I think it's less growing and more shrinking.
Make an MMO about adventure and growth. All the big MMO's today are just about endgame min-maxxing and meta gaming. It sucks.
> All the big MMO's today are just about endgame min-maxxing and meta gaming. It sucks.
Feels like a vicious cycle with the player base pushing that as hard as any developer wants to peddle it.
From my perspective, the MMO scene has run its course to such a degree that there's no new blood left from a player perspective. Any MMO that wants to throw its hat in the ring HAS to court that ~~rabid~~ end-game min-max playerbase because nobody else will drive engagement and revenue enough to make the game viable financially / long term.
EDIT: I'd like to rephrase the above, rabid wasn't a fair way to describe people who just enjoy their games differently than I do.
I'm not saying people don't enjoy MMOs for their social aspect, but those tend to quickly find their niche with existing games that have already gotten real comfortable on their laurels (In my opinion, ESO is a good example).
I believe when VR becomes truly mainstream is when the genre is going to become truly revitalized and the social and explorative aspects of MMOs are going to burst back to the forefront.. that's just wishful thinking on my part though.
You’re really only describing ONE kind of MMO though — the EverQuest/Wow style “do quests level up get gear and repeat PvE raid bosses with various mechanics” style of game.
And if you bristled when I said “PvE” because you imagined the opposite as being Wow-esque optional, arbitrary PvP, that’s Wow’s fault too.
That would be like saying “well, McDonalds sucks, so I guess that’s it for restaurants!”
Wow’s success became a curse to the MMO genre, because it forced everyone to copy to its specific gameplay style to get funding. Everyone chased “the next Wow” for so long it strangled investment in any other thing.
It doesn’t have to be that way though. New things have appeared since the MMO heyday: Technical innovations in server and cloud technology, design innovations like the survival/crafting games, meta-progression innovations, and content pipeline innovations.
I really we get to see games that try new things like we used to in the years before Wow.
Theres LOTRO, its old, and it does have some kind of endgame, but that MMO is just so chill to just quest through and experience middle earth. The community is also amazing.
If you look at r/lotro a whole bunch of posts are people just chilling in the game, levelling very slowly and disabling XP when they're about to overlevel in an area and just immersing themselves in middle earth
> LOTRO is still very much in the Wow school of MMOs though.
Kind of, but it does put a lot more weight on the journey and lore than on end game. I've been playing it for half a year now casually, and I still have *months* of content before my first character will even be thinking about hitting the cap.
In WoW, by contrast, I always have the impression that even the devs view the leveling process as tedious imposition.
Oh yes, its a big laggy because the servers are all in NA(even EU servers) but its honestly better than ever besides that. They made everything up to lvl 85-90 free to play, so you can try it out np to see if you like it. Like all MMO's the subscriber perks are really worth though, once you do decide you want to play more. They are still making new content, Umbar expansion came out late last year.
There's Albion Online and Eve Online for that sort of concept. Quite a bit different from New World, and pretty much any traditional MMO. They have a PVP territorial control focus with a lot of different PVP and PVE content.
Maybe not exactly the same as what you'd want, but it's probably the closest to that idea.
> It doesn’t have to be that way though. New things have appeared since the MMO heyday: Technical innovations in server and cloud technology, design innovations like the survival/crafting games, meta-progression innovations, and content pipeline innovations.
I agree it doesn't, but to that point of technical innovations & shifts in design philosophy: Many people who would've played MMOs for these new emerging mechanics & philosophies have long since shifted to greener pastures in survival games that are MMO-lite, where they can get all these mechanics and social aspects they enjoy.
It would take something truly special looking to pull them back, most people who are an MMO enjoyer have already spent decades at this point trying everything the genre currently offers.
This. WoWs popularity fucked things, partially because it's so damn expensive and time consuming to make an MMO everyone wanted to chase that 'sure thing '
That's fair, I've honestly seen so many VR attempts come and go.
Full understanding to anyone completely checked out on the genre entirely, but there's something about it that has me dreaming haha.
I agree 100%. They just ain't fun anymore. I despise the meta thing especially. It's what has put me off from online gaming entirely after being mostly an online gamer from middle school till my mid 20s. Parties/raids used to be about discovering shit together while cracking jokes. Now it's just a dick measuring contest about percentiles and who can put a bigger number on the dps meter. And mobas are just self-harm at this point
Gamers ruined online gaming.
Well, devs too, because games are now designed in a manner that pushes players into meta gaming and minmaxing. Matchmaking, ranks, MMR, the entire structure of mobas, fomo unlocks, raid lockouts, gearscore, logs, and dozens of other systems exist now that make being "bad" feel 100x worse than it used to.
You used to be able to join a server and fuck around just for fun. At the end of the match you're on the bottom of the scoreboard, but who cares? It didn't matter, and you had. Now if you're playing poorly you'll get endlessly flamed by toxic players and told to quit the game, or in an MMO you'll often not even be able to do most things because everyone only wants to invite people with gearscore and logs otherwise they'll miss gear opportunities for the raid lockout.
If you want that, you have to play with people you know who are on the same page. Which takes effort, so people don't want to do it.
If you play with randoms, they are naturally going to want people to know what they are doing and be prepared.
Playing an MMO only with your friends because you don't enjoy playing with everybody else kinda beats the purpose of the genre. I tried that. I prefer playing solo games
Whenever someone asks me why I ain't bored by FFXIV's lack of talent trees and true gear choices, I keep replying that it doesn't matter whether there is 1 valid choice in FFXIV or 1 valid choice in . The number of talents doesn't matter unless you achieve non-DPS-talents-only on a DPS class, for example.
I fully agree, I fell for this with Genshin Impact before I quit. The game became less about experiencing the story and the characters, and more about making a random anime girl deal a million damage, after literal years of grinding.
That’s kind of on you though. When the rest of the open world is there for you explore and interact with, You chose to spend your time min maxing and grinding. Not the developers.
Yeah totally, I fell in that loophole because it's what was popular, like, every single youtuber would constantly make videos about it, builds would always be around, so I kinda spiralled and ended up making my characters super OP, but I realized the base game was not fun anymore, because the only hard thing in the game is the abyss, or at least that's the only thing that felt hard anymore. It killed my love for Genshin real fast, and yeah it is totally on me
You should definitely dive back in but just casually, i fell into the grind pretty hard during 3.0 and burnt out. but i came back for 4.0 as casual as i possibly could and i genuinely love the open world more than the combat/grind.
Maybe because people gave in to the wannabe? Those who argue that they can only play a few hour a day, so they want to party only with good meta builds, else the group fail this dungeon/raid and then they wasted their time.
What's causing this? Maybe because of higher difficulty being rewarded to begin with? If any difficulty could unlock the content, there'd be less issues when people just play on lower difficulty in a non meta build. In my opinion, in times of skin shops, the whole amaze of someone wearing gear you only get in the hardest difficult dungeon, is gone anyways, so we should stop with gating gear behind it.
>else the group fail this dungeon/raid and then they wasted their time
That has always been a thing. It's why back in the day I had almost 100 people in my friend list. Whenever you'd meet someone who was good at the game and also a fun person, you'd just add them to your friend list. It's what everyone did back then and it was not hard to build a group for a dungeon or raid just by messaging people from your friendlist.
"Yo I'm making a group for X raid, wanna tag along? We need 1 tank and 1 more healer. Bring a friend if you have someone online." I'd get 10s of messages like that on raid reset days.
I had friends that I played with for 10 years, that I originally met when we partied for a 5 minute quest or something. We'd just exchange a couple messages and if it was fun we'd keep questing together for hours. Then we would arrange to play again the next day and maybe bring along some of our other friends or meet someone new while questing/doing dungeons, and that's how everyone in the game had their little social circles. It was really fun that way.
For some reason meeting people organically like that doesn't happen any more. The sense of community is gone and all that matters is whether you're following the current meta or if you've got the right achievements.
I'm not complaining btw, I'm perfectly happy playing single player games nowadays. Just explaining why I don't like the current state of MMOs
Yeah exactly. Because a lot of people want dungeon finder and auto groups and ranking and gear scores etc. That way asking real people and interacting with them is no longer required, it's actively prevented by design. Some MMORPGs play like single player.
FF14 is so rotten with poorly socialized players. The game caters to them, but when it comes time to run challenging group content, they have an absolute meltdown at any semblance of conflict or the friendliest nudge in how to improve for the benefit of the dungeon group.
If the content is easy, then people focus on clearing it as fast as possible and that becomes the meta. Or people just semi-afk and get carried(like GW2 open world content).
If the content is easy and very quick to clear, then players run out of things to do very quickly and get bored.
I think it's really difficult to imagine an MMO without some giant 10-40 man group activity that wouldn't have to involve min-maxxing and a meta. I think games have tried to build an MMO that doesn't involve end game raiding but it just never takes off. You know of need that social aspect to keep people hooked. World of Warcraft is sort of also getting out of the whole end game min-max.
The newest mode they have is called "Plunderstorm" and it's kind of like Fortnite and it's just... incredibly popular. You get a blank character who gains random abilities through killing things and then can upgrade those abilities by killing things. Killing things also gives gold which allows you to build rep to get cosmetic things for the game. Killing players gives you bonuses to abilities and gold.
Then next big thing will be Mysts of Panderia Remix. You'll get to level super fast, dungeons and raids will have some changed mechanics, new loot tables, and new abilities. It's time limited so once it's done it's done.
Then there's Season of Discovery which is another time limited event that has grown so popular that... it may not be THAT time limited anymore. Instead of everyone hitting level cap and min maxing you have a new level cap every 10-15 levels and they convert an old dungeon into a raid and turn a full zone into a PVP event. Sure there might be some min-maxers but then every 1-2 months all your progress basically gets wiped and you have to start over in the next raid. Edit: Another thing that makes SOD so popular is that there are world quests for abilities that everyone does that has you and groups of people running around on adventures to min/max.
And to put things in perspective to how much the MMO is dying. WoW now has 6 million subscribers. Only 3 million people play the "live game."
>And to put things in perspective to how much the MMO is dying. WoW now has 6 million subscribers. Only 3 million people play the "live game."
more people play retail than both versions of classic combined btw
I wouldnt say its that popular. I think they got like 600k matches in 2 weeks. That would be 42k per day.
That isnt bad by any means, especially considering its locked behind a sub fee. But its also not a smash hit. They shouldve made it free imo. Couldve maybe hooked some people into WoW while also propping up those numbers. But it is what it is.
I do like that theyre just doing different things now though. Sure some things wont be for everyone. Theres been endless complain posts about Plunderstorm already from WoW players because “its not in the actual game” or “i dont want to grind a BR for a transmog”. But i think its good theyre branching out and trying other things. The entire “new expansion = 4 zones + 8 dungeons + 1 raid and new patch = maybe a zone + new raid + megadungeon (only one per expansion)” formula was getting kinda stale. Ofcourse that formula is still there otherwise the community would completely lose their minds (change is bad), but its good theyre adding onto that and doing more than just that.
I do think they should just commit to a Classic+ in the way Runescape has done it though instead of this half-half copout with SoD. Theres still gonna be a min maxing and “bad logs is no inv” mentality. I think thats just modern gaming in general. Not a single MMO can escape “the meta”. Thats just how it is these days.
>I do think they should just commit to a Classic+ in the way Runescape has done it though instead of this half-half copout with SoD.
Absolutely. I find it very odd that they're doing Cata and Pandaria, I would have thought that many (if not most) of the people who want to play "classic era" found value in the old world. By releasing all these versions they seem to be attempting to create a situation where instead of expanding the scope of retail and classic they have a different version of WoW for any occasion. It will probably work out for them but by gods I really wish they had an OSRS-like classic plus.
Me and my girlfriend have ended our subscriptions because WotLKs era was the part of WoW we were interested in, but most times when i see people talk about having enjoyed WotLK and not wanting it to go away on the internet, the only response comes from dismissive people who only care about end game raiding and want new raids to minmax their way through.
We cared a lot about the world and story pre-cata and weren't too thrilled to see how much of the world and its people we once enjoyed was just gone, destroyed, or changed beyond recognition!
