Right now, what I am bummed out about the most is the lack of community in MMORPGs. From what I understand, the general trend is basically a march towards creating online single-player games with a shared world and public objectives. The result--which I have seen first-hand--is primarily a depressing lack of real, enriching social interaction, in which social interaction is reduced to an issue of temporary, specific practical needs and nothing more. Rude, horrible behavior runs unchecked, in terms of both the coldest of neglect and the hottest of trolling. The secondary result of this is a predominant focus on completing static, easy, developer-made content, in which people literally burn through the said content with great speed and put the developers in question in panic mode creatively and schedule-wise.
Seriously, something has to change here. Community is the essential nucleus of MMORPGs. You cannot have true replayability in MMORPGs without living, dynamic, persistent community activities. Moreover, you cannot have a truly immersive environment in MMORPGs without pitting a unified community against an unpredictable, dynamic, harsh, scary, yet very doable in-game world. The tensions of meaningful politics, the opportunism of a free economy, the brotherhood and sisterhood of an idiosyncratic guild, a desire to tame the unknown ... all that revolves around a highly developed community facing needs and challenges together. Everything else, no matter how important it is, is secondary.
For me, I feel like the ideal MMORPG experience could be summarized thusly in an experientialist spirit:
At night, you and your fellow hunters gather around a warm, illuminating fire as you hear the chilling sounds of the unknown outside the bolted door of your cabin. As sunrise approaches and the fire nears its end, all of your grab a hearty stew to eat, as if you hadn't eaten in days. You silently agree that yesterday's hunting really paid off. Afterwards, you carefully select the supplies you will need in the coming day, cramming them into your backpacks as you can. You break out your team's map and talk about where you want to explore today.
You're all packed up and ready to go now. With a breath of anticipation, you gather at your bolted shut cabin door and proceed to open it. Before you, a full, wintery horizon of trees, mountains, and the occasional unknown structure unfolds. Through your own eyes, you step out, together, as a tight group. You look around, watching each others' backs. Your breath steams into the cold air. You make sure your weapons are in reachable places. You jostle and adjust your backpacks.
You got this. Time to face down the harsh terrain of the unknown, together. You take your first steps, keeping in pace with everyone around you ...
Anyways, I hope that you can understand what I am feeling here. Some of you might not "get" this, but that's okay. I just wanted to get this off my chest.
Thanks for reading. :-)
Waiting for:Citadel of Sorcery. Along the way, The Elder Scrolls Online (when it is F2P).
Keeping an eye on:www.play2crush.com (whatever is going on here).
Doom and gloom again. Suck it up, choose a game and make it happen. If you can't then probably you are right and you need to move on. You wanted to logout within the first minute, but how can you check out everything that is new the game has to offer without a thorough chance?
The problem with the genre isn't the games so much as it is flooded with choices, to many imho. No one puts the effort into anything before they move on and complain about what they just left.
The paradox of too much choice - instead of being freeing its often paralyzing.
I have to agree....with 70+ steam games alone I have a hard time deciding what I want to play, I want to play them all, all are RPG or RTS, and all require a time investment. Add to that the number off MMO's I could pick up and play, it can be quite paralyzing.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Here is what person that invented MMO ( by that i mean MUD ) says about the situation :
Ten years ago, massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMOs) hada bright and exciting future. Today, their prospects do not look so glorious. In an effort to attract ever-more players, their gameplay has gradually been diluted and their core audience has deserted them. Now that even their sources of new casual players are drying up, MMOs face a slow and steady decline. Their problems are easy to enumerate: they cost too much to make; too many of them play the exact same way; new revenue models put off key groups of players; they lack immersion; they lack wit and personality; players have been trained to want experiences that they don’t actually want; designers are forbidden from experimenting.
And that is the optimistic outlook from someone hoping there is a chance.
When in fact - we screw it.
Literally - we took gaming genre with most potential and screw it so badly that nobody wants to touch it with ten foot pole anymore.
The game industry is (thanks god) on new mission - to screw MOBA genre. And MMOs are now slowly fading into obscurity as "to risky"
Unfortunately another problem with MMOs is they are too costly and too complicated for indie studio to tackle. So we will not see a breaktrough there. And AA companies will not touch them anymore.
In fact there will be looong time until we see a new quality MMO.
I agree, wildstar has shown finally that people are tired of the quest-> raid for eternity model is done, if they still want that they have wow/rift/wildstar now. That means the next title needs a strong ISP, however many players are too used to rushing and don't read lore or care about storylines.
Fortunately OP there are in fact great titles out there that are different, ESO, GW2, Archeage, LOTR and others all a hell of a lot better than old titles and great games but if you are looking for WOW 2 you are out of luck.
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
Lobotomist's post put me on to this article which is well worth reading in full. I particularly liked butterflies as a term for player behaviour as opposed to locusts and the term non-MMO to describe what MMOs have become:
The Decline of MMOs Prof. Richard A. Bartle University of Essex United Kingdom May 2013
Abstract Ten years ago, massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMOs) had a bright and exciting future. Today, their prospects do not look so glorious. In an effort to attract ever-more players, their gameplay has gradually been diluted and their core audience has deserted them. Now that even their sources of new casual players are drying up, MMOs face a slow and steady decline. Their problems are easy to enumerate: they cost too much to make; too many of them play the exact same way; new revenue models put off key groups of players; they lack immersion; they lack wit and personality; players have been trained to want experiences that they don’t actually want; designers are forbidden from experimenting. The solutions to these problems are less easy to state.
Can anything be done to prevent MMOs from fading away? Well, yes it can. The question is, will the patient take the medicine?
Introduction From their lofty position as representing the future of videogames, MMOs have fallen hard. Whereas once they were innovative and compelling, now they are repetitive and take-it-or-leave-it. Although they remain profitable at the moment, we know (from the way that the casual games market fragmented when it matured) that this is not sustainable in the long term: players will either leave for other types of game or focus on particular mechanics that have limited appeal or that can be abstracted out as stand-alone games (or even apps).
The central issue is that MMOs don’t actually appeal to everyone. Those whom they do appeal to, they appeal to very powerfully – even transformationally – but not everyone wants or needs what they offer. The word massively in the acronym doesn’t mean they’re mass-market, it merely means that more people can play in the same shared environment at once than can do so in a regular multi-player game. You can have a profitable MMO with 20,000 players, you don’t need 2,000,000. However, developers have in general chosen to make their money from volume rather than from pricing, attempting to draw in a wide audience of less-engaged players rather than a narrow audience of enthusiasts. In so doing, they have collectively lost their hard-core players to single-player RPGs and have slash-and-burned their way through almost all the casual players they could reach. What’s left to them is an army of butterfly players, flitting from new MMO to new MMO: engaged enough to try the out, but not sufficiently so that any particular one will win their loyalties. Among non-gamers, MMOs are perceived as being time sinks that you play for a while but then leave when you get bored or the gameplay gets too hard. Among gamers, they’re regarded as unsophisticated and exploitative, with a pay-to-win revenue model that legitimises corruption.
To recover from this, MMOs have to go back to their roots. They have to remember what it is about MMOs that’s fun.
Causes The problems plaguing MMOs are not hard to state, but they can’t be dealt with unless their causes are identified. So, what are the main issues facing MMOs’ decline and how did they arise?
Development costs MMOs cost too much money to develop. Art, animation and voice assets are required in bulk and are costly. Even these pale alongside the demands of content creation – although at least content creation is related to gameplay. There are three main reasons for these high costs: 1) Marketing. If your MMO looks gorgeous, features a popular intellectual property, you have big-name stars doing voice-overs, your characters act fluidly and everything oozes quality, then people will want to play it. They will see that money has been spent on the surface quality, so will assume it has also been spent on depth quality. They are, however, likely to be disappointed: most developers spend so much on surface than they have little left for depth. The look and IP of a game is good at attracting new players, but has little to do with making playing an MMO fun. It can aid immersion, but there are far less expensive ways of doing that. 2) Raising the bar. If players have been groomed to expect an MMO to have superb polish, they won’t play ones that don’t. This makes it harder for new developers to enter the market and compete, even if their MMO’s gameplay is superior. Therefore, it is in the interests of publishers to keep raising the bar in order to reduce competition. 3) Finance. The way that publishers and venture capitalists generally work, money is available in chunks of particular sizes (for example $1m, $5m, $20m). If a developer calculates that they need an out-of-band amount (for example $2m) then they are unlikely to be lucky. Counter-intuitively, they have to ask for more money than they want in order to get any; their product design must therefore be expanded to justify what is being asked for. You don’t actually need a million players for an MMO to be profitable, but if you have to make an MMO aimed at garnering a million players in order to justify the money you’re asking for (because you can’t ask for less), well, that’s what you’ll do.
Too many clones Most MMOs play exactly the same as one another. It doesn’t matter what the genre is – Fantasy, Science Fiction, Superhero, whatever – the gameplay is pretty much the same and has been since DikuMUD. There are three main reasons for this, all of which are consequences of high development costs: 1) Re-use of technical assets. We saw this in the days of text MUDs, when people would take a complete game engine and use it to create a new game curiously 1 The upcoming MMO Camelot Unchained being developed by veteran designer Mark Jacobs, has a $5M development budget that can be justified by 50,000 subscribers (onlinewelten.com, 2013). similar to the new games everyone else using the engine created. The worlds would change but the games wouldn’t. Of course, if you have invested millions in making an MMO engine it makes sense that you would want to use it for more than one product, but if little changes except the setting then eventually players will see through that. Production lines create identical products cheaply – that’s the whole point of them. It does mean the products are identical, though. 2) Fixed tools. If your quest-creation tool only allows 11 different types of quest, your new MMO will only have 11 different types of quest (and it will, definitely, have quests). There are only a certain number of ways 11 varieties of quest can be spun before players will notice that they’re all basically the same. Clones are bad because if players leave one MMO to play another and find it’s basically the same (or is worse), then eventually they’ll leave one and not come back to MMOs at all. 3) Fear of failure. MMOs cost so much to make that if they fail it can be catastrophic for a developer. There is less chance of their failing if they use a proven model, therefore developers go with the proven model. The way that company management sees it, if they develop a clone then they’re rolling a die: on a 1 they get back their stake; on a 2-6 they get back ten times their stake. For a non-clone, on a 1 they get back their stake; on a 2 they get back a thousand times their stake; on a 3-6 they lose their stake. This is exciting if the stake is $1, but frightening if the stake is $50,000,000.
