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MMORPG, the genre that is being destroyed.
Andrew0988
Member CommonPosts: 15
I started playing MMORPG's at the ripe age of 9 years old, on a dial up 2d turn based MMORPG called The Realm Online. The game was raw, very little quest information was given and you just went out and killed stuff. I saw my first example of how a MMO could evolve (change graphics, user interface, ect.) and grow into a better game.
From The Realm I branched out into the more attractive younger games like EQ, Asheron's Call DAoC.
In my opinion that was the last spawn of good competitive MMORPG's. Since then, while World of Warcraft has dominated. Very little has been done in the industry to promote new ideas and great gameplay. Darkfall, Age of Conan, Warhammer, Mortal, Aion, and so many more have failed to make any real impression on me.
Where did they go wrong?
While some game companies still have their dignity (very few) I think the huge influx of cash shop games, asian free to play games, and games bought from other countries to be released into US territory have sucked.
The main problem I find with these games is this - a equal representation of quests AND grinding, and end game content. Seamless worlds, and non linear story lines, and bad updates (maybe because they dont have a staff who can even update the game) and crappy communities.
World of Warcraft - too much emphasis on questing
Most Asian games - too much emphasis on grinding (little end game other than killing eachother - wowww thats cool.)
Why can't these games give you the choose?
Seamless worlds / Story lines. Yes, I understand with the new fancy graphics its getting harder and harder to make a good seamless world and good content. Oh wait, yeah. Graphics replacing content/quality. Yup.
Heres how the typical free to play stupid Asian to American game purchased by some shady idiot money grubbing company goes.
"Awesome Asian Fighting MMORPG 2001038" is now out and free to play!
"Wow, the graphics look cool, im gonna play this its free!"
50 dollars later. Dang, it takes 14 hours of killing mobs to level, the server keeps crashing there is 5000 gold bots and its gonna cost me 10,000 dollars to be a top geared player.
I've tried them all, i've seen em all kinds of deceptive. Believing, hey this game might actually have potential. Now with LOTRO online going free to play the market shifting toward that it will only get worse. Now we will not only get these crap linear kill pew pew kill other players spend your whole retirement crap, but we will be miserable too.
When I grew up playing online games I knew they were worth the 10-15$ a month because when everyone else was out buying the newest Tony Hawk or Mario I was still playing a game with content updates that never got old. You could be the best Mario player in the world and what good did it do you? You couldnt reap havoc on your foes and take out your aggression on your enemies, or team up and fight against evil with real people. I always loved the multiplayer aspect.
EQ, Realm, DAoC, AC, and other games also had good communities. Try playing 12 Sky 2, or Cabal, or Kingdom Heroes or any of this other garbage crap. The communities suck.
I want a game that I can do dungeons, kill creatures, explore seamlessly and freelance on, that also has available quests that I can partake in as I choose that about equals the experience of grinding. I want a game with places to go and people to see, with a community. With housing and personal warehousing. Open world PvP that is endorsed so it doesnt die out, and a reason to KEEP playing. Give me a hundred million, Ill get the damn job done.
You ever notice DAoC, AC, EQ, and other older qualities games don't die? Because they have good qualities, you see all these new age games sucker punched as soon as they land. Ill see the hype meter up on the next crap game to hit the market, Final Fantasy 5000 or Crouching Tiger Online.
So quit giving me these garbage @ss, feed me money games.
Comments
So you're ranting about the F2P games category, then praising some P2P games, and then complaining about the whole genre? Why not continue playing the games that you felt have a good community? You could always try to get the job done yourself like that poster in the other thread that is trying to create their own MMO. It won't be easy.
Your about five years too late.
Once SoE Converted SWG from sandbox to themepark to grab some of the World of Warcraft pie the genre took a nose dive.
Playing: Rift, LotRO
Waiting on: GW2, BP
There are a trillion asian f2p mmorpg, because they are actually making money. I can say it because all the chinese MMO company stock have gone up, unlike Funcom.
If you think you can do better, start your own comapny. Get funding like how every other indie company do. It aint easy, no ones just going to give you 100 million dollar because you say so.