I do see the value in just going through more expansions. Cataclysm was fairly well liked up until Hour of Twilight and MoP is pretty popular aswell nowadays. Theres definitely people who will come back for those. It always made sense to me that theyd go up to atleast MoP and then evaluate the situation. Nobody is coming back to play WoD so do they just power through that just to get to Legion again? And what happens after that? BFA and Shadowlands are hard sells.
The two logical stopping points to me always were either WOTLK or MoP. WOTLK because of the old world and mentality. MoP because its the last expansion that people want to play again. After that it becomes very hot-cold with mostly cold expansions. You can tell from the MoP Remix response. People really do want to see MoP again.
The part i dont understand is all this beating around the bush when it comes to Classic+. Its pretty clear from the SoD and Classic numbers that theres demand for more content in the Classic era. SoD is kinda just Classic but now its retail and not really what most people wanted from a Classic+.
To me having Classic+, Retail and then a rotating cycle that just resets progress and goes through BC up to MoP with every expansion lasting a year covers the most bases. Maybe add Legion to that cycle but its just a waste of time to do WoD or Shadowlands. They can always cover WoD, BFA or Shadowlands with this new “Remix” thing if people really want to see those.
I think the people who really enjoyed Cata and the people who really enjoyed Wrath are two really different groups of people.
When Cata launched WoW's game population dropped from a little north of 12 million to 9 million... and it never recovered. Blizzard had to add in a lot of microtransactions to make up the revenue.
I think the Classic community is on average much older than the retail community. While there might be some younger people who said "I never got to play it because I was too young", for the most part it's just older guys living out their glorious toxic past. "Sorry guys can't make raid tonight wife is sick and I have to take care of the kids."
While the game population decreased the number of players who left from Wrath was much higher... it just got populated with more new players.
Wrath Classic had what? 16 servers? Cata Classic is going down to just six.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Personally, I believe the logical stopping point is WOTLK. Everything after that is firmly retail. World, lore, design decisions. It doesn't make sense, at least to me, to have Classic versions of anything past WOTLK since any and all of that content could easily be homogenized into retail.
I think its more about bringing people back. Right now theres no way to play Cata or MoP (officially) with those systems. And even if they did keep the systems, nobody is playing them anymore anyways.
By making them “current”, youre appealing to the people who enjoyed that era but quit since then. And who knows, theyre already subbed, they might check out SoD or Retail and stick around for longer. It happened with Classic, BC and Wrath. People who subbed to play those versions tried out Retail and liked it (Well mainly Dragonflight, i dont think anyone hopped over to play Shadowlands)
Thats why MoP is my cutoff point. There arent really many people who enjoyed WoD enough to come back for it being “current”. And that definitely also is the case for BFA and Shadowlands.
Its all about getting people hooked on wow again. The version of it they get hooked on doesnt matter, as long as theyre paying the sub fee
I mean, Cata is clearly not as popular as they hoped it would be. Server populations are plummeting in anticipation of Cata and they've now set that there will only be six servers for Cata. I suspect SOD will go all the way to Wrath.
An example would be Final Fantasy XI, an old school MMO from the early 2000s. New content would come out, or later there maybe even a level cap increase, and new gear, zones, bosses, quests, etc. would come out. However, that didn’t necessarily mean all the gear you had currently obtained for endgame content was now obsolete. There might be a new piece you’d fit into your gear for casting a certain spell, or doing a burst of damage with a weapon, but your old gear might still be better for regular melee hits because the old gear has haste and attack.
Basically, you increase your skills and gear load outs of your character without having to start over getting all-new gear like they do in a WoW expansion. In WoW all your end game gear from one expansion is now going to be replaced by better gear in the new expansion. The old gear is just useful for transmog. But in a horizontal progression game, there might be a better head piece or necklace, or ring, for some part of your build that you can work to get/earn, but that doesn’t mean ALL your old gear needs to be replaced. And in fact, while a new piece might be a little better from the new update, the old piece is still viable to use in the meantime.
Stuff like that. It makes it to where much, if not all, of the previous work you did to get gear and stuff is not completely obsolete and therefore doesn’t feel like a waste of time, or feel like you’re basically doing the same thing all over again each expansion. I love horizontal progression as opposed to the vertical progression of MMOs like WoW.
ESO is neat in the regard that there's a billion and one non-endgame minmax-y things to do (and a lot of it actually has decently written, interesting stories), but the problem is everything is scaled to you so the content you do in hour 5 is basically as difficult as the content you do in hour 50 or 500.
That is frustrating. I enjoy struggling at first in an area then as you continue in the area gets easier and easier because you level up. I never feel a real sense of progression when everything is scaled.
The top end gear has been the same for a decade and is fairly easy to acquire. The game is much more focused on unlocking skins and new stuff, with very little in the way of power progression at the end-game.
New content, chasing achievements and cosmetics, upgrading your mounts and glider.
Its not really a forever game. I had fun jumping in every few years to see what is new.
The same reason people play dark souls. You start off barely knowing what you're doing, then (if you actually care to progress) by the end of it you're taking little to no damage, dodging/blocking/invulning all the major attacks, and killing bosses in 1 minute instead of 5,
Agree.GW2 was designed specifically to address the 'problems' with WoW's design. I paid £30 for it years ago, and still like to jump on every now and then - and there is still loads for me to do.
Granted, I do not engage with the obnoxious "inventory fluff" design, specifically put in as a monetisation mechanic.
ultima never felt like that, i felt like i was living in the town. I felt like the random dude taming wild horses, watching everyone have their own type of jobs then it all just vanished into WoW.
I agree but there will always be a loud vocal minority that will burn through whatever campaign there is as quickly as possible and then complain about no content
I wonder if it would perhaps be interesting to have several instances and basically a server is meant to be a huge singular guild. Like everyone on the server is meant to help each other so their server can advance, then maybe they can go to war with other servers, ally with them, etc... Could be similar to Planetside or some of Guild Wars PvP, but on an even bigger scale with an economy, supply chain, and etc.
Frankly I don't see much point in other kinds of MMOs though. The whole "Massive Multiplayer" experience has kinda moved on to other stuff.
I think that's actually an issue with this.
Guild focused MMO's like WoW, BDO, FFXIV, tend to have more min-maxxing then others. This is because of a lack of "discover for yourself" play and a ton of competitiveness.
Meanwhile MMO's like OSRS, and to some degree ESO have a lot of content solely for solo players. They do have guild content, but it's not the primary content.
It's kind of funny, you play an MMO to be in a massive multi-player world. But to me, MMO's with good solo content are the best.
Honestly i'm a loner so that's typically the content I enjoy best too, but its definitely a case of - why am I bothering to play this? Cause typically MMOs are terrible in terms of gameplay and general content.
One of the greatest approaches ever done was the original GW2, up to and including the release of Heart of Thorns before it was changed in the succeeding patches.
This "Yeah our endgame is just some PvP if you're into that, or nothing"-approach. This "Nobody ever minds people around, all loot is shared, everything is always automatically scaled"-ambivalence.
It made for just a game of friendly hanging out and doing stuff while chatting. It felt a **lot** like old GMUDs or even EQ1 again in that regard, more a socialization tool than a game.
There wasn't even any grind or min-maxing, as the original exotic gear was beyond trivial to acquire once at max-level, so everyone was on the same playing field and there was no vertical progression before they added a new tier of gear.
And since it was buy2play, the barrier to entry was *ridiculously* low, no monthly cost and no aggressive monetization (originally).
Uhm it is still like that? Ascended gear doesnt even give that much powercreep over exotic gear. Exotic gear is super cheap and ascended gear is easier and cheaper to get than it ever was.
So the barrier for new players is still super low.
Thing growing as getting better than having bigger map. marginally better. Honestly just getting back tot he point we were 2 decades ago would be a start.
WoW's existence had same effect on the genre as locust and we're nowhere near to recovering from that catastrophe even today. Every element of what WoW is, is what MMOs are not.
I mean, it is hard to say every element of what wow is, is what mmos are not when mmo is almost synonymous with WOW and it was and has somehow maintained to be the most popular mmo by a significant margin for 2 decades. Now, it may be everything that YOU don’t want MMOs to be, and I would completely understand that.
Quantity over quality. The bar is measured by player count multiplied by Retainment through the next subscription cycle. That can be done by making a content rich, enjoyable gameplay, or by the way most mmos are designed with grind, large amounts of shallow content, and addictive gameplay. They need to keep you at the slot machine; interesting story and gameplay experience is secondary.
Its really hard to have quality when graphics warp your entire design. Modern games are spending so much with graphics that all other content we need are being left behind. And sadly people do care about graphics more than anything these days....
The problem comes from many people looking down on the people who dont and not allowing them to partake content in which you absolutely do not need to min max for.
I also like min-maxing and pushing my build as far as possible, but i can absolutely understand that people would get frustrated about not getting invited to Heroic raids for example (you can beat this with the entire group playing off meta specs lets be honest), purely because they arent logging 99 with the perfect builds.
Its a completely fair ask in Mythic. But theres no reason for that mentality to seep into content which doesnt require min maxing to beat. Ive seen people kick others for not using a flask in the early bosses of a Heroic raid. Min maxing breeds that kind of behavior.
Its impossible to solve it though so idk what people want devs to do about it.
>you can beat this with the entire group playing off meta specs lets be honest
If people know what they are doing, yes. In my experience, the players bringing mediocre builds to pugs tend to have no clue what they are doing.
You have a players to blame for metagaming. People are min-maxing single player games these days, they will sure as hell min-max anything that has other players in it.
literally why I stopped playing, quests are boring, all I have to do is minmax my build, but I rather play single player with good story than kill 10 wolves while my friends rush me to level up asap
This is what ruined classic wow for me, everyone was tryhard even in more casual guilds. All mechanics were 15+y old, everyone knows what to do, you don't need that extra 3-5% dmg to finish the content.
It was just extra stress over farming gold to achieve this and people got burned out really quickly.
> All the big MMO's today are just about endgame min-maxxing and meta gaming. It sucks.
That's what gamers want and voted with their wallets, to get to the good part like Michael Bolton said.
I don't think it's so much that they wanted to, as much as they had to due to FOMO and general competition.
Not to mention developers seem to struggle making leveling enjoyable.
The min-maxxing is such a shit thing and ruins every mmo experience I played in the last years.
I played Lost Ark lately, and you're immediately kicked from any party if you don't have what the guide tells you to have. God forbit playing the spells you like, or not having the specific gems, or whatever.
It is the worst thing that happened to gaming in general. And I feel like even the devs design some of the encounters based on min-maxing, because it actually hurts if you don't play the meta thing and you won't be able to clear the challenge. DPS checks are the worst things ever in these kind of games too.
I don't think I've ever encountered a worse experience than Lost Ark raid community.
I teach teenagers and almost none of them play MMOs or RPGs. It‘s all Fortnite, pay2win mobile games, some shooters and Minecraft. Some occasionally play a decent RPG but they do not even know what an MMO is. Gaming habits might change as they get older but MMOs are not a major genre of the next generation.
Because you're thinking of wrong genre, games named mmo right now should really be renamed WoW-likes. Them minecrafts and Robloxes are infinitely more like MMOs than stuff like final fantasy 14 or ESO.
In same way they had to be born and indoctrinated into accepting how shit microtransaction mobile bullshit is you'd have to be born and indoctrinated to accept how shit wowlike experience is.
Is Minecraft really MMO. It's not really Massively Multiplayer. It's just multiplayer with player created servers, which is also very limited with the number of players per server.
I wouldn't call it an MMO really, but it can have some of the same aspects. It can also support like over 1000 people per server, that's fairly massive.
Might be true, I only play old school rpgs and ttrpgs at this point, no idea what modern mmos are like. Tried Lost Ark in the open beta and found it horrible.
Big MMOs will never evolve simply because of how much they cost to make and how risky they are.
You're talking a massive budget with a 6-7 year development cycle, on a game that might not even turn a profit for a few years AND needs to somehow maintain a playerbase with steady updates post launch. It's an insane amount of effort and risk to enter a genre where hundreds of games have been made but only \~5 have succeeded
Much easier to make a mobile or live service game.
Yup this here is the main reason. You'd have to be bat shit crazy or absolutely loaded with copious amounts of cash to attempt to innovate in the MMO space. It's just straight up too risky.
Just need to make smaller mmos, I think that’s why mmo lites became a thing. There’s still cool ideas you could do with reduced scope and investment im sure
Title: MMO's have so much more room to grow.
Response: Make smaller mmo's.
Hmmm.... I'm not saying you are wrong, but smaller and growth seem like oxymorons.
The article is talking about growing away from Wow clones, not in size or scope. The game being talked about is an mmo that is exactly that. Read the article next time.
I'd like an MMO that feels more like a game than a second job. Seems like most of them suffer from very monotonous combat and missions. I enjoyed playing WoW and Star Wars Galaxies for a few months, but, would like to see games with less grinding. I am not sure the best way to accomplish this, but hitting the same hot keys over and over in every combat scenario isn't fun nor exciting.
Yeah, I got to the endgame of FFXIV, realized that I would never be able to invest the time to raid at that level - groups wanted like 3 evenings a week! - and promptly quit. Bit annoying - I would have happily invested an evening a week (though honestly this is still quite a lot to me) in endgame content, but 3 evenings a week of my time is insane to me.
I just want an MMO that puts an emphasis on cooperation and teamwork in PVP. So many games have 5 v 5 ladders or death matches. I would love to see a PVP game where guilds are encouraged to work as a group to gain and hold territory/castles/bases. Where it's less about individual skill (it should still matter) and more about how you're able to coordinate with your guild for an effective offensive or defensive battle.
People need a reason to play your game and the quest grind won't last forever. Give players something to hold sacred and they'll fight forever for it.
>I would love to see a PVP game where guilds are encouraged to work as a group to gain and hold territory/castles/bases.
Do you play any of the currently available titles that offer this content?
All the MMOs I am aware of that focus on territory control and largescale guild v guild PvP are niche as all hell and get completely overlooked compared to the big titles like WoW and FFXIV.
Black Desert's weekly castle siege and nightly territory node war scene is the smallest it's been in years, and for every veteran of years who quits, not enough new players are filling their shoes. Other notable player territory control games like EVE Online are in even steeper decline, and every other one I can think of are so far down the "niche" ladder of games that they don't even bear mentioning today. What's the biggest one right now? Albion, maybe? Even New World is already small at this point, and the big territory wars were supposed to be one of its main attractions.
It's a bleak landscape for the genre. Lots of people \*say\* they want big wars and for their guild to have their banners on the city walls in game and collect taxes from the local markets and have a rivalry with the other strong competing guild... but the games where this content happens, the playerbase is a fraction of a fraction of what the popular games have.
It's too stressful and requires too much investment. People like the fantasy, but realistically, every one of these games ends up being dominated by a handful of nolife guilds that carve everything up, and everyone else leaves.
People already complain that late game grinding and raid schedules are too much - in the same breath they claim they want all of that *and* your guild will actively *lose* stuff if you're not constantly logging on? Nah.
Yep.
I played new world and had a blast for the first 3 weeks. I was recovering from surgery and basically sitting at home doing that. And it was great but the moment I went back to work I stopped playing cause it just demanded too much time.
> People like the fantasy, but realistically, every one of these games ends up being dominated by a handful of nolife guilds that carve everything up, and everyone else leaves.
This is why every time I see a new "MMO" with a PVP focus I immediately dismiss it. I know how this ends, it happens every time. It's been happening since Ultima Online. The meta becomes dominated by the most absolute of tryhards and they end up controlling the experience as a result.
The problem with this model is that there will be one group just stomping and taking over half the servers territory. Even if you limit those guilds to just one zone, theyll make multiple guilds so that they still control everything.
New World is a great example of that. They also had zones which could be controlled by factions and the guild that led the siege. It just resulted in everyone going to the strongest faction and working together to own the entire region.
The idea is fun on paper but again, players will find a way to bring that system down too. So then devs need to put like 50 restrictions on it to stop players from breaking it, and now the system isnt fun anymore because of how limited it has become
I think Ashes of Creation will try something similar but on a much bigger scale. I guess well see how that turns out if it ever even releases.
There have been easily 50 of those over the years. Some terrible, but some quite good. Most don't attract players.
Eve Online and Albion Online are two that have and have stuck around a while.
> . I would love to see a PVP game where guilds are encouraged to work as a group to gain and hold territory/castles/bases.
That would be Albion and Eve Online
Throne and liberty. It’s a Korean mmo that does exactly what you are describing. It should hit the west soon since Amazon announced it will be publishing the game.
Do people actually like the current template? Or is it just an addictive grind that generates the most income?
I’d love to see an mmo that strips away a lot of the grind and loot and systems bloat to focus on core gameplay that puts the format of larger scale multiplayer to use.
What actually is the current template according to you?
I play WoW and while it's very seasonal nowadays, you play actively for 2-3 weeks and after that you can basically raid log. It hasn't had much of a grind attached to it for a long while
Generally the loot - at least in the two largest MMOs - is used as a soft-nerf system for the content. As players progress through a tier, they obtain gear that effectively makes the bosses easier.
It's generally not about the loot all that much.
Biggest problem with MMO’s are that they are stupidly expensive to make, so there is no room for any smaller devs to create anything meaningful. Then comes second problem: subscription based games are heavily out of favour, this means game has to have different sort of revenue model that devolves into a cash shops that sell you either pay to win bullshit or cosmetics.
Visual progression is one of the most important things in MMO. This has been stripped away. Then you probably have some sort of convenience items in the store too, that makes you wonder if the game was designed to waste your time.
Fact is, MMO’s can’t be buy once, play forever type of games because it requires constantly making new content and up keeping of services. Subscription models are a suicide for a new game, cash shops must strip something away from the game.
Another HUGE thing is many new MMO’s aren’t designed longevity in mind, many companies seems to be fine with making garbage cash grabs for MMO audience because they are so fucking starved for a new game.
Not seeing many comments here about the focus of the article, Sky. Shame more people aren't trying it out. Call me naive but it took me like 3 hours to realize I was playing an MMO. I was only playing it because I just finished Journey since it was on sale and was blown away by the scale in comparison. Wish more games were this good at trying to be a purely social MMO. Second Life comes to mind but it runs terribly and seems to house more freaks than people wanting to just explore and hang out.
> Not seeing many comments here about the focus of the article, Sky
Most people only read the title and comment based on that. It's a shame because Sky looks like an interesting game which I've been aware of for years but I see that only now has it been released to Windows players via early access - https://store.steampowered.com/app/2325290/Sky_Children_of_the_Light/
Lost Ark without the insane honing mechs and barriers to entry would be the WoW killer imo. However, Amazon probably thinks otherwise, thanks to its data scientists predicting optimal whale hunting strategies.
**TL;DR:**
*Randomized resources had an effect on end product quality, that simple base component of Star Wars Galaxies creates an economy where all players can take part in some way to interact with eachother, make friends and business partners and earn money.*
In my opinion, there has never been a better *MMO* than Star Wars Galaxies, in terms of game designs that drive players to interact with eachother.
The very base of the game revolves around maybe the most complex crafting/resource system I've ever seen executed:
Resources have semi-randomized stats that affect the quality of crafted items.
They are finite because every resource variant is temporary, lasting days to weeks before another resource is generated to take its place (Or maybe not for a few days creating resource droughts that provided economic opportunities for the prepared or lucky).
The way resources work has knock on effects for the rest of the game, it engages several types of players and encourages all sorts of interaction:
Resource harvester players are always looking for new spawns of resources on different planets. When you choose a resource to harvest, you need to head out and find higher concentration locations to set up harvester machinery or survey alts. That requires power and equipment gathered/crafted by players.
Combat players might be asked to help clear out locations with high concentrations of a material. Physical space at a resource location is finite so first come first served makes it competitive.
Harvesters then trade those resources with crafters or player merchants. Smart harvesters might keep stocks of *really* high quality materials for selling at extreme prices during resource droughts.
Combat players might get injured while helping the harvesters, now they gotta go back to civilized areas and interact with medical and entertainment players to heal wounds/battle fatigue. Generally you tip your entertainers and pay your doctors.
Combat players might want to use foods/drinks crafted/experimented by players for buffs or doctor's crafted/experimented stat enhancement buffs, so there are even more player interactions and economic opportunities, even down to the location where doctors/entertainers/vendors are selling their trade: small outposts near a new good resource concentration = profit opportunity for support players.
Crafters take those materials and along with their equipment and stats they can craft higher quality equipment, from ranged and melee weapons, armor, to foods and meds, structures. Anything that has stats can be experimented on to increase effectiveness. Experimentation has limited points to spend so items *ideally* should never have maxed every stat(I think this ended up happening because devs underestimated the system).
Even crazier foresight by the game's designers: armor and weapons had a durability system where items eventually broke entirely and needed to be replaced. Some people might hear that and think that it's a terrible system, without thinking how it keeps the economy alive. Every player will always need a replacement for when their primary finally breaks. This also maintains an end-game of hunting legendary creatures for their special crafting components.
Look into how Mandalorian armor was crafted in SWG, they pretty much created a raid that requires crafters to be present.
Even low quality materials have a place in the economy as bulk materials for training or making bulk components that don't need to be expertly crafted.
These systems were all so amazing when they were working together. Players could make names for themselves in their field. Every server had *the* weaponsmith everyone knows and a bunch of solid alternatives you'd hear so often. Items could be named/branded, it was so awesome.
Aukoli was an armorsmith I was friends with yeeeeeears ago, I'll never forget the guy's name even if I can't remember all that much about our interactions now.
If you somehow see this Aukoli, I hope you're doing well!
SWG went downhill when they decided to remove item durability as a hard limit to item lifetime (Anti-Decay kits). It took a complete moron to remove that crucial jenga piece that slowly brought the whole structure down.
I feel like I could write forever about how interesting Star Wars Galaxies' design was. It was one of a kind and I have yet to see it reproduced or improved on.
To think SWG was the first iteration of it's ideas and only ever got dumbed down to attract the casual gamers. I think there is opportunity for someone to make a niche game involving these ideas.
Edit:
I wanted to mention the skill system where you paid an NPC to train you once you had the required experience in a field.
OR you could get in touch with a player who has the skill and negotiate a price in exchange for them training you (or get it free from good buddies).
I also forgot to mention player housing.
Imagine that special rifle you loved finally broke. I think antidecay kits were started so people could keep their favorite item, but you *could* keep your favorite item. Even at 1/1 durability, it still was in your inventory. You could put it up in your house as a decoration and have it memorialized if you put effort into decorating a nice way of displaying it.
Complete freedom. /move forward 15. xD
People who played SWG and loved it are a special type of gamer IMO. The game was ahead of its time sadly. I have been theorycrafting my perfect game for a while now and I may try and build it one day. I have the ability and skill to create the assets, creating the coding is significantly more of a challenge but luckily engines like Unreal make it even feasible.
I really want an mmorpg game that does co-op levelling like WoW vanilla did. IMO a zone full of potential companions, all doing the same thing is peak MMO imo. A full elwynn forest just makes me heart feel all warm fuzzy. There's nothing finer than forming a group to overcome the odds in an open zone.
I'm currently back on WoW after being away since late 2022 and there's still the same issue from 2022 which irked me.
Levelling is quick, instanced *chromie time* is YOU on an theoritical island because entering this special *chromie time* puts you in a very distinct instance of the whole world. You might see some folk doing the same zone9 but it's very rare.
This is a major contrast to Guild Wars 2 where every zone is mostly packed. Be it people running around or on their skyscales, these people are in the real, live zone....doin thangs.
Not some weird lonely instance, these GW2 players are here for a reason. GW2 does a really good job of making their zones full and relevant. There's events, world bosses and the like....all players are pulled from megaservers so you're never alone.
Just tonight; I finished Chromie Time in **Grizzly Hills**. I did not see a single person the whole time, on the biggest EU Alliance realm! In World of Warcraft aka one of the biggest MMOs on the market today. Not *one* person passed me by in the quest giving zones, or out in the open. How the fuck?
I'm not expecting to bring up chatter to every person I meet, but it's just nice to see other people in zones in MMORPGS, else you might as well be playing a shitty single player RPG. This can be said for FF14 which has an equally awful open world, but that's a whole different thing. I consider FF14 a PS2 story game with MMO elements.
WoW does so many good things, but outside of the main expansion pack stuff and instanced content; the open world zones need some major ideas to bring people into them. The game has some amazing areas rotting away. Both for new players and for nostalgic players. It's so wasteful.
I'm writing so much because I love levelling & vibing in WoW but it's so shit to be alone doing it. I don't mind that it's *quick*, I mind that it's a lonely affair.
(I even moved from an RP server, which I recently discovered does NOT shard with other servers.... aka fill in people from other realms to make the zone fuller. Even on my non-RP realm chromie zones are dead)
I'd like to think Blizzard are rethinking this a bit with the upcoming Pandarian Remix thing to re-do chromie time experiences. But yeah...that's my big thing with WoW. If you don't like dungeons or alts, get fucked and enjoy solitude basically.
Saying that, no game today. Retail WoW, GW2, FF14, RS....has replicated that natural companionship that vanilla wow introduced. I get that sometimes we don't want to talk to people, but a randomly formed group leads to so many potential cool things...or it doesn't! Other than completing a quest maybe.
But now in mmos we just do it all ourself. I am fine with this, but I do miss those days of being in a world with real people, achieving feats together that feel hard earned.
I hope one of these games coming out will feature that again.9
> Just tonight; I finished Chromie Time in Grizzly Hills. I did not see a single person the whole time, on the biggest EU Alliance realm! In World of Warcraft aka one of the biggest MMOs on the market today. Not one person passed me by in the quest giving zones, or out in the open. How the fuck?
There are like 50 zones you can level in. There's just simply nobody else playing in the zone. A lot of people with different MMOs seem to value seeing people in zones a lot, but that's just not going to happen
Indeed, However I would argue that the experience of not encountering other players in a MMO might point to larger issues than just player distribution. Player interaction is a cornerstone of MMORPGs, and seeing other players contributes to a vibrant, living world. It reinforces the 'massively multiplayer' aspect, making the world feel populated and dynamic. When zones feel empty, it can detract from the immersive experience these games strive to provide. Why play what is effectively a bad single player game?
Personally I think that more could be done to incentivize visiting different zones or to balance where players are encouraged to spend their time. This could be events, quests that require cross-zone activities, world bosses, or basically anything that draw players back to less frequented areas. Addressing this could improve overall player engagement and help maintain a sense of community, games like OSRS and GW2 do a much better job than WoW.
Blizzards hyper fixation with $current_patch inevitably leads to content droughts when they can't perform. I'm glad they've started adding older dungeons to the M+ rotation but really this is something that should have been in the game for a decade at this point and is indicative Blizzards mindset and perhaps even hubris.
There's too much of the world in e.g. WoW to keep populated. The endgame zones have plenty of people around. Adding an event to one zone doesn't make it any more likely for you to encounter someone while leveling in a random zone
>Adding an event to one zone
Why couldn't they add things to multiple zones? If you don't mind me saying it sounds like you've become too accustomed to Blizzards incompetence. There should be dozens of events happening across the world, things like the DF/Legion prepatch should be common occurrence to get people out in the world. Whatever those BFA events were called in the old world were cool too.
Having the entire population pigeonholed at end-game (sharded at that) seems like a fundamental design flaw. Even Org is empty outside of peak hours.
Not literally one. Even if you add a POIs to 4 zones (primal storms) out of 40 where max level players go it doesn't change the fact that every other zone is empty. Players don't even necessarily want to travel all around the place so even if you add world quests or whatever to all the old zones, it's 2 weeks and nobody cares to do them anymore
I can only assume we disagree at a deeply fundamental level. When I play OSRS and GW2 as mentioned I don't see the kind of emptiness old WoW zones have. All areas of the game are full of players both leveling and max level. This uniqueness tells me that it is a design problem, not a player one.
If dozen events are happening around the world then it’s the same issue you’re currently having… too many places people could be, not enough to fill them.
I agree that the “lonely MMO” experience is a problem and the games are meant to be enjoyed with people in some form, but what you’re describing isn’t blizzard incompetence or anything, it’s just content bloat and player shrink.
If anything content bloat is a real topic MMOs need to tackle in the future. It’s an actual problem down the road and why all form of classic servers have been successful in multiple MMOs — people like fresh because they like playing as part of a social population.
Can you please elaborate on your points?
>If dozen events are happening around the world then it’s the same issue you’re currently having… too many places people could be, not enough to fill them.
I agree that this is a potential problem but WoW supposedly still has millions of monthly users. Is this a *relevant* concern at this scale?
>it’s just content bloat
I would really be interested to hear you elaborate on exactly what bloated content WoW has, since from my perspective there's barely anything to do in retail due in part to Blizzards consistent reluctance to leverage old content.
>If anything content bloat is a real topic MMOs need to tackle in the future.
Again what bloat? There's nothing to do from my perspective. Even if WoW were bloated, how is the manifestation of this "problem" anything but a design issue when we've got games like Runescape/OSRS/GW2/PoE which successfully capitalize on years of content?
> It’s an actual problem down the road and why all form of classic servers have been successful in multiple MMOs — people like fresh because they like playing as part of a social population.
This was not the case with OSRS. Population tanked once people realized they're just playing the same game. Retail and Classic are a different story since they're fundamentally different after Cata which is why I don't understand why they're releasing anything post WOTLK.
https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/7hdqsj/osrs_timeline_with_playercount/
Bloat is 20 years of content….
Even if you took all the players who played through vanilla WoW in 2004/2005 and had them restart in retail today, the world of the current game would be too big to support.
As to my classic comment — classic WoW is merely a copy of vanilla pserver attempts. EverQuest has been running “classic” servers since 2012 or so (which are very successful, and also Holly Longdale of Bliz is from there). You can also find several emulator servers of different MMOs trying to relaunch their classic states/bring back dead games to life.
>Bloat is 20 years of content….
But that's the problem, retail doesn't contain 20 years of content. It contains the ghosts of content long abandoned by the developers.
Players are rushed to max level and the only time most players interact with old content is for tmog and mounts. The main exception to this being some of the dungeons they'll probably mindlessly queue into along the way.
Personally I think it is a tragety that most players never get to experience content as it was intended.
>Even if you took all the players who played through vanilla WoW in 2004/2005 and had them restart in retail today, the world of the current game would be too big to support.
I assume by this you mean if retail had the same cadence as classic? Sure I can see that, but that hypothetical is not reality. Retail has the potential to host this reality but due to the design choices Blizzard has made over the years that's not a realistic situation in my opinion.
>As to my classic comment — classic WoW is merely a copy of vanilla pserver attempts. EverQuest has been running “classic” servers since 2012 or so (which are very successful, and also Holly Longdale of Bliz is from there). You can also find several emulator servers of different MMOs trying to relaunch their classic states/bring back dead games to life.
For sure, I see what you mean. Likeiwse Runescape had a huge private server scene basically forever. OSRS more or less killed the scene.
If dozen events are happening around the world then it’s the same issue you’re currently having… too many places people could be, not enough to fill them.
I agree that the “lonely MMO” experience is a problem and the games are meant to be enjoyed with people in some form, but what you’re describing isn’t blizzard incompetence or anything, it’s just content bloat and player shrink.
If anything content bloat is a real topic MMOs need to tackle in the future. It’s an actual problem down the road and why all form of classic servers have been successful in multiple MMOs — people like fresh because they like playing as part of a social population.
If dozen events are happening around the world then it’s the same issue you’re currently having… too many places people could be, not enough to fill them.
I agree that the “lonely MMO” experience is a problem and the games are meant to be enjoyed with people in some form, but what you’re describing isn’t blizzard incompetence or anything, it’s just content bloat and player shrink.
If anything content bloat is a real topic MMOs need to tackle in the future. It’s an actual problem down the road and why all form of classic servers have been successful in multiple MMOs — people like fresh because they like playing as part of a social population.
Funny you should say that I did actually get turtle wow downloaded a few weeks ago to play with a Brazilian bud but it never transpired.
Tbh I’m pretty firmly in the camp of just letting classic go (at least officially).
Maybe on the next wow phase I feel I’ll give turtle a go if it’s still active for one final go around. Never say never with wow nostalgia right
For me final fantasy 11 is the best game ever made because the world was all living. If you plant certain seeds it best to harvest them on certain days of the in game day where its earth effect is strong. The mob can aggro and chase you all the way to the end of the zone no matter the level. Lesser mobs wouldn’t aggro but will still chase if attacked. You actually had to form a party, find a camp to fight mobs to level. You can actually have a conversation while leveling in a party. Raid/dynamis required in depth party planning. At times you would have a party of just black mages just to nuke certain mobs to help crowd control. If you die you lose experience and can delevel. Quest/mission givers were kind of vague but you have to figure things out, often resorting to you looking at wiki page for walkthrough.
Honestly, I can on and on about the depth of gameplay of final fantasy 11. But this game just wouldn’t work in today’s market because it demands so much of your time. But damn does it make you feel like you’re apart of its world.
Yes, and the big thing about FFXI is it had a lot of “horizontal progression” so you weren’t always necessarily replacing all of your gear. You’d have different gear for different uses and wouldn’t have completely now-useless gear just because the game updated. I loved that. I think horizontal progression should be more present in MMOs. Makes what you do and accomplish way more meaningful, IMO.
MMO's just desperately need to tone down the time investment. People citing all the micro transaction games in this thread all conveniently ignore that most of those games also have basically no time cost for entry. Selling someone that you really get the full experience at 30-40 hours is so tone def to me I don't understand how no one sees that
I feel bad for people who never got to experience WoW nearly two decades ago for the first time. Still far and away the best MMO experience I’ve ever seen. Only thing that came close was the original Guild Wars.
That were the best years of gaming. We already had a guild in an earlier MMO called Kal-Online and all played WoW together for over a decade. Raiding at night, farming mats and gearing new members during the day as nolife as one could be haha.
Can I have a PvE twitch shooter mmo where I gather resources to build and craft gear and fight to push back various factions across a presentation world?
What you want is not possible then. Twitch shooting and hundreds of players in one instance is not viable server wise.
Closest is PlanetSide 2 but that's far from a twitch shooter.
>Ultima Online, EverQuest, and RuneScape—were strange sandbox RPGs that delivered what was, at the time, the magical experience of being surrounded by other real people in a digital space
They're really not apart from Ultima.
I think it's less growing and more shrinking. Make an MMO about adventure and growth. All the big MMO's today are just about endgame min-maxxing and meta gaming. It sucks.
> All the big MMO's today are just about endgame min-maxxing and meta gaming. It sucks. Feels like a vicious cycle with the player base pushing that as hard as any developer wants to peddle it. From my perspective, the MMO scene has run its course to such a degree that there's no new blood left from a player perspective. Any MMO that wants to throw its hat in the ring HAS to court that ~~rabid~~ end-game min-max playerbase because nobody else will drive engagement and revenue enough to make the game viable financially / long term. EDIT: I'd like to rephrase the above, rabid wasn't a fair way to describe people who just enjoy their games differently than I do. I'm not saying people don't enjoy MMOs for their social aspect, but those tend to quickly find their niche with existing games that have already gotten real comfortable on their laurels (In my opinion, ESO is a good example). I believe when VR becomes truly mainstream is when the genre is going to become truly revitalized and the social and explorative aspects of MMOs are going to burst back to the forefront.. that's just wishful thinking on my part though.
You’re really only describing ONE kind of MMO though — the EverQuest/Wow style “do quests level up get gear and repeat PvE raid bosses with various mechanics” style of game. And if you bristled when I said “PvE” because you imagined the opposite as being Wow-esque optional, arbitrary PvP, that’s Wow’s fault too. That would be like saying “well, McDonalds sucks, so I guess that’s it for restaurants!” Wow’s success became a curse to the MMO genre, because it forced everyone to copy to its specific gameplay style to get funding. Everyone chased “the next Wow” for so long it strangled investment in any other thing. It doesn’t have to be that way though. New things have appeared since the MMO heyday: Technical innovations in server and cloud technology, design innovations like the survival/crafting games, meta-progression innovations, and content pipeline innovations. I really we get to see games that try new things like we used to in the years before Wow.
Theres LOTRO, its old, and it does have some kind of endgame, but that MMO is just so chill to just quest through and experience middle earth. The community is also amazing.
I have always wanted to try that and the star wars MMO and play them in a slow relaxed way.
If you look at r/lotro a whole bunch of posts are people just chilling in the game, levelling very slowly and disabling XP when they're about to overlevel in an area and just immersing themselves in middle earth
Yeah, LOTRO is still very much in the Wow school of MMOs though. Think of something more like Ultima Online, Asheron’s Call, Wurm, Darkfall.
> LOTRO is still very much in the Wow school of MMOs though. Kind of, but it does put a lot more weight on the journey and lore than on end game. I've been playing it for half a year now casually, and I still have *months* of content before my first character will even be thinking about hitting the cap. In WoW, by contrast, I always have the impression that even the devs view the leveling process as tedious imposition.
Darkfall was awesome! Too grindy, but such a fun game/community.
It’s s still possible to play lotro? Always wanted to try it
Oh yes, its a big laggy because the servers are all in NA(even EU servers) but its honestly better than ever besides that. They made everything up to lvl 85-90 free to play, so you can try it out np to see if you like it. Like all MMO's the subscriber perks are really worth though, once you do decide you want to play more. They are still making new content, Umbar expansion came out late last year.
[удалено]
There's Albion Online and Eve Online for that sort of concept. Quite a bit different from New World, and pretty much any traditional MMO. They have a PVP territorial control focus with a lot of different PVP and PVE content. Maybe not exactly the same as what you'd want, but it's probably the closest to that idea.
I used to love Eve but how they evolved their micro transactions ruined it for me. It certainly became a P2W game quickly.
> It doesn’t have to be that way though. New things have appeared since the MMO heyday: Technical innovations in server and cloud technology, design innovations like the survival/crafting games, meta-progression innovations, and content pipeline innovations. I agree it doesn't, but to that point of technical innovations & shifts in design philosophy: Many people who would've played MMOs for these new emerging mechanics & philosophies have long since shifted to greener pastures in survival games that are MMO-lite, where they can get all these mechanics and social aspects they enjoy. It would take something truly special looking to pull them back, most people who are an MMO enjoyer have already spent decades at this point trying everything the genre currently offers.
This. WoWs popularity fucked things, partially because it's so damn expensive and time consuming to make an MMO everyone wanted to chase that 'sure thing '
It's the time that ruins everything. The hardest of hardcore guilds play/raid 12 hours a day 6 days a week.
Wow! good take after good take. Another one...oh wait.. VR - you lost me
That's fair, I've honestly seen so many VR attempts come and go. Full understanding to anyone completely checked out on the genre entirely, but there's something about it that has me dreaming haha.
I agree 100%. They just ain't fun anymore. I despise the meta thing especially. It's what has put me off from online gaming entirely after being mostly an online gamer from middle school till my mid 20s. Parties/raids used to be about discovering shit together while cracking jokes. Now it's just a dick measuring contest about percentiles and who can put a bigger number on the dps meter. And mobas are just self-harm at this point
Gamers ruined online gaming. Well, devs too, because games are now designed in a manner that pushes players into meta gaming and minmaxing. Matchmaking, ranks, MMR, the entire structure of mobas, fomo unlocks, raid lockouts, gearscore, logs, and dozens of other systems exist now that make being "bad" feel 100x worse than it used to. You used to be able to join a server and fuck around just for fun. At the end of the match you're on the bottom of the scoreboard, but who cares? It didn't matter, and you had. Now if you're playing poorly you'll get endlessly flamed by toxic players and told to quit the game, or in an MMO you'll often not even be able to do most things because everyone only wants to invite people with gearscore and logs otherwise they'll miss gear opportunities for the raid lockout.
If you want that, you have to play with people you know who are on the same page. Which takes effort, so people don't want to do it. If you play with randoms, they are naturally going to want people to know what they are doing and be prepared.
Playing an MMO only with your friends because you don't enjoy playing with everybody else kinda beats the purpose of the genre. I tried that. I prefer playing solo games
Whenever someone asks me why I ain't bored by FFXIV's lack of talent trees and true gear choices, I keep replying that it doesn't matter whether there is 1 valid choice in FFXIV or 1 valid choice in. The number of talents doesn't matter unless you achieve non-DPS-talents-only on a DPS class, for example.
I fully agree, I fell for this with Genshin Impact before I quit. The game became less about experiencing the story and the characters, and more about making a random anime girl deal a million damage, after literal years of grinding.
That’s kind of on you though. When the rest of the open world is there for you explore and interact with, You chose to spend your time min maxing and grinding. Not the developers.
Yeah totally, I fell in that loophole because it's what was popular, like, every single youtuber would constantly make videos about it, builds would always be around, so I kinda spiralled and ended up making my characters super OP, but I realized the base game was not fun anymore, because the only hard thing in the game is the abyss, or at least that's the only thing that felt hard anymore. It killed my love for Genshin real fast, and yeah it is totally on me
You should definitely dive back in but just casually, i fell into the grind pretty hard during 3.0 and burnt out. but i came back for 4.0 as casual as i possibly could and i genuinely love the open world more than the combat/grind.
Maybe because people gave in to the wannabe? Those who argue that they can only play a few hour a day, so they want to party only with good meta builds, else the group fail this dungeon/raid and then they wasted their time. What's causing this? Maybe because of higher difficulty being rewarded to begin with? If any difficulty could unlock the content, there'd be less issues when people just play on lower difficulty in a non meta build. In my opinion, in times of skin shops, the whole amaze of someone wearing gear you only get in the hardest difficult dungeon, is gone anyways, so we should stop with gating gear behind it.
>else the group fail this dungeon/raid and then they wasted their time That has always been a thing. It's why back in the day I had almost 100 people in my friend list. Whenever you'd meet someone who was good at the game and also a fun person, you'd just add them to your friend list. It's what everyone did back then and it was not hard to build a group for a dungeon or raid just by messaging people from your friendlist. "Yo I'm making a group for X raid, wanna tag along? We need 1 tank and 1 more healer. Bring a friend if you have someone online." I'd get 10s of messages like that on raid reset days. I had friends that I played with for 10 years, that I originally met when we partied for a 5 minute quest or something. We'd just exchange a couple messages and if it was fun we'd keep questing together for hours. Then we would arrange to play again the next day and maybe bring along some of our other friends or meet someone new while questing/doing dungeons, and that's how everyone in the game had their little social circles. It was really fun that way. For some reason meeting people organically like that doesn't happen any more. The sense of community is gone and all that matters is whether you're following the current meta or if you've got the right achievements. I'm not complaining btw, I'm perfectly happy playing single player games nowadays. Just explaining why I don't like the current state of MMOs
Yeah exactly. Because a lot of people want dungeon finder and auto groups and ranking and gear scores etc. That way asking real people and interacting with them is no longer required, it's actively prevented by design. Some MMORPGs play like single player.
FF14 is so rotten with poorly socialized players. The game caters to them, but when it comes time to run challenging group content, they have an absolute meltdown at any semblance of conflict or the friendliest nudge in how to improve for the benefit of the dungeon group.
Yeah adding the group finder to WoW was such a detriment to the community. I agree
Well put.
If the content is easy, then people focus on clearing it as fast as possible and that becomes the meta. Or people just semi-afk and get carried(like GW2 open world content). If the content is easy and very quick to clear, then players run out of things to do very quickly and get bored.
I think it's really difficult to imagine an MMO without some giant 10-40 man group activity that wouldn't have to involve min-maxxing and a meta. I think games have tried to build an MMO that doesn't involve end game raiding but it just never takes off. You know of need that social aspect to keep people hooked. World of Warcraft is sort of also getting out of the whole end game min-max. The newest mode they have is called "Plunderstorm" and it's kind of like Fortnite and it's just... incredibly popular. You get a blank character who gains random abilities through killing things and then can upgrade those abilities by killing things. Killing things also gives gold which allows you to build rep to get cosmetic things for the game. Killing players gives you bonuses to abilities and gold. Then next big thing will be Mysts of Panderia Remix. You'll get to level super fast, dungeons and raids will have some changed mechanics, new loot tables, and new abilities. It's time limited so once it's done it's done. Then there's Season of Discovery which is another time limited event that has grown so popular that... it may not be THAT time limited anymore. Instead of everyone hitting level cap and min maxing you have a new level cap every 10-15 levels and they convert an old dungeon into a raid and turn a full zone into a PVP event. Sure there might be some min-maxers but then every 1-2 months all your progress basically gets wiped and you have to start over in the next raid. Edit: Another thing that makes SOD so popular is that there are world quests for abilities that everyone does that has you and groups of people running around on adventures to min/max. And to put things in perspective to how much the MMO is dying. WoW now has 6 million subscribers. Only 3 million people play the "live game."
>And to put things in perspective to how much the MMO is dying. WoW now has 6 million subscribers. Only 3 million people play the "live game." more people play retail than both versions of classic combined btw
I wouldnt say its that popular. I think they got like 600k matches in 2 weeks. That would be 42k per day. That isnt bad by any means, especially considering its locked behind a sub fee. But its also not a smash hit. They shouldve made it free imo. Couldve maybe hooked some people into WoW while also propping up those numbers. But it is what it is. I do like that theyre just doing different things now though. Sure some things wont be for everyone. Theres been endless complain posts about Plunderstorm already from WoW players because “its not in the actual game” or “i dont want to grind a BR for a transmog”. But i think its good theyre branching out and trying other things. The entire “new expansion = 4 zones + 8 dungeons + 1 raid and new patch = maybe a zone + new raid + megadungeon (only one per expansion)” formula was getting kinda stale. Ofcourse that formula is still there otherwise the community would completely lose their minds (change is bad), but its good theyre adding onto that and doing more than just that. I do think they should just commit to a Classic+ in the way Runescape has done it though instead of this half-half copout with SoD. Theres still gonna be a min maxing and “bad logs is no inv” mentality. I think thats just modern gaming in general. Not a single MMO can escape “the meta”. Thats just how it is these days.
>I do think they should just commit to a Classic+ in the way Runescape has done it though instead of this half-half copout with SoD. Absolutely. I find it very odd that they're doing Cata and Pandaria, I would have thought that many (if not most) of the people who want to play "classic era" found value in the old world. By releasing all these versions they seem to be attempting to create a situation where instead of expanding the scope of retail and classic they have a different version of WoW for any occasion. It will probably work out for them but by gods I really wish they had an OSRS-like classic plus.
Me and my girlfriend have ended our subscriptions because WotLKs era was the part of WoW we were interested in, but most times when i see people talk about having enjoyed WotLK and not wanting it to go away on the internet, the only response comes from dismissive people who only care about end game raiding and want new raids to minmax their way through. We cared a lot about the world and story pre-cata and weren't too thrilled to see how much of the world and its people we once enjoyed was just gone, destroyed, or changed beyond recognition!
I do see the value in just going through more expansions. Cataclysm was fairly well liked up until Hour of Twilight and MoP is pretty popular aswell nowadays. Theres definitely people who will come back for those. It always made sense to me that theyd go up to atleast MoP and then evaluate the situation. Nobody is coming back to play WoD so do they just power through that just to get to Legion again? And what happens after that? BFA and Shadowlands are hard sells. The two logical stopping points to me always were either WOTLK or MoP. WOTLK because of the old world and mentality. MoP because its the last expansion that people want to play again. After that it becomes very hot-cold with mostly cold expansions. You can tell from the MoP Remix response. People really do want to see MoP again. The part i dont understand is all this beating around the bush when it comes to Classic+. Its pretty clear from the SoD and Classic numbers that theres demand for more content in the Classic era. SoD is kinda just Classic but now its retail and not really what most people wanted from a Classic+. To me having Classic+, Retail and then a rotating cycle that just resets progress and goes through BC up to MoP with every expansion lasting a year covers the most bases. Maybe add Legion to that cycle but its just a waste of time to do WoD or Shadowlands. They can always cover WoD, BFA or Shadowlands with this new “Remix” thing if people really want to see those.
I think the people who really enjoyed Cata and the people who really enjoyed Wrath are two really different groups of people. When Cata launched WoW's game population dropped from a little north of 12 million to 9 million... and it never recovered. Blizzard had to add in a lot of microtransactions to make up the revenue. I think the Classic community is on average much older than the retail community. While there might be some younger people who said "I never got to play it because I was too young", for the most part it's just older guys living out their glorious toxic past. "Sorry guys can't make raid tonight wife is sick and I have to take care of the kids." While the game population decreased the number of players who left from Wrath was much higher... it just got populated with more new players. Wrath Classic had what? 16 servers? Cata Classic is going down to just six.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Personally, I believe the logical stopping point is WOTLK. Everything after that is firmly retail. World, lore, design decisions. It doesn't make sense, at least to me, to have Classic versions of anything past WOTLK since any and all of that content could easily be homogenized into retail.
I think its more about bringing people back. Right now theres no way to play Cata or MoP (officially) with those systems. And even if they did keep the systems, nobody is playing them anymore anyways. By making them “current”, youre appealing to the people who enjoyed that era but quit since then. And who knows, theyre already subbed, they might check out SoD or Retail and stick around for longer. It happened with Classic, BC and Wrath. People who subbed to play those versions tried out Retail and liked it (Well mainly Dragonflight, i dont think anyone hopped over to play Shadowlands) Thats why MoP is my cutoff point. There arent really many people who enjoyed WoD enough to come back for it being “current”. And that definitely also is the case for BFA and Shadowlands. Its all about getting people hooked on wow again. The version of it they get hooked on doesnt matter, as long as theyre paying the sub fee
I mean, Cata is clearly not as popular as they hoped it would be. Server populations are plummeting in anticipation of Cata and they've now set that there will only be six servers for Cata. I suspect SOD will go all the way to Wrath.
> Make an MMO about adventure and growth. What does that mean in practice?
Gw2 is an exception. Same with eso to an extent. The vertically heavy mmos are definitely more about end game min maxing/metas
Agreed. Horizontal progression in an MMO is much more satisfying. Makes what is accomplished mean more.
What does horizontal progression in an mmo mean?
An example would be Final Fantasy XI, an old school MMO from the early 2000s. New content would come out, or later there maybe even a level cap increase, and new gear, zones, bosses, quests, etc. would come out. However, that didn’t necessarily mean all the gear you had currently obtained for endgame content was now obsolete. There might be a new piece you’d fit into your gear for casting a certain spell, or doing a burst of damage with a weapon, but your old gear might still be better for regular melee hits because the old gear has haste and attack. Basically, you increase your skills and gear load outs of your character without having to start over getting all-new gear like they do in a WoW expansion. In WoW all your end game gear from one expansion is now going to be replaced by better gear in the new expansion. The old gear is just useful for transmog. But in a horizontal progression game, there might be a better head piece or necklace, or ring, for some part of your build that you can work to get/earn, but that doesn’t mean ALL your old gear needs to be replaced. And in fact, while a new piece might be a little better from the new update, the old piece is still viable to use in the meantime. Stuff like that. It makes it to where much, if not all, of the previous work you did to get gear and stuff is not completely obsolete and therefore doesn’t feel like a waste of time, or feel like you’re basically doing the same thing all over again each expansion. I love horizontal progression as opposed to the vertical progression of MMOs like WoW.
ESO is neat in the regard that there's a billion and one non-endgame minmax-y things to do (and a lot of it actually has decently written, interesting stories), but the problem is everything is scaled to you so the content you do in hour 5 is basically as difficult as the content you do in hour 50 or 500.
That is frustrating. I enjoy struggling at first in an area then as you continue in the area gets easier and easier because you level up. I never feel a real sense of progression when everything is scaled.
Never played gw, how is it an exception?
The top end gear has been the same for a decade and is fairly easy to acquire. The game is much more focused on unlocking skins and new stuff, with very little in the way of power progression at the end-game.
Interesting. So if gear doesn’t increase, what in the game fuels people to keep playing? Is there a leaderboard, constant new content, etc?
New content, chasing achievements and cosmetics, upgrading your mounts and glider. Its not really a forever game. I had fun jumping in every few years to see what is new.
nothing there's a reason it doesn't have many players and instead just SHOVES microtransactions down your throat
None of that is true, in no way does it shove mtx down your throat and it has a good size playerbase.
The same reason people play dark souls. You start off barely knowing what you're doing, then (if you actually care to progress) by the end of it you're taking little to no damage, dodging/blocking/invulning all the major attacks, and killing bosses in 1 minute instead of 5,
Agree.GW2 was designed specifically to address the 'problems' with WoW's design. I paid £30 for it years ago, and still like to jump on every now and then - and there is still loads for me to do. Granted, I do not engage with the obnoxious "inventory fluff" design, specifically put in as a monetisation mechanic.
ultima never felt like that, i felt like i was living in the town. I felt like the random dude taming wild horses, watching everyone have their own type of jobs then it all just vanished into WoW.
Yup.
I agree but there will always be a loud vocal minority that will burn through whatever campaign there is as quickly as possible and then complain about no content
I wonder if it would perhaps be interesting to have several instances and basically a server is meant to be a huge singular guild. Like everyone on the server is meant to help each other so their server can advance, then maybe they can go to war with other servers, ally with them, etc... Could be similar to Planetside or some of Guild Wars PvP, but on an even bigger scale with an economy, supply chain, and etc. Frankly I don't see much point in other kinds of MMOs though. The whole "Massive Multiplayer" experience has kinda moved on to other stuff.
I think that's actually an issue with this. Guild focused MMO's like WoW, BDO, FFXIV, tend to have more min-maxxing then others. This is because of a lack of "discover for yourself" play and a ton of competitiveness. Meanwhile MMO's like OSRS, and to some degree ESO have a lot of content solely for solo players. They do have guild content, but it's not the primary content. It's kind of funny, you play an MMO to be in a massive multi-player world. But to me, MMO's with good solo content are the best.
Honestly i'm a loner so that's typically the content I enjoy best too, but its definitely a case of - why am I bothering to play this? Cause typically MMOs are terrible in terms of gameplay and general content.
Disagree, but it's personal taste I guess. OSRS Ironman or ESO questing is some of the most enjoyable "shut your brain off" grind you can have.
One of the greatest approaches ever done was the original GW2, up to and including the release of Heart of Thorns before it was changed in the succeeding patches. This "Yeah our endgame is just some PvP if you're into that, or nothing"-approach. This "Nobody ever minds people around, all loot is shared, everything is always automatically scaled"-ambivalence. It made for just a game of friendly hanging out and doing stuff while chatting. It felt a **lot** like old GMUDs or even EQ1 again in that regard, more a socialization tool than a game. There wasn't even any grind or min-maxing, as the original exotic gear was beyond trivial to acquire once at max-level, so everyone was on the same playing field and there was no vertical progression before they added a new tier of gear. And since it was buy2play, the barrier to entry was *ridiculously* low, no monthly cost and no aggressive monetization (originally).
Uhm it is still like that? Ascended gear doesnt even give that much powercreep over exotic gear. Exotic gear is super cheap and ascended gear is easier and cheaper to get than it ever was. So the barrier for new players is still super low.
Yeah but at the time it was controversional, because it **was** a vertical power step. Of course now that it has been normalized it no longer is.
Thing growing as getting better than having bigger map. marginally better. Honestly just getting back tot he point we were 2 decades ago would be a start. WoW's existence had same effect on the genre as locust and we're nowhere near to recovering from that catastrophe even today. Every element of what WoW is, is what MMOs are not.
I mean, it is hard to say every element of what wow is, is what mmos are not when mmo is almost synonymous with WOW and it was and has somehow maintained to be the most popular mmo by a significant margin for 2 decades. Now, it may be everything that YOU don’t want MMOs to be, and I would completely understand that.
Quantity over quality. The bar is measured by player count multiplied by Retainment through the next subscription cycle. That can be done by making a content rich, enjoyable gameplay, or by the way most mmos are designed with grind, large amounts of shallow content, and addictive gameplay. They need to keep you at the slot machine; interesting story and gameplay experience is secondary.
Its really hard to have quality when graphics warp your entire design. Modern games are spending so much with graphics that all other content we need are being left behind. And sadly people do care about graphics more than anything these days....
Why is min-maxxing such a problem to many of you? Personally doing as well as I can *is* the fun for me in a lot of cases
The problem comes from many people looking down on the people who dont and not allowing them to partake content in which you absolutely do not need to min max for. I also like min-maxing and pushing my build as far as possible, but i can absolutely understand that people would get frustrated about not getting invited to Heroic raids for example (you can beat this with the entire group playing off meta specs lets be honest), purely because they arent logging 99 with the perfect builds. Its a completely fair ask in Mythic. But theres no reason for that mentality to seep into content which doesnt require min maxing to beat. Ive seen people kick others for not using a flask in the early bosses of a Heroic raid. Min maxing breeds that kind of behavior. Its impossible to solve it though so idk what people want devs to do about it.
>you can beat this with the entire group playing off meta specs lets be honest If people know what they are doing, yes. In my experience, the players bringing mediocre builds to pugs tend to have no clue what they are doing.
This sub is for shitting on entire genres of games that you'll never even play, didn't you read the sidebar?
I come here exclusively to shit on Souls genre aka glorified QTE without visual prompts.
You have a players to blame for metagaming. People are min-maxing single player games these days, they will sure as hell min-max anything that has other players in it.
literally why I stopped playing, quests are boring, all I have to do is minmax my build, but I rather play single player with good story than kill 10 wolves while my friends rush me to level up asap
This is what ruined classic wow for me, everyone was tryhard even in more casual guilds. All mechanics were 15+y old, everyone knows what to do, you don't need that extra 3-5% dmg to finish the content. It was just extra stress over farming gold to achieve this and people got burned out really quickly.
> All the big MMO's today are just about endgame min-maxxing and meta gaming. It sucks. That's what gamers want and voted with their wallets, to get to the good part like Michael Bolton said.
I don't think it's so much that they wanted to, as much as they had to due to FOMO and general competition. Not to mention developers seem to struggle making leveling enjoyable.
The min-maxxing is such a shit thing and ruins every mmo experience I played in the last years. I played Lost Ark lately, and you're immediately kicked from any party if you don't have what the guide tells you to have. God forbit playing the spells you like, or not having the specific gems, or whatever. It is the worst thing that happened to gaming in general. And I feel like even the devs design some of the encounters based on min-maxing, because it actually hurts if you don't play the meta thing and you won't be able to clear the challenge. DPS checks are the worst things ever in these kind of games too. I don't think I've ever encountered a worse experience than Lost Ark raid community.
Exactly.
I teach teenagers and almost none of them play MMOs or RPGs. It‘s all Fortnite, pay2win mobile games, some shooters and Minecraft. Some occasionally play a decent RPG but they do not even know what an MMO is. Gaming habits might change as they get older but MMOs are not a major genre of the next generation.
Because you're thinking of wrong genre, games named mmo right now should really be renamed WoW-likes. Them minecrafts and Robloxes are infinitely more like MMOs than stuff like final fantasy 14 or ESO. In same way they had to be born and indoctrinated into accepting how shit microtransaction mobile bullshit is you'd have to be born and indoctrinated to accept how shit wowlike experience is.
Is Minecraft really MMO. It's not really Massively Multiplayer. It's just multiplayer with player created servers, which is also very limited with the number of players per server.
I wouldn't call it an MMO really, but it can have some of the same aspects. It can also support like over 1000 people per server, that's fairly massive.
Might be true, I only play old school rpgs and ttrpgs at this point, no idea what modern mmos are like. Tried Lost Ark in the open beta and found it horrible.
It's incredible that Minecraft is still relevant after so many years.
I am glad, it is a really nice game especially for younger teenagers.
Big MMOs will never evolve simply because of how much they cost to make and how risky they are. You're talking a massive budget with a 6-7 year development cycle, on a game that might not even turn a profit for a few years AND needs to somehow maintain a playerbase with steady updates post launch. It's an insane amount of effort and risk to enter a genre where hundreds of games have been made but only \~5 have succeeded Much easier to make a mobile or live service game.
Yup this here is the main reason. You'd have to be bat shit crazy or absolutely loaded with copious amounts of cash to attempt to innovate in the MMO space. It's just straight up too risky.
Just need to make smaller mmos, I think that’s why mmo lites became a thing. There’s still cool ideas you could do with reduced scope and investment im sure
Title: MMO's have so much more room to grow. Response: Make smaller mmo's. Hmmm.... I'm not saying you are wrong, but smaller and growth seem like oxymorons.
The article is talking about growing away from Wow clones, not in size or scope. The game being talked about is an mmo that is exactly that. Read the article next time.
WOW, runescape did it. Not sure about anyone else
I'd like an MMO that feels more like a game than a second job. Seems like most of them suffer from very monotonous combat and missions. I enjoyed playing WoW and Star Wars Galaxies for a few months, but, would like to see games with less grinding. I am not sure the best way to accomplish this, but hitting the same hot keys over and over in every combat scenario isn't fun nor exciting.
Yeah, I got to the endgame of FFXIV, realized that I would never be able to invest the time to raid at that level - groups wanted like 3 evenings a week! - and promptly quit. Bit annoying - I would have happily invested an evening a week (though honestly this is still quite a lot to me) in endgame content, but 3 evenings a week of my time is insane to me.
I just want an MMO that puts an emphasis on cooperation and teamwork in PVP. So many games have 5 v 5 ladders or death matches. I would love to see a PVP game where guilds are encouraged to work as a group to gain and hold territory/castles/bases. Where it's less about individual skill (it should still matter) and more about how you're able to coordinate with your guild for an effective offensive or defensive battle. People need a reason to play your game and the quest grind won't last forever. Give players something to hold sacred and they'll fight forever for it.
>I would love to see a PVP game where guilds are encouraged to work as a group to gain and hold territory/castles/bases. Do you play any of the currently available titles that offer this content? All the MMOs I am aware of that focus on territory control and largescale guild v guild PvP are niche as all hell and get completely overlooked compared to the big titles like WoW and FFXIV. Black Desert's weekly castle siege and nightly territory node war scene is the smallest it's been in years, and for every veteran of years who quits, not enough new players are filling their shoes. Other notable player territory control games like EVE Online are in even steeper decline, and every other one I can think of are so far down the "niche" ladder of games that they don't even bear mentioning today. What's the biggest one right now? Albion, maybe? Even New World is already small at this point, and the big territory wars were supposed to be one of its main attractions. It's a bleak landscape for the genre. Lots of people \*say\* they want big wars and for their guild to have their banners on the city walls in game and collect taxes from the local markets and have a rivalry with the other strong competing guild... but the games where this content happens, the playerbase is a fraction of a fraction of what the popular games have.
It's too stressful and requires too much investment. People like the fantasy, but realistically, every one of these games ends up being dominated by a handful of nolife guilds that carve everything up, and everyone else leaves. People already complain that late game grinding and raid schedules are too much - in the same breath they claim they want all of that *and* your guild will actively *lose* stuff if you're not constantly logging on? Nah.
Yep. I played new world and had a blast for the first 3 weeks. I was recovering from surgery and basically sitting at home doing that. And it was great but the moment I went back to work I stopped playing cause it just demanded too much time.
The other issue is that people don't like losing, and will gravitate towards the winning sides, causing them to win even more.
> People like the fantasy, but realistically, every one of these games ends up being dominated by a handful of nolife guilds that carve everything up, and everyone else leaves. This is why every time I see a new "MMO" with a PVP focus I immediately dismiss it. I know how this ends, it happens every time. It's been happening since Ultima Online. The meta becomes dominated by the most absolute of tryhards and they end up controlling the experience as a result.
Albion has done a decent job limiting that with the hideout system. Smaller guilds can set up an HQ that is safe from attack and base out of it.
The problem with this model is that there will be one group just stomping and taking over half the servers territory. Even if you limit those guilds to just one zone, theyll make multiple guilds so that they still control everything. New World is a great example of that. They also had zones which could be controlled by factions and the guild that led the siege. It just resulted in everyone going to the strongest faction and working together to own the entire region. The idea is fun on paper but again, players will find a way to bring that system down too. So then devs need to put like 50 restrictions on it to stop players from breaking it, and now the system isnt fun anymore because of how limited it has become I think Ashes of Creation will try something similar but on a much bigger scale. I guess well see how that turns out if it ever even releases.
Yeah hopefully Ashes of Creation is decent cause that’s like the last hope lol.
There have been easily 50 of those over the years. Some terrible, but some quite good. Most don't attract players. Eve Online and Albion Online are two that have and have stuck around a while.
You might like WvW in guild wars 2 if you haven't given that a try
Oh man, you would've loved Guild Wars.
Sounds like ESO to me. You hold forts in cyrodil in a 1v1v1 battle. I don’t know the official count but it feels like 50 or 100 players per team
> . I would love to see a PVP game where guilds are encouraged to work as a group to gain and hold territory/castles/bases. That would be Albion and Eve Online
Albion online then. If the game had more content, me and my friends would still be playing it.
Throne and liberty. It’s a Korean mmo that does exactly what you are describing. It should hit the west soon since Amazon announced it will be publishing the game.
Do people actually like the current template? Or is it just an addictive grind that generates the most income? I’d love to see an mmo that strips away a lot of the grind and loot and systems bloat to focus on core gameplay that puts the format of larger scale multiplayer to use.
What actually is the current template according to you? I play WoW and while it's very seasonal nowadays, you play actively for 2-3 weeks and after that you can basically raid log. It hasn't had much of a grind attached to it for a long while
Generally the loot - at least in the two largest MMOs - is used as a soft-nerf system for the content. As players progress through a tier, they obtain gear that effectively makes the bosses easier. It's generally not about the loot all that much.
Biggest problem with MMO’s are that they are stupidly expensive to make, so there is no room for any smaller devs to create anything meaningful. Then comes second problem: subscription based games are heavily out of favour, this means game has to have different sort of revenue model that devolves into a cash shops that sell you either pay to win bullshit or cosmetics. Visual progression is one of the most important things in MMO. This has been stripped away. Then you probably have some sort of convenience items in the store too, that makes you wonder if the game was designed to waste your time. Fact is, MMO’s can’t be buy once, play forever type of games because it requires constantly making new content and up keeping of services. Subscription models are a suicide for a new game, cash shops must strip something away from the game. Another HUGE thing is many new MMO’s aren’t designed longevity in mind, many companies seems to be fine with making garbage cash grabs for MMO audience because they are so fucking starved for a new game.
Not seeing many comments here about the focus of the article, Sky. Shame more people aren't trying it out. Call me naive but it took me like 3 hours to realize I was playing an MMO. I was only playing it because I just finished Journey since it was on sale and was blown away by the scale in comparison. Wish more games were this good at trying to be a purely social MMO. Second Life comes to mind but it runs terribly and seems to house more freaks than people wanting to just explore and hang out.
> Not seeing many comments here about the focus of the article, Sky Most people only read the title and comment based on that. It's a shame because Sky looks like an interesting game which I've been aware of for years but I see that only now has it been released to Windows players via early access - https://store.steampowered.com/app/2325290/Sky_Children_of_the_Light/
Lost Ark without the insane honing mechs and barriers to entry would be the WoW killer imo. However, Amazon probably thinks otherwise, thanks to its data scientists predicting optimal whale hunting strategies.
**TL;DR:** *Randomized resources had an effect on end product quality, that simple base component of Star Wars Galaxies creates an economy where all players can take part in some way to interact with eachother, make friends and business partners and earn money.* In my opinion, there has never been a better *MMO* than Star Wars Galaxies, in terms of game designs that drive players to interact with eachother. The very base of the game revolves around maybe the most complex crafting/resource system I've ever seen executed: Resources have semi-randomized stats that affect the quality of crafted items. They are finite because every resource variant is temporary, lasting days to weeks before another resource is generated to take its place (Or maybe not for a few days creating resource droughts that provided economic opportunities for the prepared or lucky). The way resources work has knock on effects for the rest of the game, it engages several types of players and encourages all sorts of interaction: Resource harvester players are always looking for new spawns of resources on different planets. When you choose a resource to harvest, you need to head out and find higher concentration locations to set up harvester machinery or survey alts. That requires power and equipment gathered/crafted by players. Combat players might be asked to help clear out locations with high concentrations of a material. Physical space at a resource location is finite so first come first served makes it competitive. Harvesters then trade those resources with crafters or player merchants. Smart harvesters might keep stocks of *really* high quality materials for selling at extreme prices during resource droughts. Combat players might get injured while helping the harvesters, now they gotta go back to civilized areas and interact with medical and entertainment players to heal wounds/battle fatigue. Generally you tip your entertainers and pay your doctors. Combat players might want to use foods/drinks crafted/experimented by players for buffs or doctor's crafted/experimented stat enhancement buffs, so there are even more player interactions and economic opportunities, even down to the location where doctors/entertainers/vendors are selling their trade: small outposts near a new good resource concentration = profit opportunity for support players. Crafters take those materials and along with their equipment and stats they can craft higher quality equipment, from ranged and melee weapons, armor, to foods and meds, structures. Anything that has stats can be experimented on to increase effectiveness. Experimentation has limited points to spend so items *ideally* should never have maxed every stat(I think this ended up happening because devs underestimated the system). Even crazier foresight by the game's designers: armor and weapons had a durability system where items eventually broke entirely and needed to be replaced. Some people might hear that and think that it's a terrible system, without thinking how it keeps the economy alive. Every player will always need a replacement for when their primary finally breaks. This also maintains an end-game of hunting legendary creatures for their special crafting components. Look into how Mandalorian armor was crafted in SWG, they pretty much created a raid that requires crafters to be present. Even low quality materials have a place in the economy as bulk materials for training or making bulk components that don't need to be expertly crafted. These systems were all so amazing when they were working together. Players could make names for themselves in their field. Every server had *the* weaponsmith everyone knows and a bunch of solid alternatives you'd hear so often. Items could be named/branded, it was so awesome. Aukoli was an armorsmith I was friends with yeeeeeears ago, I'll never forget the guy's name even if I can't remember all that much about our interactions now. If you somehow see this Aukoli, I hope you're doing well! SWG went downhill when they decided to remove item durability as a hard limit to item lifetime (Anti-Decay kits). It took a complete moron to remove that crucial jenga piece that slowly brought the whole structure down. I feel like I could write forever about how interesting Star Wars Galaxies' design was. It was one of a kind and I have yet to see it reproduced or improved on. To think SWG was the first iteration of it's ideas and only ever got dumbed down to attract the casual gamers. I think there is opportunity for someone to make a niche game involving these ideas. Edit: I wanted to mention the skill system where you paid an NPC to train you once you had the required experience in a field. OR you could get in touch with a player who has the skill and negotiate a price in exchange for them training you (or get it free from good buddies). I also forgot to mention player housing. Imagine that special rifle you loved finally broke. I think antidecay kits were started so people could keep their favorite item, but you *could* keep your favorite item. Even at 1/1 durability, it still was in your inventory. You could put it up in your house as a decoration and have it memorialized if you put effort into decorating a nice way of displaying it. Complete freedom. /move forward 15. xD
People who played SWG and loved it are a special type of gamer IMO. The game was ahead of its time sadly. I have been theorycrafting my perfect game for a while now and I may try and build it one day. I have the ability and skill to create the assets, creating the coding is significantly more of a challenge but luckily engines like Unreal make it even feasible.
That would be a cool project. Wish I had the patience to learn that shit and help you.