Player type imbalance People play MMOs for different reasons which can be characterised as player types (Bartle, 1996). All of these player types are needed if an MMO is to be healthy. For example, an MMO with achievers but no socialisers will shed achievers, because low-level achievers will find that there are no players that they are “better” than and so leave. Likewise, an MMO with socialisers but no achievers will mean players have little to do and will leave. Today’s MMOs have two main sources of type imbalance: 1) Revenue model. The switch from subscription to free-to-play is bad for achievers. It doesn’t matter how much you try to persuade them otherwise, any payment for any gameplay-affecting item or service is pay-to-win. Anything that improves your chances of getting something gameplay-affecting is pay-to-win. Only purely cosmetic items are not seen as pay-to-win (and even some of those are unacceptable if they give the impression you’ve achieved something you haven’t). Pay-to-win attracts socialisers but puts off achievers (except cheating achievers). Achievers are the core audience for MMOs; they’ve long been abandoning them for single-player games. When an MMO is designed around a revenue model rather than around fun, it doesn’t have a long-term future. 2) Elder game. When players reach the end of the levelling game, they start a new game. This usually involves raiding or player-versus-player, along with daily quest and instance grinding. This elder game is a completely different experience to the levelling game and is not generally appealing to socialisers. Learning various boss dances is rarely fun unless you know everyone involved, and PvP is dispiriting when you get killed over and over by better (or richer) achievers. There are only so many alts socialisers will level up before they leave for pastures new.
Player expectations Each MMO player has their own idea of what the MMO paradigm involves. They won’t play if they see things they don’t like; they are also reluctant to play if they don’t see things they do like. This is irrespective of whether these views are ultimately self-defeating (Bartle, 2004). The reasons for this are: 1) Trained by experience. This follows from the fact that so many MMOs are clones. Players play an MMO and observe it to have particular features. They play other MMOs and observe them to have the same features. They come to believe these features are intrinsic to what it means to be an MMO, although actually they’re probably not. For example, there’s nothing that says an MMO must have character classes and levels, but most do and so players expect both. If an MMO differs in one dimension (for example it has skill sets instead of classes) then it might be given a chance; if it differs in several, though, many potential players will decline to play because what’s being offered is too different to what they’ve been trained to expect. 2) Short-sightedness. Most players can’t or won’t see beyond the short-term. If a feature has a short-term disadvantage and a long-term advantage, they will not go through the pain to reach the gain. Likewise, if a feature has a shortterm advantage and a long-term disadvantage, they will take the gain then leave when the pain comes (then in all likelihood decry competing MMOs that don’t have the very feature that caused them to leave). 3) Expanding audience. The attempts at inclusiveness in today’s MMOs mean that many casual-style players (unsurprisingly) treat them casually. They see them as limited-period activities that have a player half-life of three months. There’s no point in starting one that has been going awhile because you’ll be so far behind the power curve that you’ll never catch up; it’s better to wait for someone else to bring out a new MMO and try that instead. As a result, players rarely become sufficiently invested in an MMO to play it for long. People used to play text MUDs for two years before they quit (and some never did quit); this is rarely the case for today’s MMOs.
Lack of immersion Immersion is the sense that you, the player, are in the virtual world – that your character is you. It’s an incredibly powerful state which MMOs are particularly geared up to deliver and that very few other activities can equal (Bartle, 2003). Today’s MMO players rarely get to experience it, though, despite the fact that the better textual worlds of the 1990s successfully had a very deep sense of being “real but different”. This is because: 1) Depth is difficult. Today’s graphical worlds are excellent at making a world look real, but as a consequence it’s harder for them to behave real. Characters jump into a river without making a splash, then swim across it in full armour without sinking, to emerge without being wet and with the glass of milk they’ve had in their backpack for several years still as fresh as the day they bought it (Bartle, 2011). This happens because animating all these effects for every object is simply too expensive an undertaking (it was far easier in text, where it merely had to be described in words). 2) Other players grief. To protect players from one another, MMOs omit common functionality that objects in the real world exhibit. This makes the virtual world less immersive. For example, doors either don’t exist or, if they do, can’t be opened or closed; this is to stop players from shutting one another in or out of buildings. Objects that are dropped on the ground are instantly destroyed before they land; this is to stop players from dropping thousands of pieces of rubbish to flood the MMO’s database and slow it down. Objects can’t easily be transferred between players; this is to degrade the services offered by gold farmers. If a world doesn’t behave as it “should”, it won’t feel realistic and immersion will be harder to attain. 3) Revenue model. If you want people to buy in-game goods and services for real money then real money has to be involved. Real money is sufficiently important to players that, however you disguise it, they will regard it as being real. Unfortunately, the more real that they see in the virtual, the harder it becomes for them to sustain the conceit that the virtual is separate from the real – an essential component of immersion.
Lack of understanding of design MMO designers don’t appreciate the power they have. They wind up doing design-by-numbers, unaware of why things are the way they are, just that things are that way. Many don’t even know what worked in the past, let alone what could work in the future. There are several factors contributing to this: 1) Design as art. Game design in general and MMO design in particular is an art form. It’s not treated as such either by the game industry or by the wider world. Designers aren’t seen as authors but as content creators. There is little opportunity to use MMOs to say anything, even though their origins were all about saying something (Bartle, 2010). If designers aren’t allowed to express themselves through their creativity, why are they designing? 2) Industry recognition. When designers are formally recognised, it’s usually as a result of the commercial success of their games. This success may have little to do with design at all – it could be due to marketing, for example. Brilliant designs might not be recognised because of sales that are modest for other reasons (such as dated graphics). There are some very famous game designers who aren’t actually all that good at design, but their lack of ability is only apparent to other designers; the rest of the world fetes them. 3) Insufficient study. There is very little academic study of game design. There is certainly nothing to compare to the depth of study of literature, theatre, photography and film. This is because games are regarded as low-brow culture of little importance. Until we get a game version of Cahiers du Cinema, it’s likely to stay that way, too. Because game design isn’t properly studied, that means the same mistakes are being made over and over again. This is particularly true of MMOs, which routinely try out “new ideas” that are actually old ideas known not to work.
The above aren’t the only problems with MMOs – there are plenty more – but they’re among the most important. Furthermore, they feed on each other. For example, many MMOs are released early to recoup the cost of making them, which means they’re often buggy or missing features, which in turn means players don’t play them for as long; the developer therefore has to release the first expansion earlier than planned so as to retain players, which means that it, too, is likely to be less than perfect. Knowing what the problems are isn’t the important thing here, though: knowing what the causes of the problems are is. That’s because if you know the causes, you can fix the disease, not merely hide the symptoms.
Fixes All the above problems can be fixed. Unfortunately, part of the reason they persist is because those involved are reluctant to take the medicine, either because they don’t feel the patient is ill or because they believe the proposed cure will make the patient worse. Nevertheless, changes will eventually be made: MMOs simply have too much promise for it all to be squandered by turning them into non-MMOs. What follows are ways and means by which MMO developers and players (and indeed the wider world) can restore MMOs to their rightful position at the forefront of computer game design and experience.
Development The ancestors of today’s MMOs are text MUDs. These began as monolithic entities, but over time became more modular – partly because of their own “clone MUD” phenomenon. They developed a layered architecture, enabling radically new games to be built on existing software. In comparison, today’s MMOs are still very monolithic; it’s hard to swap out one component and replace it with a wildly different one while leaving everything else unchanged. A particular manifestation of this is that too much is directly coded-in that could be scripted. Taking a more modular approach to MMO systems architecture could reduce development costs, but its real value lies in how it addresses two other points: · Clone reduction. Modularisation allows for more variety in MMOs. Text MUDs exhibited far, far more individual difference than do today’s MMOs (Bartle, 2007); there’s no reason why today’s MMOs can’t diverge from the norm too if the costs (and therefore the risks) of experimentation are reduced. The wider the choice, the better the market. · Immersion improvement. If different physics modules can be plugged in, the world can feel more realistic. Text worlds had superior physics to today’s graphics-heavy MMOs. If existing art and (particularly) animation assets can be swapped in and out, again, the world can feel more detailed and accrue more assets. It shouldn’t be as hard as it is for the giant insects developed for new MMO X to be added to existing MMO Y. Art assets – even ones for dry versus wet clothes – only need to be created once to be usable indefinitely. Ultimately, players are paying to be immersed: immerse them!
Size Doesn’t Matter Today’s MMOs are designed to be vast worlds occupied by teeming masses of players. However, most of those players will be spending their time in 4-6 person instances – it’s irrelevant to them how many other players there are in the wider game. There’s no need for an MMO to be able to support 10,000 simultaneous players per shard; most players don’t know more than 250 other players anyway. The two main reasons for having large numbers of players per shard are marketing (“see how many players we have!”) and immersion (“the world feels more real if there are more people in it”). The former only works if the people you’re marketing to want to be anonymous, ineffectual nonentities; the latter is true, but doesn’t require the people to be real. Worlds should be made smaller-population and there should be more of them. Cloud-based servers allow this. If you have 100,000 players, then instead of 10 servers of 10,000 players each, try 400 servers of 250 players each. This would affect: · Player impact. When you’re one player among 250, you’re more important than one among 10,000: you’re a somebody, not a nobody. The game is more fun and retention increases. · Specialisation. Servers can be set up with different general rules (no PvP, unrestricted PvP,, immortality, permadeath, whatever). They can even be leased to guilds who want to play by their own, non-standard rules: roleplaying is enforced, only magic-user characters are allowed, play-to-win is permitted, everyone communicates in Latin, ... · Artificial Intelligence. AI-controlled characters can make the world seem busy and make your accomplishments feel more appreciated by the population. The Storybricks work with EverQuest Next is an exciting recent development here.
Remove the Elder Game Have your MMOs actually end for individual players. Players are playing MMOs as a journey to self-understanding. When that journey comes to an end – when they “win” – they will continue to play because the pressure is now off. We know this because that’s exactly what happened in text MUDs. We only have interminable elder games today because the business side of MMO development companies became frightened that if they let players finish a game, the players might stop playing quicker; in fact, the opposite is true. The great appeal of Star Wars: the Old Republic was its emphasis on story. When players reached the end of their character’s story, that was a high point; what followed was a huge anticlimax. The game descended into the same raid/PvP/grinding elder game as every other MMO. If, instead of adding more endgame content, the developers had stuck with their story-first mandate and created more levelling-game content, people who were playing for story – which most were – would have kept coming back with different characters to experience those new stories. As it was, they built up a few alts and then drifted away. EVE Online has no elder game; or, rather, if it does have an elder game, the whole game is that elder game. It has a shifting web of alliances from which new content continually emerges. The fact that corporations can be eliminated and that in theory it’s possible for one to win adds meaning.If it worked like the typical realmversus-realm elder game and had permanent factions that could never be eliminated,that one, tiny difference would render all conflict ultimately meaningless. An end provides meaning. The main advantages of removing the elder game are: · Retention. Players currently leave an MMO because they become frustrated it just drags on and on without giving them release. It becomes boring – more like work than play. If you acknowledge that they’ve won, they have nothing to prove: some will indeed drift away after a month or two, but many will continue to play just for the sheer fun of it2. This may seem unlikely, but experience from text MUDs shows that it actually works: there are people who are still playing MUD2 over 20 years after they “beat” it. · Marketing. If your players leave when they like you, they’ll come back for your next MMO. They won’t think, “oh, yes, their games are OK but eventually I got bored”, they’ll think “oh, I remember – what an incredible experience! I’m going to try their games again!”. 2 This assumes that your MMO is actually fun. · Revenue model. People who pay to skip content or to pass through it quickly will be able to replay it at a more leisurely pace once their need to “finish” has been assuaged. This time, they may even pay to skip the content they didn’t pay to skip last time... · Immersion. If an ending makes sense then it makes the virtual world more immersive. An “escape from a prisoner of war camp” game should end when your character escapes. A “war between two factions” game should allow for one faction actually to win. The world feels less realistic (and therefore less immersive) otherwise.
Educate players People who are playing a casual MMO today will not be playing one 5 years from today. They will have grokked the concept. Either they’ll be playing other casual games or they will be playing more sophisticated MMOs. If you want them to play your MMO, then you need to educate them: · Teach what MMOs offer. Glorify and reward the positive features that different types of players find fun. Teach your players what they want from an MMO, then make your MMOs give them what you taught them to appreciate. · Celebrate designers. Movie-making used to operate a “studio system”, whereby a film was associated with a studio rather than its director or actors. This eventually fell apart because directors were poached by other studios (or set up their own) and their creative importance became apparent. Film improved as a genre because of this as it reduced risk: audiences would follow a favourite director or actor, meaning that even if a film flopped it still recouped some money. Games are still generally stuck in an equivalent “developer system”; players think of a “Bioware game” or a “Rockstar game” or even a “Nintendo game”, but not a “Rob Pardo game”. Until players learn that game design is important, they’ll follow the studio; this means that if a game flops, the reputation of the whole studio suffers, rather than that of the designer.
Let designers design Designers know what the problems are that face MMOs, and often have an intuition as to how to solve them. These solutions could be far more creative and acceptable than the ones I’ve outlined here. Unless designers are allowed to design, MMOs are going to remain stuck in the doldrums. · Let designers take risks. They may not be able to prove that something will work, but if they’re not allowed to try it then it never will be proven. Of course, it may not work, but that’s a known risk and known risks can be managed. Don’t expect that every game will be a hit; just expect that the games that succeed will more than compensate for the ones that fail. · Allow for revolution. MMOs evolve, but sometimes evolution isn’t enough: revolution is required. The reason that Minecraft was developed independently wasn’t because the idea of a voxel-based world hadn’t been thought of by designers at big studios, it was because these deigners weren’t allowed to explore the idea. These aren’t the only ways to address these problems – there are others. They are presented merely as examples of showing what is possible. It may be that larger studios are too invested in the status quo or too unresponsive to be able to act on them. However, they will be acted on in time, and virtual worlds will be all the better as a result.
Conclusion MMOs are losing sight of what it is that makes them special. As a result, there is a growing audience of former players who are waiting for a game to appear that recaptures this essence. Some studios do recognise the problem and are trying to innovate – The Secret World and Age of Wushu/Wulin (????) are recent interesting examples. However, the majority of MMO developers are sleepwalking themselves to obscurity. Having identified the problems, solutions can be proposed. The ones listed here are quite radical at times, but nevertheless practical. They are solutions, but they may not be the only solutions. The reason they were given was primarily to draw attention to the problems, rather than to persuade people of the individual merits of particular ways of dealing with those problems. If MMOs continue as they are, then a few years from now people will wonder why they were ever considered to be anything special. The first developer able to remind them will become very successful indeed. If today’s developers wish to survive, they need to accept that they have a long-term problem and to make difficult decisions as to how to solve it. If they don’t change, the world will change around them.
I just paid $15 and logged into WoW to revisit, give it a chance after the latest big patch and within the first minute I wanted to log back out.
Looks super outdated and in fact worse than it used to because they did something to the lighting and now everything has the same amount of light. Super bright and ugly, no darkness. The sky in Stormwind looks like Minecraft 1.0 and it's never night time. Everything looks the same, but somehow worse.
Super easy, everything dies almost instantly.
It looks like they spend $46 on this expansion and are hoping to rake in hundreds of millions from all of the suckers.
All of the games out now and even the ones coming are either lobby console casual crap or Asian anime throw-up.
I just want EQ1 with a brand new graphics engine and AAA production quality.
It seems like there is no more talent and passion anymore, just people who want to be trillionaires.
A quick visit on youtube would of proved to you nothing has or will change in these old games and you could of been $15 better off, but na you do what most do and continue to feed the beast, your own fault not the gaming companies. Don't pay for substandard games and they will die or go f2p and milk though's who have the funds to throw away.
I just paid $15 and logged into WoW to revisit, give it a chance after the latest big patch and within the first minute I wanted to log back out.
Looks super outdated and in fact worse than it used to because they did something to the lighting and now everything has the same amount of light. Super bright and ugly, no darkness. The sky in Stormwind looks like Minecraft 1.0 and it's never night time. Everything looks the same, but somehow worse.
Super easy, everything dies almost instantly.
It looks like they spend $46 on this expansion and are hoping to rake in hundreds of millions from all of the suckers.
All of the games out now and even the ones coming are either lobby console casual crap or Asian anime throw-up.
I just want EQ1 with a brand new graphics engine and AAA production quality.
It seems like there is no more talent and passion anymore, just people who want to be trillionaires.
I think the problem might be on your end.
People see their beliefs reflected in the real world, so if you see nothing worthwhile in sight - that is all you.
The best is yet to come.
He's not alone. I feel the same way. I think it depends on when people started to get into MMORPGs. Those of us who were lucky enough to experience games like UO, Asherons Call and EQ1 in their prime have a completely different outlook on MMORPGs. Those of you who came into the genre with WoW, or later, do not know how good this genre can be because you missed out on the earlier stuff.
It's like driving a Ferarri, then they suddenly stopped making Ferarri's and started producing mini vans. A lot of people just don't know how fast they could be going
ANd the rest of us who don't wear our MMO starting point as some sort of badge on our shoulder realize, they were just as filled with problems as they are today, they were also lacking in a lot ways games today aren't.. Namely game-play, and actual content. There's no denying that MMOs have changed since uo, daoc or SWG... The devs put a lot more into them today than they did in the past in terms of creating content to experience. PVE in old MMO's consisted of some fairly archaic as well as generic practices. WE still haven't come that far from it today outside of presentation. That presentation comes at a huge cost, social and world heightening mechanics.
They served as not much more than a chatroom/battleground/Slaughterhouse/crafting tables in the past... Which is fine and dandy but it's not for everyone and not suitable at all for folks who want actual player vs environment encounters with some solid game-play behind them. You're going to be hard pressed to find the best of both worlds in one game, AA seems to be yet another example of this... not unlike SWG in the past. All the freedom and player driven aspects in the gaming world can't make up for generic content for some folks.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Lobotomist's post put me on to this article which is well worth reading in full. I particularly liked butterflies as a term for player behaviour as opposed to locusts and the term non-MMO to describe what MMOs have become:
The Decline of MMOs Prof. Richard A. Bartle University of Essex United Kingdom May 2013
...
Some studios do recognise the problem and are trying to innovate – The Secret World and Age of Wushu/Wulin (????) are recent interesting examples. However, the majority of MMO developers are sleepwalking themselves to obscurity. ...
Very interesting article, thanks for that.
I still have hope for the genre, even in the current Dark Ages where microtransactions appear to be the primary factor underpinning game design.
Luckily there's always somebody that believes that THEY can do it better. Most of them are wrong of course, but it inevitably leads to someone actually getting it right !
I just paid $15 and logged into WoW to revisit, give it a chance after the latest big patch and within the first minute I wanted to log back out.
Looks super outdated and in fact worse than it used to because they did something to the lighting and now everything has the same amount of light. Super bright and ugly, no darkness. The sky in Stormwind looks like Minecraft 1.0 and it's never night time. Everything looks the same, but somehow worse.
Super easy, everything dies almost instantly.
It looks like they spend $46 on this expansion and are hoping to rake in hundreds of millions from all of the suckers.
All of the games out now and even the ones coming are either lobby console casual crap or Asian anime throw-up.
I just want EQ1 with a brand new graphics engine and AAA production quality.
It seems like there is no more talent and passion anymore, just people who want to be trillionaires.
Sounds like a problem with you, not the genre.
Using LOL is like saying "my argument sucks but I still want to disagree".
That Bartle-guy sure is a joke. A fanboi with a degree. An idealist too which makes him worse! And the stuff he asserts... it is ridiculous.
For example, how the hell is designing MMOs more of an art form than designing any other game? Where have we established that? Has some research shown that players dismiss classless character systems specifically because they are "too different"? He speaks on the subject as an authority yet admits there is little to no research done on game design.
In other words, a lot of what he's talking about is based on his own subjective experiences and -preferences on what MMOs are and what they should be. Just like any other forum poster here.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
Lobotomist's post put me on to this article which is well worth reading in full. I particularly liked butterflies as a term for player behaviour as opposed to locusts and the term non-MMO to describe what MMOs have become:
The Decline of MMOs Prof. Richard A. Bartle University of Essex United Kingdom May 2013
Abstract Ten years ago, massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMOs) had a bright and exciting future. Today, their prospects do not look so glorious. In an effort to attract ever-more players, their gameplay has gradually been diluted and their core audience has deserted them. Now that even their sources of new casual players are drying up, MMOs face a slow and steady decline. Their problems are easy to enumerate: they cost too much to make; too many of them play the exact same way; new revenue models put off key groups of players; they lack immersion; they lack wit and personality; players have been trained to want experiences that they don’t actually want; designers are forbidden from experimenting. The solutions to these problems are less easy to state.
Lots of good points on both sides in here. Yet I still lean towards the OP's side as we don't have any of those "types" of mmo's anymore. Whether you agree those "types" were better than what we have or not, the intricate sandbox mmo's of the past that started this genre seem to have come to an end. Making these "types" of games is a lot of work, and yes there may be a profit margin to be had but it's probably quite a lot less than a WoW clone system or something the MOBA market has to offer.
I've said for years I'd return to several games if they received an engine upgrade, graphical overhaul, and ui update. One in particular is DAOC. Still there's been calls for this type of development for years and nothing has come of it, so I've given up hope on the matter. There remains "decent" mmo's out there who have one or two areas of quality you can get a couple months out of if you return to them time and time again over the years though, but for me atleast there isn't a game I see myself putting years of sub into out atm.
Haxus Council Member 21 year MMO veteran PvP Raid Leader Lover of The Witcher & CD Projekt Red
when the hell did that become "i dont like it, you like it, i must flame!"
Hello Thane,
My mage in WoW is called Thayne.
I have been since I began this crazy journey 11 years ago, a gamer that will hang in there if two things are present for me. One the fun factor. Understand; one man's fun might be another man's grind, thus it is relative to how I perceive my gaming experience. I will use WoW as an example for me, since the OP used it. While i agree the old graphics are getting a bit long in the tooth, it's not all that bad for me, I deal with it because it honestly doesn't effect my game play. There are still many aspects of WoW that still presents some challenge for me and those that bring me personal joy; remembering, one man's happiness is another's anger.
Two, the community and this, for me, is the most fundamentally important. I play solo, but I prefer to be "doing stuff" with a guildie or friend. Now community in general also plays an important role in feeling a part of something a bit grander than just you. I shall use EQ 2 here. The community on Butcherblock is simply just mature and extremely helpful. At times we can get a bit goofy, but you NEVER have to endure the "anal this or anal that" diatribe some immature 20-somethings do when they get bored. i have made some quite strong friendship playing Lineage 2, EQ 2, and WoW. These folks have come and gone, but like old high school buddies when they return it is wonderful happiness all around! Community helps me hang on when a game gets tedious and i would have to say the four or five folks I have met playing Archeage would examples of this. Without their warm friendship, I would have left after the first great disaster back in head start.
OP keep you chin up mmo's are NOT dead, they are evolving. Eventually there WILL be a replacement out there that many love, however there may NEVER be another WoW experience in a long, long time.
Alyn
All I want is the truth Just gimme some truth John Lennon
That Bartle-guy sure is a joke. A fanboi with a degree. An idealist too which makes him worse! And the stuff he asserts... it is ridiculous.
For example, how the hell is designing MMOs more of an art form than designing any other game? Where have we established that? Has some research shown that players dismiss classless character systems specifically because they are "too different"? He speaks on the subject as an authority yet admits there is little to no research done on game design.
In other words, a lot of what he's talking about is based on his own subjective experiences and -preferences on what MMOs are and what they should be. Just like any other forum poster here.
If this did not get under your skin so much you might have noticed he said he did not have all the answers. I can't see why MMOs would be more of an art form, I can see why he says games could be.
He is a professor, not just someone with a degree. His academic background is of no importance to me but since you decided to slate him like that I think it should be pointed out that that's what you are doing.
For me it was his hand in creating MUD1 that gives his words more weight than your average poster here. Or perhaps you would like to tell us your industry credentials?
Was it scientific proof of what many of us have been saying all these years? No. But you seem rather rattled that something more than just another post from the old school guys has been presented to this thread.
I do think it adds to the case of the many amongst us who have been saying this for so many years now. We predicted the problems MMOs now have, and this is now the age of the cash shop non-MMO. He is more optimistic than I am, I doubt we will see a new MMO that will turn things round.
Old players have and will leave for other games, I and guild members I know have already done that several times in their gaming history. But what I have noticed is that the times we spend in a MMO are getting shorter and the times we are not playing MMO's is getting longer. That direction of travel will continue until we don't come back.
Meanwhile non-MMO's will rely on the teenagers new to gaming. As he said they have slashed and burned their way through casual gamers. Mobile phone users are now being mined for players, there is no audience for gaming outside of that for them to find.
It will take years for them to get through that new cellphone audience mind you, but when they do the more mature online gaming audience will melt away. Good luck with those teens and preteens.
I just paid $15 and logged into WoW to revisit, give it a chance after the latest big patch and within the first minute I wanted to log back out.
Looks super outdated and in fact worse than it used to because they did something to the lighting and now everything has the same amount of light. Super bright and ugly, no darkness. The sky in Stormwind looks like Minecraft 1.0 and it's never night time. Everything looks the same, but somehow worse.
Super easy, everything dies almost instantly.
It looks like they spend $46 on this expansion and are hoping to rake in hundreds of millions from all of the suckers.
All of the games out now and even the ones coming are either lobby console casual crap or Asian anime throw-up.
I just want EQ1 with a brand new graphics engine and AAA production quality.
It seems like there is no more talent and passion anymore, just people who want to be trillionaires.
You could have just created a free account and logged in if all you wanted to do was look around.
And hint... you have to step through the Dark Portal to see the new stuff. Everything on this side of the portal is still basically MoP.
Lobotomist's post put me on to this article which is well worth reading in full. I particularly liked butterflies as a term for player behaviour as opposed to locusts and the term non-MMO to describe what MMOs have become:
The Decline of MMOs Prof. Richard A. Bartle University of Essex United Kingdom May 2013
Abstract Ten years ago, massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMOs) had a bright and exciting future. Today, their prospects do not look so glorious. In an effort to attract ever-more players, their gameplay has gradually been diluted and their core audience has deserted them. Now that even their sources of new casual players are drying up, MMOs face a slow and steady decline. Their problems are easy to enumerate: they cost too much to make; too many of them play the exact same way; new revenue models put off key groups of players; they lack immersion; they lack wit and personality; players have been trained to want experiences that they don’t actually want; designers are forbidden from experimenting. The solutions to these problems are less easy to state.
-Snip-
Good read
It's still an opinion piece... they did similar such thesis on notable pop figures as Madonna. Fluff articles at best.
Lobotomist's post put me on to this article which is well worth reading in full. I particularly liked butterflies as a term for player behaviour as opposed to locusts and the term non-MMO to describe what MMOs have become:
The Decline of MMOs Prof. Richard A. Bartle University of Essex United Kingdom May 2013
Abstract Ten years ago, massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMOs) had a bright and exciting future. Today, their prospects do not look so glorious. In an effort to attract ever-more players, their gameplay has gradually been diluted and their core audience has deserted them. Now that even their sources of new casual players are drying up, MMOs face a slow and steady decline. Their problems are easy to enumerate: they cost too much to make; too many of them play the exact same way; new revenue models put off key groups of players; they lack immersion; they lack wit and personality; players have been trained to want experiences that they don’t actually want; designers are forbidden from experimenting. The solutions to these problems are less easy to state.
-Snip-
Good read
It's still an opinion piece... they did similar such thesis on notable pop figures as Madonna. Fluff articles at best.
Anything is opinion, even science. It is his contribution to the founding of MUDs which counts, I will ask you the same question I did Quirhid, perhaps you can tell us your industry credentials?
Lobotomist's post put me on to this article which is well worth reading in full. I particularly liked butterflies as a term for player behaviour as opposed to locusts and the term non-MMO to describe what MMOs have become:
The Decline of MMOs Prof. Richard A. Bartle University of Essex United Kingdom May 2013
Abstract Ten years ago, massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMOs) had a bright and exciting future. Today, their prospects do not look so glorious. In an effort to attract ever-more players, their gameplay has gradually been diluted and their core audience has deserted them. Now that even their sources of new casual players are drying up, MMOs face a slow and steady decline. Their problems are easy to enumerate: they cost too much to make; too many of them play the exact same way; new revenue models put off key groups of players; they lack immersion; they lack wit and personality; players have been trained to want experiences that they don’t actually want; designers are forbidden from experimenting. The solutions to these problems are less easy to state.
-Snip-
Good read
It's still an opinion piece... they did similar such thesis on notable pop figures as Madonna. Fluff articles at best.
Anything is opinion, even science. It is his contribution to the founding of MUDs which counts, I will ask you the same question I did Quirhid, perhaps you can tell us your industry credentials?
One doesn't need industry credentials to call BS on it though. One only needs to look around.
We have more choices in MMOS than we ever had.
More Players play MMOS than they ever did.
More and more Indie and small companies are now making MMOS than they ever did.
MMOS are making more money than they ever dreamed of.
Crowd funding is all time high which means people are very much interested in MMOS.
To say MMO's are dying or have bleak future is just BS. Yes they didn't turn out exactly the way you want (sorry that is life) but that doesn't mean the world revolves around your opinion. (by you i mean people who love the doom and gloom).
I come to sites like this to find out what is up and coming, but I never base my opinion on a game from what they say on the forums. When I play a game, I just ask myself, is this fun enough to continue playing? If the answer is yes, I just play it.
I will make an analogy here to a social paradigm that is best displayed by how genders typically look at themselves in the mirror. Men see their strengths, and women see their flaws. And as a result, women tend to have more disorders related to how they look.
Instead of moaning about what a game lacks, try looking at a game for what it has. Does it have more strengths for how I like to play a game than another game in this genre? I'll play that, and ignore the others. And I don't care what other people think of games I don't particularly like, because they have their own play style which affects me in no way.
I think another part of the problem is that people on this site tend to view each game as though it is supposed to be the perfect game for everybody. And if it isn't, it's an awful game that should be F2P, or nobody should play it. Look at every single game's forum on this site. If we were to base our opinions on what was said on these forums, there would be ZERO games to play. I presume that everybody is playing at least 1 MMORPG or they wouldn't be here.
While it has become cliché to blame the consumer, I cannot help but think that it is correct given the behavior on media sites.
I can fly higher than an aeroplane. And I have the voice of a thousand hurricanes. Hurt - Wars
I just paid $15 and logged into WoW to revisit, give it a chance after the latest big patch and within the first minute I wanted to log back out.
Looks super outdated and in fact worse than it used to because they did something to the lighting and now everything has the same amount of light. Super bright and ugly, no darkness. The sky in Stormwind looks like Minecraft 1.0 and it's never night time. Everything looks the same, but somehow worse.
Super easy, everything dies almost instantly.
It looks like they spend $46 on this expansion and are hoping to rake in hundreds of millions from all of the suckers.
All of the games out now and even the ones coming are either lobby console casual crap or Asian anime throw-up.
I just want EQ1 with a brand new graphics engine and AAA production quality.
It seems like there is no more talent and passion anymore, just people who want to be trillionaires.
I think the problem might be on your end.
People see their beliefs reflected in the real world, so if you see nothing worthwhile in sight - that is all you.
The best is yet to come.
He's not alone. I feel the same way. I think it depends on when people started to get into MMORPGs. Those of us who were lucky enough to experience games like UO, Asherons Call and EQ1 in their prime have a completely different outlook on MMORPGs. Those of you who came into the genre with WoW, or later, do not know how good this genre can be because you missed out on the earlier stuff.
It's like driving a Ferarri, then they suddenly stopped making Ferarri's and started producing mini vans. A lot of people just don't know how fast they could be going
I agree. The magic in those early MMOs are long gone though. And with ArcheAge's failure I myself have surrendered to the ThemePark flavour and trying to find other things in MMOs to enjoy, beside the virtual world concept which UO introduced.
One day though I believe a new virtual world MMO will be released. Like a Lord of the Rings MMO where you live as a hobbit or an orc in a Tolkien sandbox world. Imagine...
Just maybe Yamota is talking on a personal level
Anyways.....
The virtual world aspect is also what has and does draw me into the genre.
I do see a bright side. Look at all the single player and multiplayer "virtual world" and "open world" rpg's there is out or soon to be released.
They're very popular and very well made these days. And it's only a matter of time when this is again emulated in a high quality MMORPG.
OP, there is plenty of stuff out there but none of it may be to your liking. In which case may mean that you are burnt out on the genre.
As far as WoW goes, logging in a few days before an x-pack releases and expecting the game to be drastically different than it was earlier in the xpack is odd. All the characters are overtuned for current content making it trivial. Also, they tweaked the graphics for WoD so I suspect things will look better in the new zones. People don't play WoW for bleeding edge graphics, they play WoW because it's the most well rounded and polished MMO available.
Their problems are easy to enumerate: they cost too much to make; too many of them play the exact same way; new revenue models put off key groups of players; they lack immersion; they lack wit and personality; players have been trained to want experiences that they don’t actually want; designers are forbidden from experimenting. The solutions to these problems are less easy to state.
**snip**
Very interesting read. I don't agree with every point (or rather his conclusions / examples for certain ones), but overall a very truthful article imho.
I've highlighted perhaps the 2 largest problems w/ MMOs specifically. Problems I've been trying to illuminate for years now, but often get overlooked / ignored. They're the elephants in the room no one wants to talk about.
Too many people forget (designer's included) that games are primarily a means of teaching. A set of skills to help the player through a story, mechanics that get combined to complete a game, puzzles, strategy, etc. etc. And the author of the article is correct, we HAVE gotten too used to learning the same mechanics over and over again. When it comes to the MMO genre. I see it time and time again, players who assume 'we've always had these mechanics, so therefor they must be necessary'. It's not only absurd, it's fairly annoying. However, that's how most people think, and there's not a whole lot that can be done about it until the next big leap forward comes, at which point everyone will assume that this new thing will be the only way to ever make a game.
As a result of this (combined with the fact that MMOs have indeed gotten too expensive to make), it makes it nearly impossible for developers to innovate in the way many of us claim we want. Even if they do innovate in a meaningful way, it often gets rejected by gamers. And this is something publishers notice. The more this happens, the less likely they are to allow innovation in the future. And here we are today.
It may be safe to say, if you (speaking to the OP and people like him) haven't liked a genre for the last 10 years, maybe you never really liked it and you only liked a game that you played over a decade ago. Because it's getting a bit ridiculous to see people pining for the fjords constantly.
Why are you waiting on something that reminds of what was just a blip of the time-line of MMOs? Don't you think maybe the only problem is you at this point? Okay, maybe you liked DAOC, or EQ, or UO, or SWG. Grats. One of four games. Are you done yet? How long are you going to drone on about them? Are you Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite who can't stop talking about the big game back in high school?
Build a bridge and get over it. You don't like MMO's, oh well, there's lot of things, lots of people don't like. Know what they do? They go do something else. So please, gtfo already, all of you who clearly hate the entirety of this genre. No one will miss you.
Comments
Right now, what I am bummed out about the most is the lack of community in MMORPGs. From what I understand, the general trend is basically a march towards creating online single-player games with a shared world and public objectives. The result--which I have seen first-hand--is primarily a depressing lack of real, enriching social interaction, in which social interaction is reduced to an issue of temporary, specific practical needs and nothing more. Rude, horrible behavior runs unchecked, in terms of both the coldest of neglect and the hottest of trolling. The secondary result of this is a predominant focus on completing static, easy, developer-made content, in which people literally burn through the said content with great speed and put the developers in question in panic mode creatively and schedule-wise.
Seriously, something has to change here. Community is the essential nucleus of MMORPGs. You cannot have true replayability in MMORPGs without living, dynamic, persistent community activities. Moreover, you cannot have a truly immersive environment in MMORPGs without pitting a unified community against an unpredictable, dynamic, harsh, scary, yet very doable in-game world. The tensions of meaningful politics, the opportunism of a free economy, the brotherhood and sisterhood of an idiosyncratic guild, a desire to tame the unknown ... all that revolves around a highly developed community facing needs and challenges together. Everything else, no matter how important it is, is secondary.
For me, I feel like the ideal MMORPG experience could be summarized thusly in an experientialist spirit:
At night, you and your fellow hunters gather around a warm, illuminating fire as you hear the chilling sounds of the unknown outside the bolted door of your cabin. As sunrise approaches and the fire nears its end, all of your grab a hearty stew to eat, as if you hadn't eaten in days. You silently agree that yesterday's hunting really paid off. Afterwards, you carefully select the supplies you will need in the coming day, cramming them into your backpacks as you can. You break out your team's map and talk about where you want to explore today.
You're all packed up and ready to go now. With a breath of anticipation, you gather at your bolted shut cabin door and proceed to open it. Before you, a full, wintery horizon of trees, mountains, and the occasional unknown structure unfolds. Through your own eyes, you step out, together, as a tight group. You look around, watching each others' backs. Your breath steams into the cold air. You make sure your weapons are in reachable places. You jostle and adjust your backpacks.
You got this. Time to face down the harsh terrain of the unknown, together. You take your first steps, keeping in pace with everyone around you ...
Anyways, I hope that you can understand what I am feeling here. Some of you might not "get" this, but that's okay. I just wanted to get this off my chest.
Thanks for reading. :-)
Waiting for: Citadel of Sorcery. Along the way, The Elder Scrolls Online (when it is F2P).
Keeping an eye on: www.play2crush.com (whatever is going on here).
Let's play Fallen Earth (blind, 300 episodes)
Let's play Guild Wars 2 (blind, 45 episodes)
I have to agree....with 70+ steam games alone I have a hard time deciding what I want to play, I want to play them all, all are RPG or RTS, and all require a time investment. Add to that the number off MMO's I could pick up and play, it can be quite paralyzing.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Here is what person that invented MMO ( by that i mean MUD ) says about the situation :
Ten years ago, massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMOs) hada bright and exciting future. Today, their prospects do not look so glorious. In an effort to attract ever-more players, their gameplay has gradually been diluted and their core audience has deserted them. Now that even their sources of new casual players are drying up, MMOs face a slow and steady decline. Their problems are easy to enumerate: they cost too much to make; too many of them play the exact same way; new revenue models put off key groups of players; they lack immersion; they lack wit and personality; players have been trained to want experiences that they don’t actually want; designers are forbidden from experimenting.
And that is the optimistic outlook from someone hoping there is a chance.
When in fact - we screw it.
Literally - we took gaming genre with most potential and screw it so badly that nobody wants to touch it with ten foot pole anymore.
The game industry is (thanks god) on new mission - to screw MOBA genre. And MMOs are now slowly fading into obscurity as "to risky"
Unfortunately another problem with MMOs is they are too costly and too complicated for indie studio to tackle. So we will not see a breaktrough there. And AA companies will not touch them anymore.
In fact there will be looong time until we see a new quality MMO.
Fortunately OP there are in fact great titles out there that are different, ESO, GW2, Archeage, LOTR and others all a hell of a lot better than old titles and great games but if you are looking for WOW 2 you are out of luck.
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
Lobotomist's post put me on to this article which is well worth reading in full. I particularly liked butterflies as a term for player behaviour as opposed to locusts and the term non-MMO to describe what MMOs have become:
The Decline of MMOs
Prof. Richard A. Bartle
University of Essex
United Kingdom
May 2013
Abstract
Ten years ago, massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMOs) had
a bright and exciting future. Today, their prospects do not look so glorious. In an
effort to attract ever-more players, their gameplay has gradually been diluted and
their core audience has deserted them. Now that even their sources of new casual
players are drying up, MMOs face a slow and steady decline. Their problems are easy
to enumerate: they cost too much to make; too many of them play the exact same
way; new revenue models put off key groups of players; they lack immersion; they
lack wit and personality; players have been trained to want experiences that they
don’t actually want; designers are forbidden from experimenting. The solutions to
these problems are less easy to state.
Can anything be done to prevent MMOs from fading away?
Well, yes it can. The question is, will the patient take the medicine?
Introduction
From their lofty position as representing the future of videogames, MMOs
have fallen hard. Whereas once they were innovative and compelling, now they are
repetitive and take-it-or-leave-it. Although they remain profitable at the moment, we
know (from the way that the casual games market fragmented when it matured) that
this is not sustainable in the long term: players will either leave for other types of
game or focus on particular mechanics that have limited appeal or that can be
abstracted out as stand-alone games (or even apps).
The central issue is that MMOs don’t actually appeal to everyone. Those whom
they do appeal to, they appeal to very powerfully – even transformationally – but not
everyone wants or needs what they offer. The word massively in the acronym doesn’t
mean they’re mass-market, it merely means that more people can play in the same
shared environment at once than can do so in a regular multi-player game. You can
have a profitable MMO with 20,000 players, you don’t need 2,000,000. However,
developers have in general chosen to make their money from volume rather than
from pricing, attempting to draw in a wide audience of less-engaged players rather
than a narrow audience of enthusiasts. In so doing, they have collectively lost their
hard-core players to single-player RPGs and have slash-and-burned their way
through almost all the casual players they could reach. What’s left to them is an army
of butterfly players, flitting from new MMO to new MMO: engaged enough to try the
out, but not sufficiently so that any particular one will win their loyalties.
Among non-gamers, MMOs are perceived as being time sinks that you play for
a while but then leave when you get bored or the gameplay gets too hard. Among
gamers, they’re regarded as unsophisticated and exploitative, with a pay-to-win
revenue model that legitimises corruption.
To recover from this, MMOs have to go back to their roots. They have to
remember what it is about MMOs that’s fun.
Causes
The problems plaguing MMOs are not hard to state, but they can’t be dealt
with unless their causes are identified. So, what are the main issues facing MMOs’
decline and how did they arise?
Development costs
MMOs cost too much money to develop. Art, animation and voice assets are
required in bulk and are costly. Even these pale alongside the demands of content
creation – although at least content creation is related to gameplay. There are three
main reasons for these high costs:
1) Marketing. If your MMO looks gorgeous, features a popular intellectual
property, you have big-name stars doing voice-overs, your characters act
fluidly and everything oozes quality, then people will want to play it. They will
see that money has been spent on the surface quality, so will assume it has
also been spent on depth quality. They are, however, likely to be disappointed:
most developers spend so much on surface than they have little left for depth.
The look and IP of a game is good at attracting new players, but has little to do
with making playing an MMO fun. It can aid immersion, but there are far less
expensive ways of doing that.
2) Raising the bar. If players have been groomed to expect an MMO to have
superb polish, they won’t play ones that don’t. This makes it harder for new
developers to enter the market and compete, even if their MMO’s gameplay is
superior. Therefore, it is in the interests of publishers to keep raising the bar
in order to reduce competition.
3) Finance. The way that publishers and venture capitalists generally work,
money is available in chunks of particular sizes (for example $1m, $5m,
$20m). If a developer calculates that they need an out-of-band amount (for
example $2m) then they are unlikely to be lucky. Counter-intuitively, they
have to ask for more money than they want in order to get any; their product
design must therefore be expanded to justify what is being asked for. You
don’t actually need a million players for an MMO to be profitable, but if you
have to make an MMO aimed at garnering a million players in order to justify
the money you’re asking for (because you can’t ask for less), well, that’s what
you’ll do.
Too many clones
Most MMOs play exactly the same as one another. It doesn’t matter what the
genre is – Fantasy, Science Fiction, Superhero, whatever – the gameplay is pretty
much the same and has been since DikuMUD. There are three main reasons for this,
all of which are consequences of high development costs:
1) Re-use of technical assets. We saw this in the days of text MUDs, when people
would take a complete game engine and use it to create a new game curiously
1 The upcoming MMO Camelot Unchained being developed by veteran designer Mark Jacobs, has a $5M development budget that can be justified by 50,000 subscribers (onlinewelten.com, 2013).
similar to the new games everyone else using the engine created. The worlds
would change but the games wouldn’t. Of course, if you have invested millions
in making an MMO engine it makes sense that you would want to use it for
more than one product, but if little changes except the setting then eventually
players will see through that. Production lines create identical products
cheaply – that’s the whole point of them. It does mean the products are
identical, though.
2) Fixed tools. If your quest-creation tool only allows 11 different types of quest,
your new MMO will only have 11 different types of quest (and it will,
definitely, have quests). There are only a certain number of ways 11 varieties of
quest can be spun before players will notice that they’re all basically the same.
Clones are bad because if players leave one MMO to play another and find it’s
basically the same (or is worse), then eventually they’ll leave one and not come
back to MMOs at all.
3) Fear of failure. MMOs cost so much to make that if they fail it can be
catastrophic for a developer. There is less chance of their failing if they use a
proven model, therefore developers go with the proven model. The way that
company management sees it, if they develop a clone then they’re rolling a die:
on a 1 they get back their stake; on a 2-6 they get back ten times their stake.
For a non-clone, on a 1 they get back their stake; on a 2 they get back a
thousand times their stake; on a 3-6 they lose their stake. This is exciting if the
stake is $1, but frightening if the stake is $50,000,000.
Player type imbalance
People play MMOs for different reasons which can be characterised as player
types (Bartle, 1996). All of these player types are needed if an MMO is to be healthy.
For example, an MMO with achievers but no socialisers will shed achievers, because
low-level achievers will find that there are no players that they are “better” than and
so leave. Likewise, an MMO with socialisers but no achievers will mean players have
little to do and will leave. Today’s MMOs have two main sources of type imbalance:
1) Revenue model. The switch from subscription to free-to-play is bad for
achievers. It doesn’t matter how much you try to persuade them otherwise,
any payment for any gameplay-affecting item or service is pay-to-win.
Anything that improves your chances of getting something gameplay-affecting
is pay-to-win. Only purely cosmetic items are not seen as pay-to-win (and
even some of those are unacceptable if they give the impression you’ve
achieved something you haven’t). Pay-to-win attracts socialisers but puts off
achievers (except cheating achievers). Achievers are the core audience for
MMOs; they’ve long been abandoning them for single-player games. When an
MMO is designed around a revenue model rather than around fun, it doesn’t
have a long-term future.
2) Elder game. When players reach the end of the levelling game, they start a
new game. This usually involves raiding or player-versus-player, along with
daily quest and instance grinding. This elder game is a completely different
experience to the levelling game and is not generally appealing to socialisers.
Learning various boss dances is rarely fun unless you know everyone involved,
and PvP is dispiriting when you get killed over and over by better (or richer)
achievers. There are only so many alts socialisers will level up before they
leave for pastures new.
Player expectations
Each MMO player has their own idea of what the MMO paradigm involves.
They won’t play if they see things they don’t like; they are also reluctant to play if
they don’t see things they do like. This is irrespective of whether these views are
ultimately self-defeating (Bartle, 2004). The reasons for this are:
1) Trained by experience. This follows from the fact that so many MMOs are
clones. Players play an MMO and observe it to have particular features. They
play other MMOs and observe them to have the same features. They come to
believe these features are intrinsic to what it means to be an MMO, although
actually they’re probably not. For example, there’s nothing that says an MMO
must have character classes and levels, but most do and so players expect
both. If an MMO differs in one dimension (for example it has skill sets instead
of classes) then it might be given a chance; if it differs in several, though,
many potential players will decline to play because what’s being offered is too
different to what they’ve been trained to expect.
2) Short-sightedness. Most players can’t or won’t see beyond the short-term. If a
feature has a short-term disadvantage and a long-term advantage, they will
not go through the pain to reach the gain. Likewise, if a feature has a shortterm
advantage and a long-term disadvantage, they will take the gain then
leave when the pain comes (then in all likelihood decry competing MMOs that
don’t have the very feature that caused them to leave).
3) Expanding audience. The attempts at inclusiveness in today’s MMOs mean
that many casual-style players (unsurprisingly) treat them casually. They see
them as limited-period activities that have a player half-life of three months.
There’s no point in starting one that has been going awhile because you’ll be
so far behind the power curve that you’ll never catch up; it’s better to wait for
someone else to bring out a new MMO and try that instead. As a result,
players rarely become sufficiently invested in an MMO to play it for long.
People used to play text MUDs for two years before they quit (and some never
did quit); this is rarely the case for today’s MMOs.
Lack of immersion
Immersion is the sense that you, the player, are in the virtual world – that
your character is you. It’s an incredibly powerful state which MMOs are particularly
geared up to deliver and that very few other activities can equal (Bartle, 2003).
Today’s MMO players rarely get to experience it, though, despite the fact that the
better textual worlds of the 1990s successfully had a very deep sense of being “real
but different”. This is because:
1) Depth is difficult. Today’s graphical worlds are excellent at making a world
look real, but as a consequence it’s harder for them to behave real. Characters
jump into a river without making a splash, then swim across it in full armour
without sinking, to emerge without being wet and with the glass of milk
they’ve had in their backpack for several years still as fresh as the day they
bought it (Bartle, 2011). This happens because animating all these effects for
every object is simply too expensive an undertaking (it was far easier in text,
where it merely had to be described in words).
2) Other players grief. To protect players from one another, MMOs omit
common functionality that objects in the real world exhibit. This makes the
virtual world less immersive. For example, doors either don’t exist or, if they
do, can’t be opened or closed; this is to stop players from shutting one another
in or out of buildings. Objects that are dropped on the ground are instantly
destroyed before they land; this is to stop players from dropping thousands of
pieces of rubbish to flood the MMO’s database and slow it down. Objects can’t
easily be transferred between players; this is to degrade the services offered by
gold farmers. If a world doesn’t behave as it “should”, it won’t feel realistic and
immersion will be harder to attain.
3) Revenue model. If you want people to buy in-game goods and services for real
money then real money has to be involved. Real money is sufficiently
important to players that, however you disguise it, they will regard it as being
real. Unfortunately, the more real that they see in the virtual, the harder it
becomes for them to sustain the conceit that the virtual is separate from the
real – an essential component of immersion.
Lack of understanding of design
MMO designers don’t appreciate the power they have. They wind up doing
design-by-numbers, unaware of why things are the way they are, just that things are
that way. Many don’t even know what worked in the past, let alone what could work
in the future. There are several factors contributing to this:
1) Design as art. Game design in general and MMO design in particular is an art
form. It’s not treated as such either by the game industry or by the wider
world. Designers aren’t seen as authors but as content creators. There is little
opportunity to use MMOs to say anything, even though their origins were all
about saying something (Bartle, 2010). If designers aren’t allowed to express
themselves through their creativity, why are they designing?
2) Industry recognition. When designers are formally recognised, it’s usually as
a result of the commercial success of their games. This success may have little
to do with design at all – it could be due to marketing, for example. Brilliant
designs might not be recognised because of sales that are modest for other
reasons (such as dated graphics). There are some very famous game designers
who aren’t actually all that good at design, but their lack of ability is only
apparent to other designers; the rest of the world fetes them.
3) Insufficient study. There is very little academic study of game design. There is
certainly nothing to compare to the depth of study of literature, theatre,
photography and film. This is because games are regarded as low-brow culture
of little importance. Until we get a game version of Cahiers du Cinema, it’s
likely to stay that way, too. Because game design isn’t properly studied, that
means the same mistakes are being made over and over again. This is
particularly true of MMOs, which routinely try out “new ideas” that are
actually old ideas known not to work.
The above aren’t the only problems with MMOs – there are plenty more – but
they’re among the most important. Furthermore, they feed on each other. For
example, many MMOs are released early to recoup the cost of making them, which
means they’re often buggy or missing features, which in turn means players don’t
play them for as long; the developer therefore has to release the first expansion
earlier than planned so as to retain players, which means that it, too, is likely to be
less than perfect.
Knowing what the problems are isn’t the important thing here, though:
knowing what the causes of the problems are is. That’s because if you know the
causes, you can fix the disease, not merely hide the symptoms.
Fixes
All the above problems can be fixed. Unfortunately, part of the reason they
persist is because those involved are reluctant to take the medicine, either because
they don’t feel the patient is ill or because they believe the proposed cure will make
the patient worse. Nevertheless, changes will eventually be made: MMOs simply
have too much promise for it all to be squandered by turning them into non-MMOs.
What follows are ways and means by which MMO developers and players (and
indeed the wider world) can restore MMOs to their rightful position at the forefront
of computer game design and experience.
Development
The ancestors of today’s MMOs are text MUDs. These began as monolithic
entities, but over time became more modular – partly because of their own “clone
MUD” phenomenon. They developed a layered architecture, enabling radically new
games to be built on existing software. In comparison, today’s MMOs are still very
monolithic; it’s hard to swap out one component and replace it with a wildly different
one while leaving everything else unchanged. A particular manifestation of this is
that too much is directly coded-in that could be scripted.
Taking a more modular approach to MMO systems architecture could reduce
development costs, but its real value lies in how it addresses two other points:
· Clone reduction. Modularisation allows for more variety in MMOs. Text
MUDs exhibited far, far more individual difference than do today’s MMOs
(Bartle, 2007); there’s no reason why today’s MMOs can’t diverge from the
norm too if the costs (and therefore the risks) of experimentation are reduced.
The wider the choice, the better the market.
· Immersion improvement. If different physics modules can be plugged in, the
world can feel more realistic. Text worlds had superior physics to today’s
graphics-heavy MMOs. If existing art and (particularly) animation assets can
be swapped in and out, again, the world can feel more detailed and accrue
more assets. It shouldn’t be as hard as it is for the giant insects developed for
new MMO X to be added to existing MMO Y. Art assets – even ones for dry
versus wet clothes – only need to be created once to be usable indefinitely.
Ultimately, players are paying to be immersed: immerse them!
Size Doesn’t Matter
Today’s MMOs are designed to be vast worlds occupied by teeming masses of
players. However, most of those players will be spending their time in 4-6 person
instances – it’s irrelevant to them how many other players there are in the wider
game. There’s no need for an MMO to be able to support 10,000 simultaneous
players per shard; most players don’t know more than 250 other players anyway.
The two main reasons for having large numbers of players per shard are
marketing (“see how many players we have!”) and immersion (“the world feels more
real if there are more people in it”). The former only works if the people you’re
marketing to want to be anonymous, ineffectual nonentities; the latter is true, but
doesn’t require the people to be real.
Worlds should be made smaller-population and there should be more of them.
Cloud-based servers allow this. If you have 100,000 players, then instead of 10
servers of 10,000 players each, try 400 servers of 250 players each. This would
affect:
· Player impact. When you’re one player among 250, you’re more important
than one among 10,000: you’re a somebody, not a nobody. The game is more
fun and retention increases.
· Specialisation. Servers can be set up with different general rules (no PvP,
unrestricted PvP,, immortality, permadeath, whatever). They can even be
leased to guilds who want to play by their own, non-standard rules: roleplaying
is enforced, only magic-user characters are allowed, play-to-win is
permitted, everyone communicates in Latin, ...
· Artificial Intelligence. AI-controlled characters can make the world seem busy
and make your accomplishments feel more appreciated by the population. The
Storybricks work with EverQuest Next is an exciting recent development here.
Remove the Elder Game
Have your MMOs actually end for individual players. Players are playing
MMOs as a journey to self-understanding. When that journey comes to an end –
when they “win” – they will continue to play because the pressure is now off. We
know this because that’s exactly what happened in text MUDs. We only have
interminable elder games today because the business side of MMO development
companies became frightened that if they let players finish a game, the players might
stop playing quicker; in fact, the opposite is true.
The great appeal of Star Wars: the Old Republic was its emphasis on story.
When players reached the end of their character’s story, that was a high point; what
followed was a huge anticlimax. The game descended into the same
raid/PvP/grinding elder game as every other MMO. If, instead of adding more endgame
content, the developers had stuck with their story-first mandate and created
more levelling-game content, people who were playing for story – which most were –
would have kept coming back with different characters to experience those new
stories. As it was, they built up a few alts and then drifted away.
EVE Online has no elder game; or, rather, if it does have an elder game, the
whole game is that elder game. It has a shifting web of alliances from which new
content continually emerges. The fact that corporations can be eliminated and that in
theory it’s possible for one to win adds meaning.If it worked like the typical realmversus-realm elder game and had permanent factions that could never be eliminated,that one, tiny difference would render all conflict ultimately meaningless. An end
provides meaning.
The main advantages of removing the elder game are:
· Retention. Players currently leave an MMO because they become frustrated it
just drags on and on without giving them release. It becomes boring – more
like work than play. If you acknowledge that they’ve won, they have nothing to
prove: some will indeed drift away after a month or two, but many will
continue to play just for the sheer fun of it2. This may seem unlikely, but
experience from text MUDs shows that it actually works: there are people who
are still playing MUD2 over 20 years after they “beat” it.
· Marketing. If your players leave when they like you, they’ll come back for your
next MMO. They won’t think, “oh, yes, their games are OK but eventually I got
bored”, they’ll think “oh, I remember – what an incredible experience! I’m
going to try their games again!”.
2 This assumes that your MMO is actually fun.
· Revenue model. People who pay to skip content or to pass through it quickly
will be able to replay it at a more leisurely pace once their need to “finish” has
been assuaged. This time, they may even pay to skip the content they didn’t
pay to skip last time...
· Immersion. If an ending makes sense then it makes the virtual world more
immersive. An “escape from a prisoner of war camp” game should end when
your character escapes. A “war between two factions” game should allow for
one faction actually to win. The world feels less realistic (and therefore less
immersive) otherwise.
Educate players
People who are playing a casual MMO today will not be playing one 5 years
from today. They will have grokked the concept. Either they’ll be playing other casual
games or they will be playing more sophisticated MMOs. If you want them to play
your MMO, then you need to educate them:
· Teach what MMOs offer. Glorify and reward the positive features that
different types of players find fun. Teach your players what they want from an
MMO, then make your MMOs give them what you taught them to appreciate.
· Celebrate designers. Movie-making used to operate a “studio system”,
whereby a film was associated with a studio rather than its director or actors.
This eventually fell apart because directors were poached by other studios (or
set up their own) and their creative importance became apparent. Film
improved as a genre because of this as it reduced risk: audiences would follow
a favourite director or actor, meaning that even if a film flopped it still
recouped some money. Games are still generally stuck in an equivalent
“developer system”; players think of a “Bioware game” or a “Rockstar game”
or even a “Nintendo game”, but not a “Rob Pardo game”. Until players learn
that game design is important, they’ll follow the studio; this means that if a
game flops, the reputation of the whole studio suffers, rather than that of the
designer.
Let designers design
Designers know what the problems are that face MMOs, and often have an
intuition as to how to solve them. These solutions could be far more creative and
acceptable than the ones I’ve outlined here. Unless designers are allowed to design,
MMOs are going to remain stuck in the doldrums.
· Let designers take risks. They may not be able to prove that something will
work, but if they’re not allowed to try it then it never will be proven. Of course,
it may not work, but that’s a known risk and known risks can be managed.
Don’t expect that every game will be a hit; just expect that the games that
succeed will more than compensate for the ones that fail.
· Allow for revolution. MMOs evolve, but sometimes evolution isn’t enough:
revolution is required. The reason that Minecraft was developed
independently wasn’t because the idea of a voxel-based world hadn’t been
thought of by designers at big studios, it was because these deigners weren’t
allowed to explore the idea.
These aren’t the only ways to address these problems – there are others. They are
presented merely as examples of showing what is possible. It may be that larger
studios are too invested in the status quo or too unresponsive to be able to act on
them. However, they will be acted on in time, and virtual worlds will be all the better
as a result.
Conclusion
MMOs are losing sight of what it is that makes them special. As a result, there
is a growing audience of former players who are waiting for a game to appear that
recaptures this essence.
Some studios do recognise the problem and are trying to innovate – The
Secret World and Age of Wushu/Wulin (????) are recent interesting examples.
However, the majority of MMO developers are sleepwalking themselves to obscurity.
Having identified the problems, solutions can be proposed. The ones listed
here are quite radical at times, but nevertheless practical. They are solutions, but
they may not be the only solutions. The reason they were given was primarily to draw
attention to the problems, rather than to persuade people of the individual merits of
particular ways of dealing with those problems.
If MMOs continue as they are, then a few years from now people will wonder
why they were ever considered to be anything special. The first developer able to
remind them will become very successful indeed. If today’s developers wish to
survive, they need to accept that they have a long-term problem and to make difficult
decisions as to how to solve it. If they don’t change, the world will change around
them.
A quick visit on youtube would of proved to you nothing has or will change in these old games and you could of been $15 better off, but na you do what most do and continue to feed the beast, your own fault not the gaming companies. Don't pay for substandard games and they will die or go f2p and milk though's who have the funds to throw away.
Asbo
ANd the rest of us who don't wear our MMO starting point as some sort of badge on our shoulder realize, they were just as filled with problems as they are today, they were also lacking in a lot ways games today aren't.. Namely game-play, and actual content. There's no denying that MMOs have changed since uo, daoc or SWG... The devs put a lot more into them today than they did in the past in terms of creating content to experience. PVE in old MMO's consisted of some fairly archaic as well as generic practices. WE still haven't come that far from it today outside of presentation. That presentation comes at a huge cost, social and world heightening mechanics.
They served as not much more than a chatroom/battleground/Slaughterhouse/crafting tables in the past... Which is fine and dandy but it's not for everyone and not suitable at all for folks who want actual player vs environment encounters with some solid game-play behind them. You're going to be hard pressed to find the best of both worlds in one game, AA seems to be yet another example of this... not unlike SWG in the past. All the freedom and player driven aspects in the gaming world can't make up for generic content for some folks.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Very interesting article, thanks for that.
I still have hope for the genre, even in the current Dark Ages where microtransactions appear to be the primary factor underpinning game design.
Luckily there's always somebody that believes that THEY can do it better. Most of them are wrong of course, but it inevitably leads to someone actually getting it right !
Sounds like a problem with you, not the genre.
That Bartle-guy sure is a joke. A fanboi with a degree. An idealist too which makes him worse! And the stuff he asserts... it is ridiculous.
For example, how the hell is designing MMOs more of an art form than designing any other game? Where have we established that? Has some research shown that players dismiss classless character systems specifically because they are "too different"? He speaks on the subject as an authority yet admits there is little to no research done on game design.
In other words, a lot of what he's talking about is based on his own subjective experiences and -preferences on what MMOs are and what they should be. Just like any other forum poster here.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Good read
Lots of good points on both sides in here. Yet I still lean towards the OP's side as we don't have any of those "types" of mmo's anymore. Whether you agree those "types" were better than what we have or not, the intricate sandbox mmo's of the past that started this genre seem to have come to an end. Making these "types" of games is a lot of work, and yes there may be a profit margin to be had but it's probably quite a lot less than a WoW clone system or something the MOBA market has to offer.
I've said for years I'd return to several games if they received an engine upgrade, graphical overhaul, and ui update. One in particular is DAOC. Still there's been calls for this type of development for years and nothing has come of it, so I've given up hope on the matter. There remains "decent" mmo's out there who have one or two areas of quality you can get a couple months out of if you return to them time and time again over the years though, but for me atleast there isn't a game I see myself putting years of sub into out atm.
21 year MMO veteran
PvP Raid Leader
Lover of The Witcher & CD Projekt Red
Hello Thane,
My mage in WoW is called Thayne.
I have been since I began this crazy journey 11 years ago, a gamer that will hang in there if two things are present for me. One the fun factor. Understand; one man's fun might be another man's grind, thus it is relative to how I perceive my gaming experience. I will use WoW as an example for me, since the OP used it. While i agree the old graphics are getting a bit long in the tooth, it's not all that bad for me, I deal with it because it honestly doesn't effect my game play. There are still many aspects of WoW that still presents some challenge for me and those that bring me personal joy; remembering, one man's happiness is another's anger.
Two, the community and this, for me, is the most fundamentally important. I play solo, but I prefer to be "doing stuff" with a guildie or friend. Now community in general also plays an important role in feeling a part of something a bit grander than just you. I shall use EQ 2 here. The community on Butcherblock is simply just mature and extremely helpful. At times we can get a bit goofy, but you NEVER have to endure the "anal this or anal that" diatribe some immature 20-somethings do when they get bored. i have made some quite strong friendship playing Lineage 2, EQ 2, and WoW. These folks have come and gone, but like old high school buddies when they return it is wonderful happiness all around! Community helps me hang on when a game gets tedious and i would have to say the four or five folks I have met playing Archeage would examples of this. Without their warm friendship, I would have left after the first great disaster back in head start.
OP keep you chin up mmo's are NOT dead, they are evolving. Eventually there WILL be a replacement out there that many love, however there may NEVER be another WoW experience in a long, long time.
Alyn
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth
John Lennon
If this did not get under your skin so much you might have noticed he said he did not have all the answers. I can't see why MMOs would be more of an art form, I can see why he says games could be.
He is a professor, not just someone with a degree. His academic background is of no importance to me but since you decided to slate him like that I think it should be pointed out that that's what you are doing.
For me it was his hand in creating MUD1 that gives his words more weight than your average poster here. Or perhaps you would like to tell us your industry credentials?
Was it scientific proof of what many of us have been saying all these years? No. But you seem rather rattled that something more than just another post from the old school guys has been presented to this thread.
I do think it adds to the case of the many amongst us who have been saying this for so many years now. We predicted the problems MMOs now have, and this is now the age of the cash shop non-MMO. He is more optimistic than I am, I doubt we will see a new MMO that will turn things round.
Old players have and will leave for other games, I and guild members I know have already done that several times in their gaming history. But what I have noticed is that the times we spend in a MMO are getting shorter and the times we are not playing MMO's is getting longer. That direction of travel will continue until we don't come back.
Meanwhile non-MMO's will rely on the teenagers new to gaming. As he said they have slashed and burned their way through casual gamers. Mobile phone users are now being mined for players, there is no audience for gaming outside of that for them to find.
It will take years for them to get through that new cellphone audience mind you, but when they do the more mature online gaming audience will melt away. Good luck with those teens and preteens.
You could have just created a free account and logged in if all you wanted to do was look around.
And hint... you have to step through the Dark Portal to see the new stuff. Everything on this side of the portal is still basically MoP.
It's still an opinion piece... they did similar such thesis on notable pop figures as Madonna. Fluff articles at best.
Anything is opinion, even science. It is his contribution to the founding of MUDs which counts, I will ask you the same question I did Quirhid, perhaps you can tell us your industry credentials?
One doesn't need industry credentials to call BS on it though. One only needs to look around.
We have more choices in MMOS than we ever had.
More Players play MMOS than they ever did.
More and more Indie and small companies are now making MMOS than they ever did.
MMOS are making more money than they ever dreamed of.
Crowd funding is all time high which means people are very much interested in MMOS.
To say MMO's are dying or have bleak future is just BS. Yes they didn't turn out exactly the way you want (sorry that is life) but that doesn't mean the world revolves around your opinion. (by you i mean people who love the doom and gloom).
I come to sites like this to find out what is up and coming, but I never base my opinion on a game from what they say on the forums. When I play a game, I just ask myself, is this fun enough to continue playing? If the answer is yes, I just play it.
I will make an analogy here to a social paradigm that is best displayed by how genders typically look at themselves in the mirror. Men see their strengths, and women see their flaws. And as a result, women tend to have more disorders related to how they look.
Instead of moaning about what a game lacks, try looking at a game for what it has. Does it have more strengths for how I like to play a game than another game in this genre? I'll play that, and ignore the others. And I don't care what other people think of games I don't particularly like, because they have their own play style which affects me in no way.
I think another part of the problem is that people on this site tend to view each game as though it is supposed to be the perfect game for everybody. And if it isn't, it's an awful game that should be F2P, or nobody should play it. Look at every single game's forum on this site. If we were to base our opinions on what was said on these forums, there would be ZERO games to play. I presume that everybody is playing at least 1 MMORPG or they wouldn't be here.
While it has become cliché to blame the consumer, I cannot help but think that it is correct given the behavior on media sites.
I can fly higher than an aeroplane.
And I have the voice of a thousand hurricanes.
Hurt - Wars
Just maybe Yamota is talking on a personal level
Anyways.....
The virtual world aspect is also what has and does draw me into the genre.
I do see a bright side. Look at all the single player and multiplayer "virtual world" and "open world" rpg's there is out or soon to be released.
They're very popular and very well made these days. And it's only a matter of time when this is again emulated in a high quality MMORPG.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
OP, there is plenty of stuff out there but none of it may be to your liking. In which case may mean that you are burnt out on the genre.
As far as WoW goes, logging in a few days before an x-pack releases and expecting the game to be drastically different than it was earlier in the xpack is odd. All the characters are overtuned for current content making it trivial. Also, they tweaked the graphics for WoD so I suspect things will look better in the new zones. People don't play WoW for bleeding edge graphics, they play WoW because it's the most well rounded and polished MMO available.
Very interesting read. I don't agree with every point (or rather his conclusions / examples for certain ones), but overall a very truthful article imho.
I've highlighted perhaps the 2 largest problems w/ MMOs specifically. Problems I've been trying to illuminate for years now, but often get overlooked / ignored. They're the elephants in the room no one wants to talk about.
Too many people forget (designer's included) that games are primarily a means of teaching. A set of skills to help the player through a story, mechanics that get combined to complete a game, puzzles, strategy, etc. etc. And the author of the article is correct, we HAVE gotten too used to learning the same mechanics over and over again. When it comes to the MMO genre. I see it time and time again, players who assume 'we've always had these mechanics, so therefor they must be necessary'. It's not only absurd, it's fairly annoying. However, that's how most people think, and there's not a whole lot that can be done about it until the next big leap forward comes, at which point everyone will assume that this new thing will be the only way to ever make a game.
As a result of this (combined with the fact that MMOs have indeed gotten too expensive to make), it makes it nearly impossible for developers to innovate in the way many of us claim we want. Even if they do innovate in a meaningful way, it often gets rejected by gamers. And this is something publishers notice. The more this happens, the less likely they are to allow innovation in the future. And here we are today.
It may be safe to say, if you (speaking to the OP and people like him) haven't liked a genre for the last 10 years, maybe you never really liked it and you only liked a game that you played over a decade ago. Because it's getting a bit ridiculous to see people pining for the fjords constantly.
Why are you waiting on something that reminds of what was just a blip of the time-line of MMOs? Don't you think maybe the only problem is you at this point? Okay, maybe you liked DAOC, or EQ, or UO, or SWG. Grats. One of four games. Are you done yet? How long are you going to drone on about them? Are you Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite who can't stop talking about the big game back in high school?
Build a bridge and get over it. You don't like MMO's, oh well, there's lot of things, lots of people don't like. Know what they do? They go do something else. So please, gtfo already, all of you who clearly hate the entirety of this genre. No one will miss you.
Since WoW came out these have been introduced or tried in the genre:
What innovation are you looking for that has not been tried. Or do you require only the ones you like to be packaged into one game?
I can fly higher than an aeroplane.
And I have the voice of a thousand hurricanes.
Hurt - Wars