QFT. The SWG NGE is still the most painful gaming experience in my 13 year MMO history. The game had almost everything you could ask for. They kicked the community in the head and told us all that the NGE was "good for the game". No player feedback needed, they were "right" and we were "wrong". End of story. So even IF you find a game that you love for what it is, the nature that is an MMO will force it to change into something you probably dont........
DOOMANDGLOOMDOOMANDGLOOMDOOMANDGLOOMDOOMANDGLOOM
You'd be whining all the same if every game was exactly the same as EQ was. The part I find the most hysterical is how people drag WoW into this. WoW is WoW. It has it's own customers and subscribers, most of which were not MMO players before and probably won't be afterwards. That's an entirely different demographic which rarely ties in with other MMOs.
This is the exact same argument people use to say SNES was the best game system evar, or baseball used to be this way, or "insert old thing that's not the same." Darned Russia not being the Soviet Union anymore!
Change happens, regardless of what you post on a site.
You are also late. SOE did it before in 2002 with EQ and the PoP expansion. (and following).
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
The genre aint the problem, your getting old thats it... live with it.
The kids today with there new fangled mmos and their rock and roll music. You call that a hair cut? Back when i was a lad men were men and mmos were MUDs that were loaded with punch cards.
You, sir, have just made my day. I take my proverbial hat off to you!
Always read the small print.
Dunno if its being "destroyed".
It certainly changes.
And after the failure of Vanguard, I see no valid successor being made.
Something that has great class design and a deep world to sink into.
What can be done ? Well, I guess theres plenty of things to do, one doesnt HAVE to play a MMO.
The problem with people like the OP is that they are never satisfied and confuse their lack of understanding of older titles with high quality. Older MMORPGs were not better than modern games. There has never been an MMORPG that has equal amount of grinding or questing. You missed their flaws because you were new to the genre.
Yes, having played so long will inevitably change your perspective as you yourself have changed over the years.
Also, the genre hasn't changed all that much, but the players have. Newer generations do not want what older generations did, and neither do the publishing companies.
Ever since companies saw a profit being made, they cared less for making a great experience, and cared more for making a profit. Proof of this can be seen with the multitude of poorly made games of late and their less than stellar populations. Wow being the exception of course, though even this will change.
Us older gamers also have a harder time in accepting newer games as a whole because those 'Good Ole memories' that defined our experiences in the past can never be matched or surpassed until we redefine our expectations and that involves acceptance of what the new players want. It may never happen.
Now I simply enjoy playing with my friends, whichever mmo it is we enjoy and taking the only value I have from those games. Sharing time with those people I enjoy sharing my time with.
Does SWG really have any of those ex-World of Warcraft players these days?
A report from a current SWG player on the situation would be nice.
All those memories will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
Honestly SWG failed to grab any of those players it was shooting for.
The fact is once every damn developer got greedy and wanted blizzards piece of the pie the entire genre dropped in quality.
Blizzard made a great mmo (Vanilla WoW) we didnt need 50 copies of it. developers should of tried to innovate, to think outside the box instead of trying to improve a game that was virtually perfect already.
Playing: Rift, LotRO
Waiting on: GW2, BP
Most of these guys are right, its just fond memories. If those games were so good we could still play them, but we don't. Try playing an MMO without some sort of auction house system now. Back in the day we had nothing like that and we enjoyed standing around a major hub shouting out what we want to buy or what we were selling.. everyone did it because we had no other choice. I used to spend days on AC just trading in the same town and i thought it was fantastic. I would never do that now.. not when I see how sad and stupid it really is.
It's like chocolate.. people crave it. Would people crave chocolate if they'd never tasted or even heard of it? All the new features in MMO's are like chocolate. We don't need it, we'd possibly be better off without it, but we can't forget about it once we'v had a taste
Games will never be successful if they are made in the old style now.. even the OP wouldn't like it... we'd all start asking for features we don't really need.
I think that it's just that computer graphics have improved by leaps and bounds since the late 90s and players these days even the old vets doesn't accept the graphical standard of UO and EQ anymore.
All those memories will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
I think that is what alot of us are hoping for.