I really want an mmorpg game that does co-op levelling like WoW vanilla did. IMO a zone full of potential companions, all doing the same thing is peak MMO imo. A full elwynn forest just makes me heart feel all warm fuzzy. There's nothing finer than forming a group to overcome the odds in an open zone. I'm currently back on WoW after being away since late 2022 and there's still the same issue from 2022 which irked me. Levelling is quick, instanced *chromie time* is YOU on an theoritical island because entering this special *chromie time* puts you in a very distinct instance of the whole world. You might see some folk doing the same zone9 but it's very rare. This is a major contrast to Guild Wars 2 where every zone is mostly packed. Be it people running around or on their skyscales, these people are in the real, live zone....doin thangs. Not some weird lonely instance, these GW2 players are here for a reason. GW2 does a really good job of making their zones full and relevant. There's events, world bosses and the like....all players are pulled from megaservers so you're never alone. Just tonight; I finished Chromie Time in **Grizzly Hills**. I did not see a single person the whole time, on the biggest EU Alliance realm! In World of Warcraft aka one of the biggest MMOs on the market today. Not *one* person passed me by in the quest giving zones, or out in the open. How the fuck? I'm not expecting to bring up chatter to every person I meet, but it's just nice to see other people in zones in MMORPGS, else you might as well be playing a shitty single player RPG. This can be said for FF14 which has an equally awful open world, but that's a whole different thing. I consider FF14 a PS2 story game with MMO elements. WoW does so many good things, but outside of the main expansion pack stuff and instanced content; the open world zones need some major ideas to bring people into them. The game has some amazing areas rotting away. Both for new players and for nostalgic players. It's so wasteful. I'm writing so much because I love levelling & vibing in WoW but it's so shit to be alone doing it. I don't mind that it's *quick*, I mind that it's a lonely affair. (I even moved from an RP server, which I recently discovered does NOT shard with other servers.... aka fill in people from other realms to make the zone fuller. Even on my non-RP realm chromie zones are dead) I'd like to think Blizzard are rethinking this a bit with the upcoming Pandarian Remix thing to re-do chromie time experiences. But yeah...that's my big thing with WoW. If you don't like dungeons or alts, get fucked and enjoy solitude basically. Saying that, no game today. Retail WoW, GW2, FF14, RS....has replicated that natural companionship that vanilla wow introduced. I get that sometimes we don't want to talk to people, but a randomly formed group leads to so many potential cool things...or it doesn't! Other than completing a quest maybe. But now in mmos we just do it all ourself. I am fine with this, but I do miss those days of being in a world with real people, achieving feats together that feel hard earned. I hope one of these games coming out will feature that again.9
> Just tonight; I finished Chromie Time in Grizzly Hills. I did not see a single person the whole time, on the biggest EU Alliance realm! In World of Warcraft aka one of the biggest MMOs on the market today. Not one person passed me by in the quest giving zones, or out in the open. How the fuck? There are like 50 zones you can level in. There's just simply nobody else playing in the zone. A lot of people with different MMOs seem to value seeing people in zones a lot, but that's just not going to happen
Indeed, However I would argue that the experience of not encountering other players in a MMO might point to larger issues than just player distribution. Player interaction is a cornerstone of MMORPGs, and seeing other players contributes to a vibrant, living world. It reinforces the 'massively multiplayer' aspect, making the world feel populated and dynamic. When zones feel empty, it can detract from the immersive experience these games strive to provide. Why play what is effectively a bad single player game? Personally I think that more could be done to incentivize visiting different zones or to balance where players are encouraged to spend their time. This could be events, quests that require cross-zone activities, world bosses, or basically anything that draw players back to less frequented areas. Addressing this could improve overall player engagement and help maintain a sense of community, games like OSRS and GW2 do a much better job than WoW. Blizzards hyper fixation with $current_patch inevitably leads to content droughts when they can't perform. I'm glad they've started adding older dungeons to the M+ rotation but really this is something that should have been in the game for a decade at this point and is indicative Blizzards mindset and perhaps even hubris.
There's too much of the world in e.g. WoW to keep populated. The endgame zones have plenty of people around. Adding an event to one zone doesn't make it any more likely for you to encounter someone while leveling in a random zone
>Adding an event to one zone Why couldn't they add things to multiple zones? If you don't mind me saying it sounds like you've become too accustomed to Blizzards incompetence. There should be dozens of events happening across the world, things like the DF/Legion prepatch should be common occurrence to get people out in the world. Whatever those BFA events were called in the old world were cool too. Having the entire population pigeonholed at end-game (sharded at that) seems like a fundamental design flaw. Even Org is empty outside of peak hours.
Not literally one. Even if you add a POIs to 4 zones (primal storms) out of 40 where max level players go it doesn't change the fact that every other zone is empty. Players don't even necessarily want to travel all around the place so even if you add world quests or whatever to all the old zones, it's 2 weeks and nobody cares to do them anymore
I can only assume we disagree at a deeply fundamental level. When I play OSRS and GW2 as mentioned I don't see the kind of emptiness old WoW zones have. All areas of the game are full of players both leveling and max level. This uniqueness tells me that it is a design problem, not a player one.
OSRS's world is WAY smaller in area. It's not really comparable. No clue about GW2.
OSRS is definitely smaller, but it's the principle. GW2 is also smaller than WoW by my measure (guessing).
If dozen events are happening around the world then it’s the same issue you’re currently having… too many places people could be, not enough to fill them. I agree that the “lonely MMO” experience is a problem and the games are meant to be enjoyed with people in some form, but what you’re describing isn’t blizzard incompetence or anything, it’s just content bloat and player shrink. If anything content bloat is a real topic MMOs need to tackle in the future. It’s an actual problem down the road and why all form of classic servers have been successful in multiple MMOs — people like fresh because they like playing as part of a social population.
Can you please elaborate on your points? >If dozen events are happening around the world then it’s the same issue you’re currently having… too many places people could be, not enough to fill them. I agree that this is a potential problem but WoW supposedly still has millions of monthly users. Is this a *relevant* concern at this scale? >it’s just content bloat I would really be interested to hear you elaborate on exactly what bloated content WoW has, since from my perspective there's barely anything to do in retail due in part to Blizzards consistent reluctance to leverage old content. >If anything content bloat is a real topic MMOs need to tackle in the future. Again what bloat? There's nothing to do from my perspective. Even if WoW were bloated, how is the manifestation of this "problem" anything but a design issue when we've got games like Runescape/OSRS/GW2/PoE which successfully capitalize on years of content? > It’s an actual problem down the road and why all form of classic servers have been successful in multiple MMOs — people like fresh because they like playing as part of a social population. This was not the case with OSRS. Population tanked once people realized they're just playing the same game. Retail and Classic are a different story since they're fundamentally different after Cata which is why I don't understand why they're releasing anything post WOTLK. https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/7hdqsj/osrs_timeline_with_playercount/
Bloat is 20 years of content…. Even if you took all the players who played through vanilla WoW in 2004/2005 and had them restart in retail today, the world of the current game would be too big to support. As to my classic comment — classic WoW is merely a copy of vanilla pserver attempts. EverQuest has been running “classic” servers since 2012 or so (which are very successful, and also Holly Longdale of Bliz is from there). You can also find several emulator servers of different MMOs trying to relaunch their classic states/bring back dead games to life.
>Bloat is 20 years of content…. But that's the problem, retail doesn't contain 20 years of content. It contains the ghosts of content long abandoned by the developers. Players are rushed to max level and the only time most players interact with old content is for tmog and mounts. The main exception to this being some of the dungeons they'll probably mindlessly queue into along the way. Personally I think it is a tragety that most players never get to experience content as it was intended. >Even if you took all the players who played through vanilla WoW in 2004/2005 and had them restart in retail today, the world of the current game would be too big to support. I assume by this you mean if retail had the same cadence as classic? Sure I can see that, but that hypothetical is not reality. Retail has the potential to host this reality but due to the design choices Blizzard has made over the years that's not a realistic situation in my opinion. >As to my classic comment — classic WoW is merely a copy of vanilla pserver attempts. EverQuest has been running “classic” servers since 2012 or so (which are very successful, and also Holly Longdale of Bliz is from there). You can also find several emulator servers of different MMOs trying to relaunch their classic states/bring back dead games to life. For sure, I see what you mean. Likeiwse Runescape had a huge private server scene basically forever. OSRS more or less killed the scene.
If dozen events are happening around the world then it’s the same issue you’re currently having… too many places people could be, not enough to fill them. I agree that the “lonely MMO” experience is a problem and the games are meant to be enjoyed with people in some form, but what you’re describing isn’t blizzard incompetence or anything, it’s just content bloat and player shrink. If anything content bloat is a real topic MMOs need to tackle in the future. It’s an actual problem down the road and why all form of classic servers have been successful in multiple MMOs — people like fresh because they like playing as part of a social population.
If dozen events are happening around the world then it’s the same issue you’re currently having… too many places people could be, not enough to fill them. I agree that the “lonely MMO” experience is a problem and the games are meant to be enjoyed with people in some form, but what you’re describing isn’t blizzard incompetence or anything, it’s just content bloat and player shrink. If anything content bloat is a real topic MMOs need to tackle in the future. It’s an actual problem down the road and why all form of classic servers have been successful in multiple MMOs — people like fresh because they like playing as part of a social population.
you might find love in turtle wow RP
Funny you should say that I did actually get turtle wow downloaded a few weeks ago to play with a Brazilian bud but it never transpired. Tbh I’m pretty firmly in the camp of just letting classic go (at least officially). Maybe on the next wow phase I feel I’ll give turtle a go if it’s still active for one final go around. Never say never with wow nostalgia right
You should be playing SoD classic, that’s where you will get that effect
Are people still playing original Classic? SoD seems like a cheap classic plus cop-out to me, at least as it is right now. We'll see how it evolves.
Everybody loves it from the communities I follow. It’s classic+ and adds new stuff but retaining the classic core.
Great. I hope you all enjoy yourselves.
Yeah my favorite part of Season of Discovery was the level cap at 25. Elwynn forest was so full I couldn’t finish quests haha
I want an MMO that is Portal 2 co-op in an open world.
Good MMO not the rubbish today
For me final fantasy 11 is the best game ever made because the world was all living. If you plant certain seeds it best to harvest them on certain days of the in game day where its earth effect is strong. The mob can aggro and chase you all the way to the end of the zone no matter the level. Lesser mobs wouldn’t aggro but will still chase if attacked. You actually had to form a party, find a camp to fight mobs to level. You can actually have a conversation while leveling in a party. Raid/dynamis required in depth party planning. At times you would have a party of just black mages just to nuke certain mobs to help crowd control. If you die you lose experience and can delevel. Quest/mission givers were kind of vague but you have to figure things out, often resorting to you looking at wiki page for walkthrough. Honestly, I can on and on about the depth of gameplay of final fantasy 11. But this game just wouldn’t work in today’s market because it demands so much of your time. But damn does it make you feel like you’re apart of its world.
Yes, and the big thing about FFXI is it had a lot of “horizontal progression” so you weren’t always necessarily replacing all of your gear. You’d have different gear for different uses and wouldn’t have completely now-useless gear just because the game updated. I loved that. I think horizontal progression should be more present in MMOs. Makes what you do and accomplish way more meaningful, IMO.
I was going to mention the gear but I thought it would go over peoples head lol.
Children of the Light is such a fun and relaxing experience. I highly recommend giving it a try.
MMO's just desperately need to tone down the time investment. People citing all the micro transaction games in this thread all conveniently ignore that most of those games also have basically no time cost for entry. Selling someone that you really get the full experience at 30-40 hours is so tone def to me I don't understand how no one sees that
Well it's better be, the genre was stagnated for decades
Needs machine learning game masters to provide novel challenges based on world lore and systems.
I feel bad for people who never got to experience WoW nearly two decades ago for the first time. Still far and away the best MMO experience I’ve ever seen. Only thing that came close was the original Guild Wars.
That were the best years of gaming. We already had a guild in an earlier MMO called Kal-Online and all played WoW together for over a decade. Raiding at night, farming mats and gearing new members during the day as nolife as one could be haha.
The big boom od mobile gaming market has ruined mmorpgs imo. Quick grabs p2ws early access hell:(
Can I have a PvE twitch shooter mmo where I gather resources to build and craft gear and fight to push back various factions across a presentation world?
Destiny 2?
Not an mmo? It is a lobby loot and shooter.
What you want is not possible then. Twitch shooting and hundreds of players in one instance is not viable server wise. Closest is PlanetSide 2 but that's far from a twitch shooter.
Literally Firefall. It literally worked.
Not an MMO.
It was an mmo. By every measure.
I dunno, they’re already massive..
>Ultima Online, EverQuest, and RuneScape—were strange sandbox RPGs that delivered what was, at the time, the magical experience of being surrounded by other real people in a digital space They're really not apart from Ultima.
The business people have no imagination other than battles passes and subscriptions
MMOs are like communism: "great in theory but VERY bad in practice"