That is actually a good question. I don't mind themepark games myself but there should still be choices even in them.
Solo quest up to max level, do dungeons until the gear is good enough and then raid or PvP gets boring fast and still that is the only gameplay in many games.
Crafting is usually the only non combat thing to do and it is grindy and often pretty useless. Exploring does not exist as it did in the old games.
Don't get me wrong here, there is no problem with any particular thing like dungeons o raids, the problem is that you have very little choice.
I think that the genre will have to introduce a lot more things to do.
Let people design their own housing and let guilds build their own guild city design by the officers. Let thieves have quests that feels something like the old game "thief". Give us back traps and riddles in the dungeons. Why can't we have tournaments with knights jousting and dueling?
I hope games like GW 2 and WoDO will introduce some new vitality into the genre, new ideas are needed to if we want to be able to play MMOs in 2020 too.
There are games with new features out there. An example of this would be Ryzom and it's stanza system. I hear all the time.. "Wouldn't it be cool if people could make their own combat skills?" Well, that is exactly what it is.
However, the reality of introducing new features is that if people cannot relate to it .. or jump right in and easily understand the new feature and why they would need the new feature.. then the feature is seen more as burden to the general public. Another example of this was the original Tabula Rasa. Not the one that was released, but the one that was demoed a couple years before that had to be completely retooled. It was extremely original in both story and gear. However, they received a lot of negative feedback at the trade shows because people couldn't relate. They were a bit too ahead of their time and it was a turn off to the masses. So, they remade the game to appease people and it went defunct.
Which leads me to the inevitable question of WHY? New features should be created to solve current issues or problems, make the connection between the player and the game smoother (i.e. improve gameplay experience). Take for example a book. The only major change that has occurred within the past century is now we can read our books on a digital device that allows us to store several books (of our choosing) in a single unit to save space. Is it anymore convenient if you were going to only use it for one book? No. I have a bookmark with an LED light that illuminates the pages for me in the dark, so I really wouldn't buy a kindle if I only have a couple of books.
You are going to see MMOs begin to change pace in the feature department. You can use WoW as a marker in the timeline if you wish, but this is partly because they created a polished set of game mechanics and features. The reason why we are seeing graphics continue to improve is due to the video card life cycle. However, I see that slowing down as well as people aren't upgrading as fast.
So, instead of new features, I would love to see MMORPGs that improve on the world itself, the storyline and lore, dynamic and auto-generated on-the-fly-content, npc/character depth, server lag in high load situations. All of these really are not new features, but the content and infrastructure of the game. This is where we SHOULD be seeing improvements. Guild Wars 2 will have some of this, but I hope to see more in the next 5-10 years.
I think you are missing OPs point. He mean that the MMOs have cut out many parts to focus on a few ones even if they are polished up right now.
I don't mind auction houses or brokers even if I think player owned stores (preferably manned by a npc clerk) is most fun. But shouting in chat was not really one of the good things people misses, and there are many of those too.
MMOs cut out a lot of gameplay and never introduced something new in it's place. You don't have to take all those things back but you at least need to add a lot of more things to do instead.
I find this quote hilariously ironic seeing as I've been reading your quite astute criticisms about FF XIV on the forums for the past couple of days.
I guess by your own logic we can safely dismiss your own complaints as well? FF XIV isn't a half baked and broken cash cow, you are just too damn old to appriciate the new standards of MMO creation?
If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, riddle 'em with bullets
OP, Guild Wars 2 would like to welcome you to the next generation of MMO. Take a look, you sound like someone that will really like what you see.
Oderint, dum metuant.
Destroyed?? LOL. WOW has just reached 12M players. If you look at ANY report, the market is EXPANDING. There are more MMORPGs, more players.
It just changed to a state that YOU don't like. That's all.
Welcome to the party
OP: You are half-right in that the mmo market is full of substandard games and the AAA scene dominated by linear-story railroad themepark MMOs with low freedom and low creativity and lowered repeat value.
But it looks like GW2 is the flag-bearing for what themepark MMOs are evolving into. Everything we know about GW2 is a good source of info. Sandbox mmos will have their time...
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem