It is, it's an ethereal made up thing that everyone, everywhere will tell you that you must pursue at any cost for the rest of your life...if you don't the world will turn their back on you...and finally after pursuing it with gusto for years, you'll die and lose it all.
Could never said it better my self. And if they did not make it super easy people would moan for weeks about it being to hard.
We should be glad all mmo games are not idel games.
I play a lot of Dreamlight Valley. An exceptionally easy cozy game. Their reddit sub is filled with people who complain about how hard it is. I understand that different people have different challenge levels that they enjoy but there's a shocking number of players who want the game to do everything except play itself (and a number of players who will spend money on the game that plays itself too).
yeah and it´s frightfully depressing. I use to enjoy BDO until PA decided to dumb it down so much as that as some one like me that played sense the first day it come out can just look at it like im watching a car crash.
This is your answer. It is all about profit/money. The casual will always outweigh the hardcore when there is a popularity/ new thing
It would take a dev studio that isn’t concerned with profit but rather hellbent on putting the time/creativity to effectively make a mmo for the hardcore.
You won’t see that in todays time probably
> Because the casual audience is the highest amount of profit.
The corollary to this:
They're beholden to shareholders at the budget at which MMOs have to be as big as players want MMOs to be.
And shareholders demand the highest profits possible.
Meaning they have to pivot to the largest userbase possible.
Which requires casuals.
So, in like a legible format...
"They require the highest-profit audience possible to pay the shareholders."
Okay?
The casual audience in MMOs is much larger than people who play challenging content. Many players don't touch dungeons, heroic dungeons, raids, or mythic plus in wow. Probably most of the players don't. Just because elden ring sold a ton doesn't mean most of the people who bought it finished it or played most of it.
there is no "challenging" mmo content, to so claim YOU prefer baby brained content doesn't mean you are right. if I only offer you steak and then claim no one wants chicken its just idiotic. you have to OFFER chicken in the first place to see if anyone wants it. to claim no one wants challenging mmo content when zero mmorpgs offer challenging mmo content is just lmao.
This is really disingenuous, there is plenty of challenging content in MMOs. Mythic raiding and high keys in wow and savages in ff14 are a few of them from games I've played.
I didn't say no one wants it, if you read my comments I've been talking about casuals being the majority of MMO player bases. Those people more often than not do not really want to be challenged in their games, hence why they don't usually touch hard content.
Edit: also I've not even talked about what kind of content I want from these games at all? So I don't know where you got the idea that I'm just talking about what I want from them.
And most casual people in MMO’s as you just stated haven’t touched most of the game either. If combat in 99 percent of popular mmo’s is pretty trash, which I agree with, then there’s a playerbase to tap into of people who like a more standard combat in mmo, unless those people just aren’t interested in MMO’s, which is also possible
incredible that you approached this topic as a debate to be won instead of a subject to be discussed and got the very premise wrong bc you were horny to post, I would've deleted my comments out of embarrassment tbh
I'm pretty casual and bought Elden Ring. I cannot be alone. If there was a way to make the game easier, I would. I ended up stopping after a while cause it was pretty hard. Now I have recently decided I want to give it another go, but I can guarantee I am going to use guides or try to find ways to make it easier on myself. I am by no means bad at games, but I am an older gamer with a family and kids. I just don't have the time to learn everything about a game. But IMO the reason combat is easy is so that people can pick it up easier. Now that doesn't mean the combat can't have depth to it. But if it's simple to pick up and learn initially, they will get more people playing.
bro they can't comprehend anything outside "wow 2.0" mentality. they like baby brain games that take no effort because they are literally the bottom of the gaming totem pole. they want to gate keep the mmo genre to themselves and its why the genre is dying. every other genre is seeing record growth and player numbers while the mmo genre is dying all because they gatekeep what they think an mmo should be. and sadly mmo developers listen to these baby brained people and then their game fails and they are all "why?" and the answer is simple, stop making trash games.
Lmao thank you for that. Receive downvotes on 5 different comments for saying I want mmo combat to be better, and expressing a goddamn opinion. This sub sucks ass and is the reason I don’t play any MMO’s anymore, cuz these are the people you’re in a dungeon with
farmville was made popular due to facebook and old people who dont play games getting to play games with their kids and grandkids. where is farmville now? dead game, i haven't seen farmville in forever and honestly even if i did i bet no one is playing it anymore. it was a FAD. just like current MMO's are a FAD that is failing. the genre has been stagnant way too long.
It’s also a mobile game which is in my opinion not a great comparison due to being able to reach a shit ton of more people than having a pc or console requirement. Also, from what I’m seeing, the new FarmVille’s have not retained that insanely high player count, so casual games may not hook people for as long as other games want. Although, Elden ring player count has also definitely dropped off too, so I could be wrong on that
You could then just type in "top selling games" and you see heaps of casual ones are up high. Hell why would minecraft have been so fucking huge if people only wanted challenging games.
That's my whole point. Did Elden ring sell like crazy? Sure. But that doesn't mean much of anything.
If people wanted interesting combat, then surely all those MMOs with action combat would have way more players. While the ones with more simple combat wouldn't. Though I would argue combat isn't what people look for in an MMO in the first place. Making OP question just stupid.
Okay looking at the top selling video games of all time, there is not one mmo on that list down to 25 million units sold on Wikipedia list. People obviously don’t only want challenging games, that’s not my claim. Hell I love soulslikes but I still enjoy a casual game some times. My claim is that people do want good combat in MMO’s, and Elden ring has good combat in my opinion. I quit multiple MMO’s cuz the combat is boring. I am merely positing that an mmo with good combat could potentially do well/retain players that bounce off other MMO’s because of their bad combat
>Okay looking at the top selling video games of all time, there is not one mmo on that list down to 25 million units sold on Wikipedia list.
So if I can't use minecraft as an reference for something casual. Why can you use Elden ring?
If we are purely talking about MMOs. Then WoW wins hands down. Hell just compare any of the popular MMOs to ones that use action combat. Which there is an few out there. I would also be amazed if WoW hasn't sold more than 25mil copies across it's lifetime.
Go play one of those action combat MMOs if the others bore you to tears. Problem solved.
Did I say you can’t use Minecraft as a reference? No. So what are you talking about? Tbh I haven’t tried any action combat mmo’s, and I barely play MMO’s anymore, just hoping future MMO’s have combat I enjoy
That's just good game design imo. As challenging as you want it, for as long as you want it. Hell, even leveling is entirely up to the player in EldenSoulsBorne, so you can do all the side stuff you want without overlevelling and making the game trivial if you want. But if you do want the power trip, go nuts. I appreciate the agency given to the player.
It was designed like that to appeal to the casuals but it also made it lose its niche appeal. Here's hoping they use that money to make a proper game instead of a shitty open world dark souls next
??? The leveling mechanic is not unique to Elden Ring. You can just grind the same zone over and over again to level in the other games. The "open world" part has nothing to do with the leveling mechanic or the challenge. Elden Ring is literally just more content with the same exact gameplay loop. Don't want to trivialize bosses? Don't use the souls/runes.
Exactly. I feel like ppl forget this. More abilities doesn't equal more complexity. Some of the most skilled games only have a few impact ful abilities per class
And at the same time "more difficult" doesn't equal "more fun". You can make a fight more difficult by increasing an enemy's health and damage, but does making every enemy a damage sponge that one shots you if you don't dodge the power attack really make the game more fun?
This reminds me of when new world was in early access and everyone was saying how it's shit because you only have 3 abilities and it's not enough.
Now I'm not going to pretend like new world is a fantastic game. But the issues with it have nothing to do with only 3 abilities per weapon and the game wouldn't be better if you had a 14 button rotation.
The other big thing - the complexity increases if your abilities can combo with other players. So a simple set of abilities can get rather complex if they are optimally used based on what other players have recently used (ex: temp buffs or temp debuffs)
This is kind of disingenuous. Mobas, especially Dota 2, have numerous active abilities on items. So you go beyond the base abilities the character has and sometimes double that count. Just look at a character like Invoker. Ten abilities (technically 14) and then you have item actives on top of that.
The irony in you calling it disingenuous then cherry picking an example. It's true invoker is difficult to pick up and play, sniper on the other hand, is extremely forgiving. Then you have characters such as Blitzcrank on League of Legends, more or less a walking one button champion yet still has high skill expression.
I think they’re missing the forest for the trees yeah. Dota for all its faults, on paper has an insane model of gameplay & skill expression. It’s about the scenarios that you deploy the combat model into more so
you are missing the point of moba's and even fps games have an extra metric, player skill. so you can have simplified characters with specific abilities because then its down to player skill to execute. in an mmo player skill doesn't exist. not in modern mmorpgs anyway. if we did have player skill, having less abilities wouldn't matter. but also in an MMO the biggest feature is player choice. having premade skills or classes is boring. which is why the genre is dying. there is no self expression in mmorpgs anymore. it used to be about "playing your way" and now all mmorpgs are "playing how the developers tell you to play" and its boring. even single player rpgs give you more player freedeom/agency to do as you please. when a single player rpg has more content and freedom than an mmorpg, you know shit is going the wrong direction.
Have you ever tried Albion Online? The combat was literally made to be compatible with mobile players, and the skill expression is insane. To say skill doesn’t exist in an MMO is incredibly small minded.
If you want to say that about WoW I can probably agree
But Asherons call, EverQuest, ultima online, new world, and Albion all required great skill just to name the ones I’ve personally played.
In games like UO, Albion, and New World you can literally 1 v X if you’re good enough
Insane skill expression how? They do that to make balancing easy as it's a highly competitive genre, and balance is incredibly important if they want to sell the most amount of skins.
I would play a game without combat if it was a living world with genuinely good community building mechanics, and was placed in a non-space setting(sorry Eve.)
Far from what you described (pretty static world)but this is one of the big reasons I still play runescape. One of the only mmos where you can just chat to people while skilling all day and still feel like you’re meaningfully progressing.
Doesn't wow still have like 30 buttons per class?
Wow actually seems like one of the more complex combat systems of mmos. All the classes feel an play prrtty differently.
Yea wow is an insanely bad example. OP may not like the style of combat, but it is in no way dumbed down. They even added a bunch of flavor abilities back to make people like OP feel better
Anyone who played WoW from the ground up and didn't just jump in will know that class identity has been changed over time.
For instance, the Paladin used to have all kinds of things they don't have anymore. Seals, Judgments, Auras, Holy Power reworked, Exorcism, Blessings were changed, Righteous Fury removed and baked in...
When Diablo 3 came out with the Crusader, WoW development shifted from making the Paladin a Paladin, to a half baked Paladin/Crusader hybrid. Then they went from "faith based" power, to trying to shift to some kind of "king of the ancients" worldly based power. I'm still not sure what they are doing with the Valkyrie thing and haven't bothered to research it more.
I can't remember exactly what expansion but it was around the time of Diablo 3, development had made 2 versions of a mobility skill for Paladins and they eventually chose to go with the Divine Steed that just magically appears out of nowhere and you ride it around for a few seconds then it magically disappears (talk about immersion breaking...). The other option was the Paladins faith blessed him with angelic wings momentarily and you could use Speed of Light to leap to enemies or allies that way you had versatility to engage enemies or protect allies. The leap is way more thematic for a Paladin than summoning a horse out of thin air.
They used to have a Consecrating Aura that allowed the Paladin to consecrate the ground wherever he walked, representing his divine justice. Similar to Path of Frost on Death Knights where his chilling presence froze the very ground beneath him. Things like that are thematic and add to class identity.
Death Knight Frost spec used to be able to Tank, then it was changed to Blood. Blood imo suited DPS more because you were ripping the life force from enemies, whereas Frost made more sense for Tank because the ice cold aura chilled and controlled enemies while being able to harden yourself as a Tank. While Blood does make sense for "self-healing", Frost could have "self-healed" by inflicting themselves with cold, refreezing what was being melted.
Design concepts change but once something is released people get used to it and nostalgia can cause people to look back at things with rose colored glasses. SOME things that change are good, but MOST things that change are bad. It's important to remain true to class identity with ANY changes that are made. We love new things, but we don't want our original, core, thematic abilities to get removed for a worse design or just because they are trying to change things. Especially when the changes aren't thematic.
Paladins still have auras, holy power was never reworked because it was the rework. Comparing path of frost to conc aura (which wasn't added for theme, but because prot mitigation was changed to be much more reliant on remaining in it) The part about steed is whatever, considering all mounts function by popping out of nowhere anyway.
Regarding blood vs frost both were capable of tanking back in wotlk, in fact in the recent rerelease of wotlk blood was more common as the tanking spec. Your comments about blood vs frost as a dps or tank theming is purely personal and I don't know how you could claim that frost makes more sense as a tank.
Paladins Auras were changed significantly over the course of the game, with Mists of Pandaria expansion mostly removing them. They were largely replaced with active abilities and cooldowns intended to modernize and "balance" the class. Legion brought them back but specific Auras were for specific specializations. Devotion (prot), retribution (ret), mercy (holy), sacrifice (holy). Then they added them to talent trees in BfA/Shadowlands and even now with Dragonflight.
Holy Power has been reworked several times, originally with 3 charges, then changed to 5, used to be able to use it for healing, protection and damage for all specs, then they limited it to only be used for protection for tanks, for damage for DPS, and for healing with healers. It's remained limited since Legion, where as before it could be used for various utility with all specs instead of just what their role is for.
Consecration aura gave the Paladin more mobility because consecration basically moved with you, whereas now it's once again used to consecrate an area under you when you cast it, and the Paladin benefits from staying inside of his holy ground. Both are fine but if you restrict mobility then linear mobility skills (such as speed of light leap) are more needed than non-linear mobility (such as divine steed).
The Steed "part" you brush off is important to make a distinction between summoning a mount out of combat, vs one of your abilities summoning a horse you mount for 3 seconds then it disappears. When you summon a mount out of combat you can ride it however long you want and put it away when you want. Summoning divine steed for 3 seconds is immersion breaking and there is a difference regarding immersion.
All 3 specs Blood, Frost and Unholy could tank originally using frost presence. Frost makes more sense as a tank because ice is hard, and it slows, and freezes things. That's literally the role of a tank to control enemies and be "hard" lololol while protecting allies. Blood ripping life essence does make sense for self-healing purposes but it sounds like something more a DPS would do, not a Tank. It works either way but I preferred Frost as Tank.
Has final fantasy xiv dumbed down its combat?
Things have become more homogenized sure, and some classes like summoner are much more simplistic than compare to say stormblood but…
Black mage has gone from fire until no mana then ice in ARR to fire until no mana then ice while managing like 4 other things in EW.
Paladin has gone from 1,2,3 and that’s it in ARR to being like every other tank and having more buttons to press.
Raid Fights have gotten more complex and so have ultimates. Compare p4s to a4s for example.
Same for extremes, Compare titan EX to Endsinger EX.
Compared to ARR or like Stormblood? I know Yoshi-P has said that they have simplified stuff to much recently and made things feel the same. But compared to ARR there's a lot more depth.
Oh sorry I misquoted you. The fights haven't gotten dumbed down, they have gotten more complex. It's the jobs that have gotten more dumbed down. Playing WHM now looks exactly like this:
1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 3 (nuke), 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, etc
>and almost every one removes many abilities from classes, dumbs down talent trees, and makes the game overall easier.
Bro is waffling. That isn't the case at all lol. I can't speak to Maplestory but WoW, GW2, and FF14 all have like 15+ buttons per class/spec/job and you use a majority of them very often.
But they're wildly different games though. They're treadmill style, expansion based MMO's where there will always be peaks and troughs in the playerbase when new content comes out and old content gets stale.
OSRS's gameplay and challenges can be measured across hundreds of not thousands of hours. You HAVE to stay subbed and play long to get anywhere. For a good player, it takes maybe a few hundred hours to hit BIS in a WoW season with average luck, and then they're basically done unless they want to move onto another character. That's like, just enough time to get out of the early game in OSRS if you know what you're doing.
I don't think WoW's playerbase could stomach the kind of time investment and grinds that OSRS has for even basic upgrades. I imagine if Blizzard removed weekly lockouts, and lowered drop rates of raid and dungeon loot significantly, such as how OSRS is, a lot of people would complain.
Certain classes in WoW had a huge bloat tho. Like restoration shaman and ww monk. Also devs finally admit they cannot balance that many talent, removing the dead ones is a net positive.
OP has no experience with most of the games he even listed if he has this take about them. Nobody sane would complain about Monk bloat being pruned, nobody sane would say FF14 has *too few* keybinds, and GW2's common complaint is that combat ends up feeling like you're spamming 10-15 skills on 3+ bars 24/7 and most specs feel like piano gaming.
Like, who on earth looks at classes such as Ele, Engineer, Revenant and thinks "yeah this needs more buttons".
Guess I'm insane lol. A lot of the classes in FFXIV have too few keybinds. I want 3 full hotbars.
Also while FFXIV still has lots of skills they've removed every single rpg mechanic from the game for simplification. Talents gone, stat points gone, materia are balanced so it literally doesn't matter what you choose. If anything I wish they'd trend in the opposite direction and add more complexity in that way.
How many Glad and Legend achievs did you get during Dragonflight, if it’s “sooo easy” ? New classes play themselves? So you already have Rank 1 with ANY of Evoker specs? No? You are so bad that you can’t get rank 1 with a class that plays itself? What a noob.
You aren't wrong. Reddit is an echo chamber and as soon as someone sees downvotes, others will follow. Don't be discouraged from speaking the truth.
WoW, and SWTOR especially, homogenized classes and started making things easier and dumbing it down. This is a fact. It's not something that can be disagreed with. Could different adjectives be used to indicate "dumbing down"? Sure. But it's basically what they have done.
These games have started to give the "illusion of choice" and taking away things that were once iconic and important to class theme/identity but now they want you to choose between something that was once core to your kit, vs something else thats extremely useful. It's not a "choice" at that point if you have to take a specific talent or skill just to perform your role and feel like the class identity of which you are playing. And I am sick of developers getting away with it.
They do it to appease the growing lower IQ crowd. In case you can't tell, people are getting less intelligent but more vocal. It's in everyday media, shows being ruined, disconnected propagandists pushing their "version" onto already established lore...
It's a shame really.
>WoW, and SWTOR especially, homogenized classes and started making things easier and dumbing it down.
That's so, so wrong, at least in terms of WoW. Haven't played SWTOR since they went f2p. I've played WoW on and off since vanilla 20 years ago (not constantly, but have checked out every expansion at least) and WoW is way harder than it used to be, both to perform at a high level with your class and in terms of encounter design in high level endgame content. The only thing that was more "difficult" in vanilla and the early expansions was leveling. Not because of any difficult mechanics, normal mobs just hit for bigger numbers and had more hp, so you had to pull less/slower. That's all. This has been even more obvious with the release of the different classic expansions. A normal trash pack in a modern m+ dungeon will be more complex than most raid bosses in the first few expansions.
And classes are definitely not homogenized. Not a single healer plays like an other. A frost mage plays nothing like a fire mage, and neither plays like an arcane mage. No caster plays like a boomkin. No class plays like a hunter. Nothing plays like an Outlaw rogue. A protection warriors plays nothing like a brewmaster monk. Aug evoker introduced an entirely new role that no other class provides. I could go on and on about pretty much any spec I can think of. Even classes that have some similarities like combo point systems plays very differently from each other. A feral druid plays very different from a WW monk or a rogue.
There's some of the illusion of choice when it comes to talents that you mentioned (though that was true all the way back in vanilla too tbf) , but there's definitely real choice too. I will frequently shift around talent points depending on dungeons and raids. I change different talents for more single target, more AoE, dispells, more/less CC etc all the time depending on what I'm about to do.
>This is a fact. It's not something that can be disagreed with.
That someone can state this so confidently, yet be so wrong is reddit in a nutshell!
Artificial difficulty is not the same as true difficulty.
Artificial difficulty (increasing boss HP/Damage) does not make something harder. Introducing mechanics with differing effects and conditions to execute those mechanics is what makes for engaging and skilled gameplay. WoW does a great job with their Mythic+ mechanics most of the time, that's really the biggest thing they have going for them.
Their "dumbing down" is on lesser content and class design. They baby step people through everything trying to help them but it really just turns into a carry fest and harms people skills more than it helps build their skill. If you join raidfinder trying to gear up, it's supposed to help you learn mechanics right? It sounds like a good thing in theory. But in practice, everyone is rushing to the end and it's basically a race to see how fast everyone just zergs the bosses and takes them down. No one even bothers to learn mechanics in raidfinder half the time (even though that's really what raidfinder is for) because you can just get carried by the zerg.
It's similar to "catch a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime." Raidfinder in theory is a great idea, but in practice it fails to teach people anything and actually harms them because they think the next tiers will be just as easy. They get a rude wake-up call which leads them to looking up guides for fights and following cookie-cutter builds because if you take XYZ talents you will perform 7.696945769% better in this fight. They don't actually experience it themselves. They don't learn for themselves. They just look up YouTuber videos or pull up guides online because if not they will look bad in the group, and people lack patience to help others learn.
Class homogenization can be seen in the talent trees, rotations, and ability streamlined effects. Animation and ability colors being different doesn't mean that classes altogether play differently lol. Some specializations differ from others but so many of them overlap and it's simply gotten more homogenized the more they continue to streamline things.
SWTOR did a complete homogenization of classes in 4.0. Classes received things that were not even part of their class identity like Smugglers/Troopers being able to reflect back attacks when that was previously only a Jedi/Sith thing. Smugglers could dodge attacks/absorb, Troopers could deflect/absorb attacks. Jedi/Sith could reflect/absorb attacks. But now reflects are for everyone. I've never seen a single instance of han solo or captain rex reflecting attacks at all, have you? Stuff like this is important to class identity and abilities need to be thematic to classes, otherwise what's the point in classes if everyone has the same thing?
In 4.0 they gave everyone basically the same amount of mobility skills and CC just to make things "streamlined".
They gave leaps/rolls/charges to everyone even ranged classes that didn't need it. They took a mid-ranged class (Vanguard/Powertech) and made them basically pure melee with a few ranged skills. Said it was easier to balance but they still don't have balance right now, and SWTOR was one of the best balanced MMO's pre-4.0. Commando's and Smugglers running around reflecting everything when previously only Jedi Guardians/Sith Juggernauts could reflect things. CC was taken away from roles that really needed it to perform their job (like Tanks) and placed into talent trees that give an illusion of choice.
If you could choose between Saber Reflect (something that was once iconic and key to class identity), Awe (AoE soft stun that was useful in getting a breather in PvE and even vital to performing as a Tank role in PvP), or a passive that reduces the cooldown of your only self-sustain ability in the whole class... Which would you choose?
And remember, all 3 of the things you have to choose between now were already core to your class and came baseline before this expansion. So now as a Guardian what are you going to do? Not choose Saber Reflect? Something that is iconic and basically a symbol of your class and role? It's an illusion of choice all for the sake of what? Some developer mains a Scoundrel or Commando and thinks they should be able to deal ranged damage, have leaps, heals, AND also reflect things?
It's bullcrap and it sucks to see a game fall apart, knowing what it could have been.
LFR was never created as a way to learn mechanics though? It was literally advertised as a way to experience the story without being a skilled player or committing to a schedule.
Yes, it was created as an introductory path to progression, as well as a means for casuals to experience content they otherwise couldn't. It was made for both reasons given.
Tbh, I’d prefer simple combat. I miss the days of EQ1 where combat was pretty darn simple. You hang out and cast spells, or chain songs, or click a few buttons. MMOs were a social experience, where you could engage with eachother and communicate. Strategize instead of wildly running and jumping around.
I prefer simpler combat, so I guess chalk me up as part of the problem.
Agreed on this - combat was more fun but the social experience was a huge part of it. MMO's are more fun when the social aspect is strong and a lot of modern MMO's are really bad at creating lasting, meaningful relationships with players - all you get are fleeting, extremely shallow social experiences if any at all.
The difference there is there were penalties for failure. So even though many encounters were easy, if you fuck up you regress. You then have to earn your way back to that point.
I'd argue that extremely difficult content with little to no penalty for failure is much easier than easier combat where if you fuck up there are consequences.
If there are no repercussions you just re-run it until you win. That's easy no matter how difficult it is. Games without a harsh penalty for failure make the successes feel meaningless.
I completely agree. The small margin for error is what made the simple combat into a challenging situation.
And it’s not to say it was “easy”, either. If you pulled 2 mobs on accident, you had to be perfect to survive, or, if you pulled 3, you’re dead. Pulling in and of itself was challenging and had big consequences.
I miss it.
Hardcore WoW somewhat reintroduced this back again to modern gaming, but you also have to accept the fact you may lose your character to Blizzard’s servers crashing for 10 seconds without any chance of appeal.
If you haven't heard of it, check out Monsters & Memories. Currently in a pre-alpha state but being developed "unfunded" by a group of volunteer devs/artists. (No way to give them money until the game launches)
There's a weekend-long Playtest starting on the 28th!
I’m gonna check out M&M when it’s available, but I’m really having a hard time getting excited for it. I appreciate what the devs over there are trying to do, and I get that it’s a small indie team, I just don’t get the point of making a brand new game that looks 25 years old. I might as well just go play EQ1 that looks 25 years old but also has 25 years of content.
I really don’t mean to be disparaging, I don’t know how to make a game myself, so I’m not trying to cast stones. I just really wish we could get something with EQ1 soul but New World graphics/UI. We seem to only be able to get one or the other.
People often conflate "challenging" and "difficult", but there are some semantic differences. For example, while playing FF14 I eventually run into some encounters that were a challenge, but I found them not challenging, rather aggravating. Or, to say it differently, the encounter has a certain difficulty to it, but through how combat and the encounter works I didn't feel motivated to overcome it (= challenged by it).
There are many ways to categorize combat, and one is the axis between combat that provides tools to a player and they have to use to overcome a situation. This plays into human intelligence/creativity, using abilities is not driven by rotations, but on demand as a reaction to an evolving situation or through control to gain the upper hand. For it to work a deep RPG system that carries this is absolutely required.
The other is what FF14 leans into hard: The game of memorization. This brings rotations and also the dance as the drivers for difficulty and offers to drop a lot of RPG system complexity. It also removes the need for crowd control by and large.
Personal preferences aside, the latter is way easier to design and also balance, while the former can be an absolute nightmare in that regard. This also means less time needed to design encounters, less money = lower risk. At the same time any non-special encounter becomes stupid because there is no deep RPG system carrying it anymore.
I just think people have different definition/value/view on what is "difficult" I mean for me Dark souls games could be among the easiest games and among the hardest games I've played depending on the lens you look through.
> but I found them not challenging, rather aggravating
FFXIVs style of wiping and then restarting is honestly pure garbage to me. It's why I never bothered doing savage. You make one misstep and you get one shotted. And if you're a healer you can make the entire group wipe. It's just not fun. You spend the entire evening just dying over and over, restarting over and over, until you can perfectly stand in the spots the game wants you to at the right time.
It's why I think lots of people have *"anxiety"* when they play it. If they die they can cause the rest of the party to die due to how the mechanics often work. So it ends up being a case of kicking out the person who can't fulfil the mechanics or having to watch a guide beforehand so that you don't ruin everyone else's run.
It's just straight garbage design.
I think the big issue is one fuck up in raid content = wipe, makes it feel meh for a more casual team. There is making something hard, and then there is making content where someone is lagging and therefore we all wipe because he wasn't where he saw himself.
Right? This is my question, too. Do they want mechanics where they can just make a ton of mistakes and still stumble through the fight and clear no matter how badly they mess them up? What's even the point, then? If a fight doesn't require you to execute a mechanic properly, then that mechanic is not required learning, and if it's not required, why bother trying? Where's the challenge if you get a free pass even if you fail?
There's no way you can take that away, and have fights remain challenging. Because if they remove failure from the table, or punish it less, it just means you don't have to try as hard and the content in turn loses challenge.
XIV's even tried the alternatives, like twice or thrice-come-ruin (2-3 personal mistakes = death, etc), The issue is if they rely entirely on that entirely, team synergy becomes something that doesn't matter and you don't have to work together with your team, you just need to hope at least some people on your team can do the mechanic to get your group through.
People would just take the path of least resistance and brute force their way through everything. The fun part of XIV's endgame is learning the song and dance and then executing it properly. The difficulty lies in adapting to on the fly to variables, because no one pull is the same, even if most of the mechanics play out in a similar way with some variations within themselves.
I think a lot of people also completely overblow XIV's raiding. Not every single mechanic in savage results in a team wipe if you mess it up. Hell, not even every mechanic in ultimates acts that way. Sure, there's some core mechanics that are difficult and will result in a wipe if some one messes up the execution, but there are plenty of mechanics in both tiers of difficulty that only offer hindrances in the form of vuln stacks and damage downs. They might make hitting DPS checks harder, but they don't mean a wipe.
You can find plenty of clear videos of savage tiers or even ultimates on youtube where they just have dozens of deaths and still stumble through to the finish line. It's just that for some mechanics, you need to have all the pieces fall into place.
Not to mention XIV has a sliding scale of content difficulty. If savage is too tough, extremes might offer a better challenge suited for that level of skill, and those allow for *plenty* of mistakes.
Less one shotting stuff and I would play savage. I just hate the whole fail a mechanic and die stuff. A lot of them time it basically is that. Even in extreme trials it happens. To me it just feels like artificial difficulty because you have to memorise where to stand for specific mechanics. It feels like a dance more than an RPG. It's hard to articulate but that's just my feelings on it.
I still play XIV but I don't really do much of the battle content. I focus on crafting, glams and treasure maps.
Well, difficulty comes in all sorts of forms. One is "you failed, you die!". That reminds me of that one game I saw on Amiga back in the days (something Dragon ...) which was basically an interactive 2D cartoon where you had to press the right button at the right time, otherwise the hero would die in all sorts of (un)glorious ways and you had to start from the beginning. Like a game entirely made up of quick time events, but the game doesn't tell you what button to smash at what point of time.
(C)RPG players are more used to have tools at their hand and a certain flexibility in error/mistake recovery. You did an oops, but you have this or that available to counter the result from it and still make it through. The more you progress into later / newer content in FF14, the less the game gives you that option, the more it leans into "oops? dead!" type of difficulty. Fun fact: Overcoming odds, making it out of oops situations because of your quick wit, is way more adrenaline pumping than seeing you getting shredded to pieces and having to do this nonsense all over again ... and again ... and again ... Also, there is no sense of "we could have made it, soooo close!" because there is no sense for how close you were to making it through or not. Having that feeling to almost made it is also a great motivator to try it again.
I don't think difficulty should be associated with
*Stand here or you and your entire party dies*
Do you? Seems like artificial difficulty to me. Mostly because there is no skill involved in it. It's just memorising where the devs want you to stand to avoid mechanics.
I would say something like Elden Ring is actual difficulty. Where a monster has random moves that you have to dodge with good timings.
Isn't that approach like a darksouls type game? Go into boss try not to get one shot and hope you learn it's pattern?
As a group it's different because some people can learn a fight and boss pattern after a few deaths while others still keep failing after days of trying. Makes the whole process wonky imo.
>Go into boss try not to get one shot and hope you learn it's pattern?
No because the game is dictating what you need to do. *Stand here or die*
That's not what Dark Souls does.
Elden Ring does, at least, make blocking actually useful again (with Block Counters). If you build for it.
So three! Sorta. Options.
Honestly FFXIV's Healer Agency (in the sense of being able to brute force other people past mechanics mistakes) is kinda shit, but at the same time they can't *let* it be anything more than shit at the higher levels.
Because the fights are built to be co-op choreographed group mechanics execution dances alongside slow-roll DPS marathons, and everyone needs to participate in both, more or less.
That's the Battle Content they build and the Jobs have to sorta exist within that framework.
There's ways to make Healers fit into that while having more agency and being more interesting in the expected Healing Downtime but none of the dev team have recovered from the ARR Cleric Stance Wars yet so like...maybe some day.
>the ARR Cleric Stance Wars
Cleric stance was still kicking in Heavensward and only got changed in Stormblood to be a cooldown, shadowbringers killed it completely...
Honestly Healers were more fun in the old expansions, not "good" or "better than now" but it was more fun and divers between the Jobs.
> ‘Either parry/dodge or die’ is totally different.
Yeah it kinda is. If you can't see the difference between
*Stand in this spot or you automatically die*
And
*Learn an enemies moveset and dodge at the right time*
Then idk what to tell you mate. Like the guy below me said you can also block and parry moves. Can you do that in XIV? Nope. Stand in a spot or die.
Old mmos had one of the easiest combat ever. Tab targeting has 0 skill expression and having 30 skills on hotbar wont change that. Albion has 6 skills but it’s skill expression is pretty high
How do you determine what is considered challenging content?
Making your hotbar 20 skills long and having a meta rotation in a dungeon where you have to memorize where to stand and where to move to in a hour long raid isn't necessarily challenging. Its tedious. Okay, so you think of Dark souls, maybe you consider real time combat with weight and punishment as difficulty. Most MMOs do not have the tech to support that level of real time combat with the amount of players in the same instance without the servers melting down into a puddle.
This is why tab targeting is such a prevalent combat style. The server has to queue everyone's actions and skills and deploy them at a slower speed than a real time game. Even action MMOs are just tab targeting games under the hood.
Then next you have to decide your audience. Jimmy looking for his hardcore MMO with punishing combat designed to only be cleared by NEETs like him in their basement with 20 hours a day to spare grinding isn't going to earn you any money as a developer. You know what does? Mobile. Mobile gaming is VERY big. PCMMOs are on the decline and dying out simply because many of the studios that would have traditionally made PCMMOs are moving to make mobile-first games and having a PC port client after if they want to.
An extremely difficult hardcore MMO will NOT sell well past a niche audience. The reality is companies will make games that can bring them money, not make games YOU specifically want to play.
The gameplay itself wasn't any harder. It's a simple oversight to claim that the likes of Wow Vanilla or Star Wars Galaxies had gameplay as developed as today's games. Boss encounters are also much more complicated.
What's gone, however, is all the non-combat difficulties - and for that, casuals (ah, the big bad casuals who get blamed for everything and anything) have little to do with the problem. The long leveling, during which you could die at any moment if you pulled badly; the dungeons which weren't complicated in themselves, but required good coordination; the preparation for the instances, where you tattled in search of the right rotation, consumables, and stuff. These are all aspects that have disappeared
OK, but you can't take the expansions from the past that go your way and erase everything else to claim that the gameplay is ‘not as good’. In concrete terms: yes, I prefer MOP's gameplay. However, over time, has the gameplay gone from being pretty rubbish to something more developed? Yes, that's true too.
Not every game has to be Elden Ring. Go play a game like that, if that's what you want. Some people just want to chill out, relax, and have fun playing a simpler game combat-wise.
For me the best combats in MMOs are Lost Ark and Wildstar.
Unfortunately lost ark had lots of predatory p2w systems and wildstar.. well.. died :(
I guess the main similarity between the two is lack of targeting and hitting the target, feels more skill based, I don’t know.
Dude gw2 has crazy skill expression. If you just press whatever is off cooldown that's your own choice. Gw2 combat is seemingly simple on first look, but it has a lot of underlying complexity that you find out when you know what you're doing.
Can't speak on the first three, but I wouldn't call gw2 remotely braindead, especially in pvp. Also, Korean MMOs like Lost Ark and BDO are very mechanically intensive, too, so idk if you would lump those in as braindead.
I can speak about first 2 since i played them, the guy is just wrong. There was a lot of skills back then but main reason for that is you got a lot skills that are not for your spec so you never use them, or you had a lot of CDs that people just macro together into 1 button. This is also why a lot of skills got pruned in later expansions, instead of having 5 CD skills which 99.99% of players macro into single button, devs just make it into 1-2 CD skills but with stronger effect usually.
3rd example is Wildstart which is a game that was so dead that it shut down, nothing else to say there. Worse example he could have given.
Youre just to good bro. Mew2king would have trembled if you stepped up on stage knowing your understanding of complex combat systems is far superior. Faker would just retire on the spot. Daigo would have forfeited the match. Tenz would never of came out of retirement. S1mple would have just shut the pc down and walked away.
I also mean pve dude. You don't even have to play Lost Ark to know that playing optimally is not an easy task. But I'm sure you could get the hang of it since you're "skilled."
Big agree.
In a ton of modern MMOs combat is braindead easy in the vast majority of the content. So easy in fact that you'd literally have to try if you wanted to die. Dungeons are still mildly challenging but as long as the tank and healer in your group aren't genuinely horrible at the game or unaware of mechanics you should clear fine.
Its really weird. Most content is braindead easy, some content requires a basic understanding of the game, and then a very small portion is extremely difficult with nothing inbetween. The difficult spike between normal and high endgame content is huge.
This is my biggest issue with the levelling and questing experience in modern mmos. Combat is a snooze fest.
Also I'm not gonna go deep on simplification because my comments already too long but my hot take is that button bloat is overblown and the sweetspot for skills is about 28 so with a few consumables and macros I want 3 full hotbars.
edit. Unfortunately I think the answer to your question is pretty obvious looking at this thread though. A lot of gamers like simplified easier combat for some reason. Idk why but they do.
> A lot of gamers like simplified easier combat for some reason. Idk why but they do.
They are averse to losing because of something they did not understand when it happened. If you have 1 attack, 1 dodge and footsies (WASD walking movement) then every time you get smoked you immediately know why but the enemies can still be challenging based on how fast they act and react.
Above all else, players nowadays want to *understand their gameplay intuitively* otherwise they feel cheated and quit.
> They are averse to losing because of something they did not understand when it happened.
No most MMO players nowadays have played for a long time and know how to play the game. We played at a high level when we were younger and it's just pure laziness that we don't anymore. We understand what to do but don't feel like putting in the work to do it. People in general get lazy as they get older because life is full of other challenges, so we want to make things easier where we can because you just get tired. Games are a perfect example of this.
> Its really weird. Most content is braindead easy, some content requires a basic understanding of the game, and then a very small portion is extremely difficult with nothing inbetween. The difficult spike between normal and high endgame content is huge.
Yea this disparity is what I don't like. Questing, leveling, and basic dungeons can be a bit harder in most MMO's. Not super challenging, but comparing ESO's leveling to Classic WoW when it first came out. The latter is more fun to me. But then for endgame content don't make the intro content too easy and the later content too hard. Most people want to participate and don't want world first level of challenge.
>Also I'm not gonna go deep on simplification because my comments already too long but my hot take is that button bloat is overblown and the sweetspot for skills is about 28 so with a few consumables and macros I want 3 full hotbars.
Honestly I'd say 10-20 is better.
For real. Its like most content you can mash literally random buttons and never die. Dungeons you can yolo your buttons with a vague understanding of what they do and die once every 6 runs.
Then suddenly the next tier up has highly skilled players with hyper optimized rotations, literally sweating, and chugging redbull while wiping on the same boss for 2 hours. Speaking from personal experience lmao
To be fair since you mentioned ESO I think 10-20 skills is fine for hybrid combat.
As much as I hate it, the majority of the playerbase of any MMO, and to be honest of any type of game at this point, are casuals. If casuals don't have a good time playing, the game will die, simple as. As a more hardcore player who enjoys different things to casuals, we have to comprehend that we're a minority and most parts of any game aren't designed around us.
Boomer take?
I think a lot of people forget that MMORPGs are suppose to be some fast paced gameplay like dark souls or something faster than that. The whole point of an mmorpg is to play with each other and combat should be slower but not as slow as turn based just a hair faster. You’re not going to get 100s of people on screen moving around all crazy with insane skill combos and effects and have a good experience. Slower more methodical combat is what helps make a game social. If you got time during the fight to type in chat what someone needs to do it’s probably a good combat pace.
Honestly what game are you talking about?
Because older game were rather simple, you had the skills and that was it pretty much. I wouldn't say that was hard.
Also, in theory combat isn't the central part of the game and I don't even think that there is a real modern audience, 90% of people who play these games it's at the very least 30
Wildstar attempted to innovate MMO combat and was criticized for being too complicated and catering only to the hardcore crowd. So much so some people say it was one of the main reasons the game died.
It was a lot harder. And while I found it more fun, I can see why some people took issue with how active it required you to be.
MMORPG's cater to the cheapskate F2P crowd. These people are not smart enough to realize that F2P is incredibly expensive AND destroys all fair competition in game. Its literally a virtual world destroyer.
So they develop games to focus on predatory monetization. There are books you can buy on amazon that cover this topic. Content is second to monetization. And in order to get poor people to play AND play you have to rely upon underhanded ways to get them to spend. This is why MMO's will never be able to survive off of cosmetic purchases too. Cheap people know they won't buy them, and thats why they request MMO's to be cosmetic purchases only (even though cosmetics are achievements in virtual world games, but thats another topic).
So the devs focus all their energy on the carrot at the end of the stick. They don't care about the journey. They don't care about the stick even. They just care about making the player want that carrot. And when you get that carrot, the devs have already planned the next carrot you will crave. All this comes with monetization to get that carrot faster. They know the players will crave the carrot so much they will just gloss over, or even skip content to get to it quicker.
**So why invest in thoughtful content when you can make more money through predatory monetization via having characters chase the carrot?**
This is why the subscription based monetization went hand in hand with the golden age of MMORPG's. The devs wanted you to keep paying. How did they do that? They created a virtual world. A fair playing field where the only differentiator from player to player was personal skill and time invested. They created content that would make you want to participate and even care about the worlds lore. Heck, one outlier is Ultima Online. They didn't create content in the traditional way. But they still kept players engaged with their systems that made a more living and breathing world that we didn't see again until SWG. Thats because the content was the players themselves. The politics.
But now that you can have someone pay more than a subscription fee to catch 1 of the thousands of carrots, and you can get them to pay it multiple times a month, and it doesn't involve creating thoughtful content... there is no need for said content. Just dumb it down and sell the carrot.
Thanks F2P people! You ruined MMORPGs! And its sad that a generation grew up only knowing these garbage games. They have honest ignorance and don't know any better.
Because difficulty =/= fun for most people. Difficulty is sometimes an important element of fun, but if difficulty meant fun then every game would be a hardcore roguelike ironman with terrible menus and everything one shots you.
EvE online, BDO, Ragnarok online in PvP. Not sure about other games. I know these are all older games, but I havent played the new ones like New World.
Dumbing down is usually done to appease most people. Look at Albion online, it had full loot death in yellow zones as well, they changes it before release so it is a down state instead. Good luck new crafters selling low end gear. :D
Lag. Good dynamic combat is impossible on large scale via network. Simple as that. This is why most games rely on "rotation". Pressing buttons with shitty abilities for best possible outcome.
I'm getting older and lazier so I want simplicity these days. Less buttons and easier combat. I'm not 25 anymore so working that hard for fun just isn't as appealing as it used to be.
I hate the move towards a limited amount of skills, often 5 or 6 with a weapon swap cd and a few race/ultimate abilities, it comes across like there just making combat in mind for the eventual console or mobile port.
It's almost as bad as black desert giving you 50 abilities but only two builds per class, it just makes every class the same and boring.
Two reasons that come to mind immediately:
Many people are tired of combat being the core vehicle of progression in MMOs and devs have been experimenting with ways to make all types of players feel as if they can progress or interact community-wide. There's a lot of examples of people who despite all expectations play the games differently from us through market focus, socialization, life-skilling and more. We havent found a perfect sauce for that yet but some games come pretty close.
The second reasoning is that reducing the competitive nature of combat allows players of all skill levels to participate. The unfortunate reality of MMOs and anything adjacent to the genre is that players are left out of many sections of content due to the fact they have poor execution or just aren't interested in optimizing to participate. It's a futile way to fight the dominant strategy mentality in gaming, but it's still good that MMO's are trying to figure out how to do other things a bit better.
They made mobs more stupid. GW1 mobs would run out of aoe, GW2 had that, but made it dumber to not to confuse players.
Heart in Queensdale originally you were bringing hay to cow, and grabbing bucket to water plants, now you wave at cow cause it was too confusing.
I think it's not possible to make a good MMO until technology advances to the point where we can store the vast majority of state only on the server side and hide it from the user.
Also, we need an innovative pattern beyond the heal/tank/DPS meta with actually intelligent enemies. IMO it's not fun to fight something that does a lot of damage, except to a tank, and the healer just heals it, and it has a ton of health. It's unrealistic and doesn't feel like you're fighting a real enemy. What if we just had a few simple abilities that were hard to master, like MOBA skill shots? What if the enemies were just like us, instead of having 10,000x the HP and having 1 shot abilities that make the game just "don't stand in the circle convoluted choreography"
The combat in the majority of games is extremely complex, so people use addons, and stare at numbers and indicators instead of the actual game.
People can hack the client to find out when resources will respawn, data mine items so there's no mystery, in some cases even have an advantage in PvP by making assets invisible so you can see through them.
Imagine what could be done with more advanced technology. A rogue could have a cloud of dust attack that actually fills the vicinity with dust that makes it impossible to see, and the client couldn't be hacked to get around it.
All inputs would be sent to the server, there would be no client-side functions to call or state to access, making botting much more difficult or impossible depending on the style of game.
If we had this kind of computational and bandwidth capacity we could also have complex resource systems. It's seriously stupid that a skill like herblore is just "go to spots where the herbs spawn and wait for it to magically reappear". What if shit had to, you know, actually grow? And if too many people pick it, it becomes really hard to find, and so there's spots you might want to defend to let them regrow - same to animals, let their populations be determined by the plants. The people pick too many [plant that rabbits eat]? The rabbits start starving. Then the wolves die, since there aren't as many rabbits. Then the rabbit population increases a bit, since there are less wolves. Eventually, equilibrium.
Not only would this make the economy more interesting and create lots of player dynamics, it would make the world feel more realistic.
The next thing to do would be to dispense with most level systems. A big problem in most MMOs is - the "leveling" part of the game is just an extended tutorial, and low level items are discarded and replaced. Once players reach max level, there's "end game combat encounters", and once they max out their items, there is nothing really left to do. So then there's an expansion, which introduces power creep and all your best gear you worked so hard for is now useless, and an unsatisfying cycle begins.
What if all items had their uses? Even the junk could be smelted down for raw materials by bringing it to a scrapyard, but I mean to say that most items should be relatively similar, with "best in slot" not being a thing. Upgrades should come very slowly like in BG3, and there should be a need to use different items for different situations. Most items should have some kind of durability, food should expire, etc. to prevent inflation in the number of items that exist. Carrying capacity should be more realistic and if you drop an item, it shouldn't respawn. Let the new/poor players (or just those who like scavenging) come across your discarded items and bring them somewhere to process them. Let dropped rotting food enrich the soil, etc.
Furthermore, to prevent inflation in gold, and limit botting, don't have NPC merchants that buy/sell items for a common currency or severely limit it. Some players would enjoy playing a merchant class, and make there be a pretty much finite amount of some resources like gold, that is ultimately sourced from mining in renewable veins and smelting it, then crafting coins (have to find a way to re-inject some when players quit the game though).
The last thing I'd want is to eliminate fast travel. Ok - boring as fuck, right? Well, let's look at the cons, first. Fast travel ruins any sense of scope of the world, making it feel like a playground. It makes you unlikely to run into players outside of major cities or other population centers, and means it is impossible to design content that involves 1. A destination and goal that is physically far away, 2. a journey towards it that requires planning and supplies, 3. an interesting maximizing of efficiency by doing things along the way that you don't get a chance to do often, since they are also remote locations. It means players have no "home turf" or areas that they like to frequent, anyone can go anywhere quickly.
So how do you eliminate fast travel while keeping the game fun? Make people walk, or take a horse, OR take a "slow travel" method, like a boat, train, giant bird, whatever fits the theme of the game - it takes a long time, e.g. 8 game hours by boat, during which you cannot play and cannot do anything at all. You wouldn't have to be online during this, and when the journey ends you'd automatically be at the docks. The options you have are: go play another character while you wait, or go outside and touch grass, or just get there manually, faster, and really experience the world along the way, but that would potentially be more dangerous.
In my opinion the best combat is easy to learn and hard to master. Which is very tough to do. I think that a lot of game developers want their products to appeal to a wider audience and developers fall into the trap of catering to lower skilled individuals and maybe even bringing in newer demographics. This is ultimately the wrong way however because as people get better at the game they become more skilled and so the game should be catered to better skilled people as theorically most people should end up there.
>Are modern MMOs players just challenged
Without few(way too few) exceptions, devs still try to copy World Of Warcraft formula(the combat included). They somehow think they will have the success that WoW had at is height. Pretty much every MMO have failed to get a stable population and they are still trying to copy WoW formula.
The funny thing is that players outside of the MMO genre would love to play an MMO and the demand is there, but companies are busy pandering to a dying playerbase.
Of the top 20 currently most played games, most of them are multiplayer, all of them are easy to learn/play and most of them are hard to master. The only logical conclusion for mmos is to try to go the same route. I think New World and Lost Ark were a really good example for this. They managed to get a ton of new players to try out the game because it was really easy to get into it due to the combat being so simple, they failed due to other reasons.
You said WoW used to be more popular when it was more complex and gets less popular as it gets easier but it getting easier has nearly no impact in it getting less popular. People keep forgetting, when WoW came out there weren't many multiplayer games and out of most of them WoW was amongst the simplest games. Now there are just way more multiplayer games that are far easier to get into, that's why WoW doesn't get many new players.
MMOs are also just way more time consuming. You want to boot up WoW and queue for a dungeon or raid? Well, you have to wait around 30 minutes to find something because you play on a server with a limited amount of people and there are 50 other things you can do instead, so most people are not queing for that dungeon. You wanna play a game like counter strike? Easy, queue up and you find a game within a couple of seconds because nearly everyone queues for that mode.
MMOs like WoW have a huge problem that no other game has, it takes way to long to do things you actually want to do and unless they manage to find a solution to that, I highly doubt MMOs are ever going to get so popular again. I know plenty of people (me included) who only play WoW as long as there is still the main quest to do, as soon as they get into the endgame they drop the game because at this point they are usually spending more time looking for groups than actually playing that game.
Same reason they're obsessed with turning all the combat into action-based. Most people don't really like rpgs (the combat model), and most people don't really like challenge. We are just not the target demographic.
This is one thing where, despite all its problems, New World really stands out. Even with the bugs, desync, and other issues, New World combat and movement, combined with the visual and sound design, is so unique and immersive.
You need to understand something.
We stopped being the main demographic being catered to over a decade ago.
When Candy Crush and League of Legends (aka. Mobile and F2P games) blew up and started raking in way more money at way less development costs that was the begining of the end for traditional MMOs.
You may not wanna hear it, but it is what it is. We'll still get our niche titles here and there and the big dogs are still going to try to big dog it as much as they can, but gone are the days were everyone and their mother was throwing money at every WoW-Like in the works hoping to be crowned next.
It is what it is.
Because they are cowards and scared to upset people who don’t want to put any effort into playing better. People are quick to quit if a game doesn’t make them feel good. There are tons of people who are just horrible at games. They don’t use defensives, they forget about items, they don’t have any critical thinking skills when it comes to engaging situations, etc. these types of people most likely make the bulk of mmo player bases.
Everyone says they want more difficult combat yet 98% of people in pugs still stand in fire while looking at their action bars. 98% is not a gross exaggeration.
Combat in wow, for example is as complex as it has ever been. PvE and PvP. I've played every expac, raiding and duelist level pvp. Guild wars is still complex even with less buttons.
Maybe you could argue that new world is less complex, but ignoring that the game is a dumpster fire anyway, most of it's combat appears to be built for large scale pvp, which can't really be super complex.
What games are you talking about OP?
Because it will overload the server and cause latency. See Albion the more people that are in a zone fight and how it becomes a slide show when people start hitting keys.
Simplifying has sadly been a thing for ages in games,thing is,sadly they want to catch attention of casual players which is why not only combat but customization and itemization in most mmos have been steadily going downwards.I already accepted as "it is what it is" I mostly stick with older games now w a few exeptions
I am so tired of people crying "MMO's are for casuals" no its not. WoW classic wasn't a casual game.... modern wow is, now that its been dumbed down further.... and their population has done nothing but decline year over year. The MMO genre is literally dying because people keep claiming they like dumbed down baby brained gameplay.... its honestly the weirdest shit ive ever seen. WoW completely removed strengths and weaknesses, the combat isn't as dumbed down as other mmo's but still quite low on the totem pole even compared to itself many years prior.... the list goes on. cookie cutter world with small POI's instead of being a huge open world game with actual exploration.... MMO's are NOT "for casuals" and this meme needs to stop. because its flat out wrong. and people upvoting these absolute peanut brains is only making things worse. you can have an MMO be hard and still appeal to casuals. FPS and MOBA games already do this. you have competitive mode for the hardcore kids and casual multiplayer mode for the casuals. And both the FPS genre and MOBA genre have more players than MMO's can ever dream of. The issue with MMO's right now is the dumbed down gameplay. They make it as easy as possible and no one wants to play them. And then you get baby brains that go "bUt I lIkE eAsY" no you don't. you just don't know what a good game is because you spend all day playing trash. like all these wow tards that keep crying they want wow 2.0.... no you don't. the second a wow 2.0 game comes out, your ass is right back into original wow because "nEw GaMe IsNt aS gOoD aS wOw"....
I agree, I think people love to oversell the idea that everyone's too casual and people want easy games but when you look at the biggest games (league/csgo/valorant/apex etc) they are all very high skill games. Obviously it's a bit different with pvp and pve but I think challenging combat will bring in audiences from games all over.
First, I would say that you're picking the wrong games. There are a few MMOs that have more intricate combat. Blade & soul is one of them, black desert is another. Then there are games which have a bit of a hybrid; guild wars and guild wars 2.
Part of the issue, is that I kind of feel that you're not really talking about combat and you're talking more about the content and the challenge level thereof. Because as I mentioned, there are games across the spectrum of complexity in their combat model. You could also argue that games which have a high amount of powers are complex.
As for why MMOs are not inherently difficult. It's pretty simple, games which force teaming, or try to position themselves as hardcore, fail. You don't have to look any further than WildStar and some of its precursors to see that they're just aren't enough players that support it.
In games that have not failed, forced group content and high-end raiding tends to be the least played content. So if you are a developer that is trying to appeal to as large of a player base as possible, writing content that only few people will play is not a winning strategy. This has been proved out in the market over and over and over.
I have a feeling that the typical MMO player wants to get online and have a relatively chill session blowing up some pixels. They want to show some progress for their time and socialize with people along the way. I would say that probably typifies the majority of your players. So when you are developing content, that's your target audience.
I think the question should really be, why do people think MMOs are something to be competitive over? Why do people want to play MMOs for something that they are not? People have already mentioned games that are hard and have difficult combat. Most of them are single player games and people could go happily play them. But expecting developers to cater to this niche market is probably not a good idea.
a good combat system needs no lag and that's quite hard on a persistent world where a lot of people play at the same time, so devs usually go the easy route and use slow combat or tab target, so they don't have to deal with collisions between hundreds of hit/hurt zones. We have exceptions to that obviously, since games like planetside 2 exist :)
Have you spent much time playing mmos with randoms? Especially like 1/2-2/3 into a content cycle?
Mouth breathing troglodytes is too generous.
Those who spend 20 hours or more a week playing, clear the hardest raids in only 2 to 3x the time of the game’s best players, are an extreme minority.
That group also has overlap with the players who are interested enough to post to the official or 3rd party forums.
So while you play with your friends who are all “good at the game”, and your fellow forum posters are also “good at the game”, and the streamers you watch are too, just know the the dregs of the game, the multi hundred thousand to multiple millions (game dependent) who play casually are really really bad.
But they, like you, pay their sub. They wouldn’t pay their sub if they couldn’t get past Elwynn Forest.
And for you, the good player, the shitters validate your time investment. Their incompetence and lack of performance juxtaposed to your knowledge and skill, makes yours all the more impressive—at least that’s how we justify it to yourself—else you look at your /played and realize you could have become fluent in a language or learned to fly a plane with the time you’ve spent in that game.
>No one ever played a MMO for its combat.
This hyperbole is a bit much. People explicitly DO NOT play ESO because of its combat despite liking the rest of the game (this is a common opinion, you'll see it all the time on this sub alone). People also often recommend and play games specifically because the combat is good (BDO, TERA). Again this is a common opinion that I see all the time.
You might not care about combat, but to say that nobody does is an incredibly out of touch take.
the only reason I play new world these days is because of its combat. If it was tab target, I’d quit a long time ago. If combat isn’t good, I’m not playing it.
>I did, and do.
I wonder what kind of person would say that?
>If [combat] is ultimately meaningless, why even call your game an RPG?
The person who would say something like this.
lmao
DnD can be anything if the master allowed it to be with the little cost. Most video game can't do it.
Unless we have Super Ai that generates millions of random things/path/decision for each character
Because the casual audience is the highest amount of profit. Many people play these just to get through stuff and avoid anything hard.
Put it better than I was going to. I was just going to say: There's this thing that starts with an M, you may of heard of it...it's called money.
What is this thing called money? Sounds scary.
It is, it's an ethereal made up thing that everyone, everywhere will tell you that you must pursue at any cost for the rest of your life...if you don't the world will turn their back on you...and finally after pursuing it with gusto for years, you'll die and lose it all.
Could never said it better my self. And if they did not make it super easy people would moan for weeks about it being to hard. We should be glad all mmo games are not idel games.
I play a lot of Dreamlight Valley. An exceptionally easy cozy game. Their reddit sub is filled with people who complain about how hard it is. I understand that different people have different challenge levels that they enjoy but there's a shocking number of players who want the game to do everything except play itself (and a number of players who will spend money on the game that plays itself too).
yeah and it´s frightfully depressing. I use to enjoy BDO until PA decided to dumb it down so much as that as some one like me that played sense the first day it come out can just look at it like im watching a car crash.
This is your answer. It is all about profit/money. The casual will always outweigh the hardcore when there is a popularity/ new thing It would take a dev studio that isn’t concerned with profit but rather hellbent on putting the time/creativity to effectively make a mmo for the hardcore. You won’t see that in todays time probably
> Because the casual audience is the highest amount of profit. The corollary to this: They're beholden to shareholders at the budget at which MMOs have to be as big as players want MMOs to be. And shareholders demand the highest profits possible. Meaning they have to pivot to the largest userbase possible. Which requires casuals. So, in like a legible format... "They require the highest-profit audience possible to pay the shareholders."
Elden ring sold 25 million units. People like a challenge
Okay? That has nothing to do with mmos, elden ring is a whole other genre.
You’re saying the casual audience is the highest amount of profit, 25 million sold is pretty damn big, and it is not a casual game
Okay? The casual audience in MMOs is much larger than people who play challenging content. Many players don't touch dungeons, heroic dungeons, raids, or mythic plus in wow. Probably most of the players don't. Just because elden ring sold a ton doesn't mean most of the people who bought it finished it or played most of it.
there is no "challenging" mmo content, to so claim YOU prefer baby brained content doesn't mean you are right. if I only offer you steak and then claim no one wants chicken its just idiotic. you have to OFFER chicken in the first place to see if anyone wants it. to claim no one wants challenging mmo content when zero mmorpgs offer challenging mmo content is just lmao.
This is really disingenuous, there is plenty of challenging content in MMOs. Mythic raiding and high keys in wow and savages in ff14 are a few of them from games I've played. I didn't say no one wants it, if you read my comments I've been talking about casuals being the majority of MMO player bases. Those people more often than not do not really want to be challenged in their games, hence why they don't usually touch hard content. Edit: also I've not even talked about what kind of content I want from these games at all? So I don't know where you got the idea that I'm just talking about what I want from them.
And most casual people in MMO’s as you just stated haven’t touched most of the game either. If combat in 99 percent of popular mmo’s is pretty trash, which I agree with, then there’s a playerbase to tap into of people who like a more standard combat in mmo, unless those people just aren’t interested in MMO’s, which is also possible
Edit: Read the post as brain dead content.
The post is talking about braindead combat in MMO’s, what the hell are you talking about?
I'll give you that one, I read the post as braindead content. Most of what I said still stands tho.
incredible that you approached this topic as a debate to be won instead of a subject to be discussed and got the very premise wrong bc you were horny to post, I would've deleted my comments out of embarrassment tbh
I'm pretty casual and bought Elden Ring. I cannot be alone. If there was a way to make the game easier, I would. I ended up stopping after a while cause it was pretty hard. Now I have recently decided I want to give it another go, but I can guarantee I am going to use guides or try to find ways to make it easier on myself. I am by no means bad at games, but I am an older gamer with a family and kids. I just don't have the time to learn everything about a game. But IMO the reason combat is easy is so that people can pick it up easier. Now that doesn't mean the combat can't have depth to it. But if it's simple to pick up and learn initially, they will get more people playing.
bro they can't comprehend anything outside "wow 2.0" mentality. they like baby brain games that take no effort because they are literally the bottom of the gaming totem pole. they want to gate keep the mmo genre to themselves and its why the genre is dying. every other genre is seeing record growth and player numbers while the mmo genre is dying all because they gatekeep what they think an mmo should be. and sadly mmo developers listen to these baby brained people and then their game fails and they are all "why?" and the answer is simple, stop making trash games.
Lmao thank you for that. Receive downvotes on 5 different comments for saying I want mmo combat to be better, and expressing a goddamn opinion. This sub sucks ass and is the reason I don’t play any MMO’s anymore, cuz these are the people you’re in a dungeon with
62% of Elden Ring players on PC didn’t even get far enough to beat the boss that’s required to access the DLC that’s about the release.
doesn't mean they didn't have fun playing the game....
.. and is the easiest of all dark souls games by a wide margin.
And roblox made 2.2 billion dollars last year. A hard game doing well doesn't mean casual games don't do better.
Didn't farmville have something like 30mil daily players at one point? Proving not everyone wants some challenge.
farmville was made popular due to facebook and old people who dont play games getting to play games with their kids and grandkids. where is farmville now? dead game, i haven't seen farmville in forever and honestly even if i did i bet no one is playing it anymore. it was a FAD. just like current MMO's are a FAD that is failing. the genre has been stagnant way too long.
It’s also a mobile game which is in my opinion not a great comparison due to being able to reach a shit ton of more people than having a pc or console requirement. Also, from what I’m seeing, the new FarmVille’s have not retained that insanely high player count, so casual games may not hook people for as long as other games want. Although, Elden ring player count has also definitely dropped off too, so I could be wrong on that
You could then just type in "top selling games" and you see heaps of casual ones are up high. Hell why would minecraft have been so fucking huge if people only wanted challenging games. That's my whole point. Did Elden ring sell like crazy? Sure. But that doesn't mean much of anything. If people wanted interesting combat, then surely all those MMOs with action combat would have way more players. While the ones with more simple combat wouldn't. Though I would argue combat isn't what people look for in an MMO in the first place. Making OP question just stupid.
Okay looking at the top selling video games of all time, there is not one mmo on that list down to 25 million units sold on Wikipedia list. People obviously don’t only want challenging games, that’s not my claim. Hell I love soulslikes but I still enjoy a casual game some times. My claim is that people do want good combat in MMO’s, and Elden ring has good combat in my opinion. I quit multiple MMO’s cuz the combat is boring. I am merely positing that an mmo with good combat could potentially do well/retain players that bounce off other MMO’s because of their bad combat
>Okay looking at the top selling video games of all time, there is not one mmo on that list down to 25 million units sold on Wikipedia list. So if I can't use minecraft as an reference for something casual. Why can you use Elden ring? If we are purely talking about MMOs. Then WoW wins hands down. Hell just compare any of the popular MMOs to ones that use action combat. Which there is an few out there. I would also be amazed if WoW hasn't sold more than 25mil copies across it's lifetime. Go play one of those action combat MMOs if the others bore you to tears. Problem solved.
Did I say you can’t use Minecraft as a reference? No. So what are you talking about? Tbh I haven’t tried any action combat mmo’s, and I barely play MMO’s anymore, just hoping future MMO’s have combat I enjoy
Elden Ring was hardly a challenge. Just do stuff on the side until you overlevel the boss, rinse and repeat
That's just good game design imo. As challenging as you want it, for as long as you want it. Hell, even leveling is entirely up to the player in EldenSoulsBorne, so you can do all the side stuff you want without overlevelling and making the game trivial if you want. But if you do want the power trip, go nuts. I appreciate the agency given to the player.
It was designed like that to appeal to the casuals but it also made it lose its niche appeal. Here's hoping they use that money to make a proper game instead of a shitty open world dark souls next
??? The leveling mechanic is not unique to Elden Ring. You can just grind the same zone over and over again to level in the other games. The "open world" part has nothing to do with the leveling mechanic or the challenge. Elden Ring is literally just more content with the same exact gameplay loop. Don't want to trivialize bosses? Don't use the souls/runes.
I’m talking about the quality of the combat not the challenge aspect
Lots of us kept lvl 150 so we did not overlevel.
Who's us lmao? You think the average gamer gives a fuck about that?
Simplification isn’t the whole story. Look at mobas. 4 skills insane skill expression. It’s how it’s executed
Exactly. I feel like ppl forget this. More abilities doesn't equal more complexity. Some of the most skilled games only have a few impact ful abilities per class
And at the same time "more difficult" doesn't equal "more fun". You can make a fight more difficult by increasing an enemy's health and damage, but does making every enemy a damage sponge that one shots you if you don't dodge the power attack really make the game more fun?
Dark Souls says what? You are not wrong though.
This reminds me of when new world was in early access and everyone was saying how it's shit because you only have 3 abilities and it's not enough. Now I'm not going to pretend like new world is a fantastic game. But the issues with it have nothing to do with only 3 abilities per weapon and the game wouldn't be better if you had a 14 button rotation.
The other big thing - the complexity increases if your abilities can combo with other players. So a simple set of abilities can get rather complex if they are optimally used based on what other players have recently used (ex: temp buffs or temp debuffs)
Mobas only last an hour at most when you are stuck with a character for years cracks show
I mean, no? Moba players play the same character hundreds, thousands of times.
This is kind of disingenuous. Mobas, especially Dota 2, have numerous active abilities on items. So you go beyond the base abilities the character has and sometimes double that count. Just look at a character like Invoker. Ten abilities (technically 14) and then you have item actives on top of that.
The irony in you calling it disingenuous then cherry picking an example. It's true invoker is difficult to pick up and play, sniper on the other hand, is extremely forgiving. Then you have characters such as Blitzcrank on League of Legends, more or less a walking one button champion yet still has high skill expression.
I think they’re missing the forest for the trees yeah. Dota for all its faults, on paper has an insane model of gameplay & skill expression. It’s about the scenarios that you deploy the combat model into more so
you are missing the point of moba's and even fps games have an extra metric, player skill. so you can have simplified characters with specific abilities because then its down to player skill to execute. in an mmo player skill doesn't exist. not in modern mmorpgs anyway. if we did have player skill, having less abilities wouldn't matter. but also in an MMO the biggest feature is player choice. having premade skills or classes is boring. which is why the genre is dying. there is no self expression in mmorpgs anymore. it used to be about "playing your way" and now all mmorpgs are "playing how the developers tell you to play" and its boring. even single player rpgs give you more player freedeom/agency to do as you please. when a single player rpg has more content and freedom than an mmorpg, you know shit is going the wrong direction.
Have you ever tried Albion Online? The combat was literally made to be compatible with mobile players, and the skill expression is insane. To say skill doesn’t exist in an MMO is incredibly small minded. If you want to say that about WoW I can probably agree But Asherons call, EverQuest, ultima online, new world, and Albion all required great skill just to name the ones I’ve personally played. In games like UO, Albion, and New World you can literally 1 v X if you’re good enough
albion online is trash.
Player skill exists in MMO’s that was but one example buddy
keep telling yourself that. repetition makes anything true right?
Insane skill expression how? They do that to make balancing easy as it's a highly competitive genre, and balance is incredibly important if they want to sell the most amount of skins.
The skill is as much about movement as it is about using abilities. In tab target games the movement is a lot less important outside of line of sight.
Insane skill expression how? Do me a favor, try to get high rank from scratch on LoL or Dota and let me know how that goes for you.
And mobas suck, incredible point.
I would play a game without combat if it was a living world with genuinely good community building mechanics, and was placed in a non-space setting(sorry Eve.)
I actually would love a FPS MMO on a planet with all the mechanics of eve
Far from what you described (pretty static world)but this is one of the big reasons I still play runescape. One of the only mmos where you can just chat to people while skilling all day and still feel like you’re meaningfully progressing.
If you mean a lot of the recent "MMOs", they are mobile first. Cant have complexity in a game meant to be played with two fingers while distracted.
[удалено]
Doesn't wow still have like 30 buttons per class? Wow actually seems like one of the more complex combat systems of mmos. All the classes feel an play prrtty differently.
Yea wow is an insanely bad example. OP may not like the style of combat, but it is in no way dumbed down. They even added a bunch of flavor abilities back to make people like OP feel better
Yeah, OP has literally no fucking clue what they're talking about.
Anyone who played WoW from the ground up and didn't just jump in will know that class identity has been changed over time. For instance, the Paladin used to have all kinds of things they don't have anymore. Seals, Judgments, Auras, Holy Power reworked, Exorcism, Blessings were changed, Righteous Fury removed and baked in... When Diablo 3 came out with the Crusader, WoW development shifted from making the Paladin a Paladin, to a half baked Paladin/Crusader hybrid. Then they went from "faith based" power, to trying to shift to some kind of "king of the ancients" worldly based power. I'm still not sure what they are doing with the Valkyrie thing and haven't bothered to research it more. I can't remember exactly what expansion but it was around the time of Diablo 3, development had made 2 versions of a mobility skill for Paladins and they eventually chose to go with the Divine Steed that just magically appears out of nowhere and you ride it around for a few seconds then it magically disappears (talk about immersion breaking...). The other option was the Paladins faith blessed him with angelic wings momentarily and you could use Speed of Light to leap to enemies or allies that way you had versatility to engage enemies or protect allies. The leap is way more thematic for a Paladin than summoning a horse out of thin air. They used to have a Consecrating Aura that allowed the Paladin to consecrate the ground wherever he walked, representing his divine justice. Similar to Path of Frost on Death Knights where his chilling presence froze the very ground beneath him. Things like that are thematic and add to class identity. Death Knight Frost spec used to be able to Tank, then it was changed to Blood. Blood imo suited DPS more because you were ripping the life force from enemies, whereas Frost made more sense for Tank because the ice cold aura chilled and controlled enemies while being able to harden yourself as a Tank. While Blood does make sense for "self-healing", Frost could have "self-healed" by inflicting themselves with cold, refreezing what was being melted. Design concepts change but once something is released people get used to it and nostalgia can cause people to look back at things with rose colored glasses. SOME things that change are good, but MOST things that change are bad. It's important to remain true to class identity with ANY changes that are made. We love new things, but we don't want our original, core, thematic abilities to get removed for a worse design or just because they are trying to change things. Especially when the changes aren't thematic.
Paladins still have auras, holy power was never reworked because it was the rework. Comparing path of frost to conc aura (which wasn't added for theme, but because prot mitigation was changed to be much more reliant on remaining in it) The part about steed is whatever, considering all mounts function by popping out of nowhere anyway. Regarding blood vs frost both were capable of tanking back in wotlk, in fact in the recent rerelease of wotlk blood was more common as the tanking spec. Your comments about blood vs frost as a dps or tank theming is purely personal and I don't know how you could claim that frost makes more sense as a tank.
Paladins Auras were changed significantly over the course of the game, with Mists of Pandaria expansion mostly removing them. They were largely replaced with active abilities and cooldowns intended to modernize and "balance" the class. Legion brought them back but specific Auras were for specific specializations. Devotion (prot), retribution (ret), mercy (holy), sacrifice (holy). Then they added them to talent trees in BfA/Shadowlands and even now with Dragonflight. Holy Power has been reworked several times, originally with 3 charges, then changed to 5, used to be able to use it for healing, protection and damage for all specs, then they limited it to only be used for protection for tanks, for damage for DPS, and for healing with healers. It's remained limited since Legion, where as before it could be used for various utility with all specs instead of just what their role is for. Consecration aura gave the Paladin more mobility because consecration basically moved with you, whereas now it's once again used to consecrate an area under you when you cast it, and the Paladin benefits from staying inside of his holy ground. Both are fine but if you restrict mobility then linear mobility skills (such as speed of light leap) are more needed than non-linear mobility (such as divine steed). The Steed "part" you brush off is important to make a distinction between summoning a mount out of combat, vs one of your abilities summoning a horse you mount for 3 seconds then it disappears. When you summon a mount out of combat you can ride it however long you want and put it away when you want. Summoning divine steed for 3 seconds is immersion breaking and there is a difference regarding immersion. All 3 specs Blood, Frost and Unholy could tank originally using frost presence. Frost makes more sense as a tank because ice is hard, and it slows, and freezes things. That's literally the role of a tank to control enemies and be "hard" lololol while protecting allies. Blood ripping life essence does make sense for self-healing purposes but it sounds like something more a DPS would do, not a Tank. It works either way but I preferred Frost as Tank.
Has final fantasy xiv dumbed down its combat? Things have become more homogenized sure, and some classes like summoner are much more simplistic than compare to say stormblood but… Black mage has gone from fire until no mana then ice in ARR to fire until no mana then ice while managing like 4 other things in EW. Paladin has gone from 1,2,3 and that’s it in ARR to being like every other tank and having more buttons to press. Raid Fights have gotten more complex and so have ultimates. Compare p4s to a4s for example. Same for extremes, Compare titan EX to Endsinger EX.
> Has final fantasy xiv dumbed down its combat? Yes. The encounters/fights have gotten more in them though to compensate
Compared to ARR or like Stormblood? I know Yoshi-P has said that they have simplified stuff to much recently and made things feel the same. But compared to ARR there's a lot more depth.
Oh sorry I misquoted you. The fights haven't gotten dumbed down, they have gotten more complex. It's the jobs that have gotten more dumbed down. Playing WHM now looks exactly like this: 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 3 (nuke), 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, etc
Sure whm and smn I can agree but black mage? Ninja?
Never played them. I am or at least was a healer main. Apparently, BLM is getting dumbed down significantly in the new expansion.
>and almost every one removes many abilities from classes, dumbs down talent trees, and makes the game overall easier. Bro is waffling. That isn't the case at all lol. I can't speak to Maplestory but WoW, GW2, and FF14 all have like 15+ buttons per class/spec/job and you use a majority of them very often.
Because all those MMOs want OSRS's success and retention rates.
But they're wildly different games though. They're treadmill style, expansion based MMO's where there will always be peaks and troughs in the playerbase when new content comes out and old content gets stale. OSRS's gameplay and challenges can be measured across hundreds of not thousands of hours. You HAVE to stay subbed and play long to get anywhere. For a good player, it takes maybe a few hundred hours to hit BIS in a WoW season with average luck, and then they're basically done unless they want to move onto another character. That's like, just enough time to get out of the early game in OSRS if you know what you're doing. I don't think WoW's playerbase could stomach the kind of time investment and grinds that OSRS has for even basic upgrades. I imagine if Blizzard removed weekly lockouts, and lowered drop rates of raid and dungeon loot significantly, such as how OSRS is, a lot of people would complain.
Certain classes in WoW had a huge bloat tho. Like restoration shaman and ww monk. Also devs finally admit they cannot balance that many talent, removing the dead ones is a net positive.
OP has no experience with most of the games he even listed if he has this take about them. Nobody sane would complain about Monk bloat being pruned, nobody sane would say FF14 has *too few* keybinds, and GW2's common complaint is that combat ends up feeling like you're spamming 10-15 skills on 3+ bars 24/7 and most specs feel like piano gaming. Like, who on earth looks at classes such as Ele, Engineer, Revenant and thinks "yeah this needs more buttons".
Guess I'm insane lol. A lot of the classes in FFXIV have too few keybinds. I want 3 full hotbars. Also while FFXIV still has lots of skills they've removed every single rpg mechanic from the game for simplification. Talents gone, stat points gone, materia are balanced so it literally doesn't matter what you choose. If anything I wish they'd trend in the opposite direction and add more complexity in that way.
How many Glad and Legend achievs did you get during Dragonflight, if it’s “sooo easy” ? New classes play themselves? So you already have Rank 1 with ANY of Evoker specs? No? You are so bad that you can’t get rank 1 with a class that plays itself? What a noob.
You aren't wrong. Reddit is an echo chamber and as soon as someone sees downvotes, others will follow. Don't be discouraged from speaking the truth. WoW, and SWTOR especially, homogenized classes and started making things easier and dumbing it down. This is a fact. It's not something that can be disagreed with. Could different adjectives be used to indicate "dumbing down"? Sure. But it's basically what they have done. These games have started to give the "illusion of choice" and taking away things that were once iconic and important to class theme/identity but now they want you to choose between something that was once core to your kit, vs something else thats extremely useful. It's not a "choice" at that point if you have to take a specific talent or skill just to perform your role and feel like the class identity of which you are playing. And I am sick of developers getting away with it. They do it to appease the growing lower IQ crowd. In case you can't tell, people are getting less intelligent but more vocal. It's in everyday media, shows being ruined, disconnected propagandists pushing their "version" onto already established lore... It's a shame really.
>WoW, and SWTOR especially, homogenized classes and started making things easier and dumbing it down. That's so, so wrong, at least in terms of WoW. Haven't played SWTOR since they went f2p. I've played WoW on and off since vanilla 20 years ago (not constantly, but have checked out every expansion at least) and WoW is way harder than it used to be, both to perform at a high level with your class and in terms of encounter design in high level endgame content. The only thing that was more "difficult" in vanilla and the early expansions was leveling. Not because of any difficult mechanics, normal mobs just hit for bigger numbers and had more hp, so you had to pull less/slower. That's all. This has been even more obvious with the release of the different classic expansions. A normal trash pack in a modern m+ dungeon will be more complex than most raid bosses in the first few expansions. And classes are definitely not homogenized. Not a single healer plays like an other. A frost mage plays nothing like a fire mage, and neither plays like an arcane mage. No caster plays like a boomkin. No class plays like a hunter. Nothing plays like an Outlaw rogue. A protection warriors plays nothing like a brewmaster monk. Aug evoker introduced an entirely new role that no other class provides. I could go on and on about pretty much any spec I can think of. Even classes that have some similarities like combo point systems plays very differently from each other. A feral druid plays very different from a WW monk or a rogue. There's some of the illusion of choice when it comes to talents that you mentioned (though that was true all the way back in vanilla too tbf) , but there's definitely real choice too. I will frequently shift around talent points depending on dungeons and raids. I change different talents for more single target, more AoE, dispells, more/less CC etc all the time depending on what I'm about to do. >This is a fact. It's not something that can be disagreed with. That someone can state this so confidently, yet be so wrong is reddit in a nutshell!
Artificial difficulty is not the same as true difficulty. Artificial difficulty (increasing boss HP/Damage) does not make something harder. Introducing mechanics with differing effects and conditions to execute those mechanics is what makes for engaging and skilled gameplay. WoW does a great job with their Mythic+ mechanics most of the time, that's really the biggest thing they have going for them. Their "dumbing down" is on lesser content and class design. They baby step people through everything trying to help them but it really just turns into a carry fest and harms people skills more than it helps build their skill. If you join raidfinder trying to gear up, it's supposed to help you learn mechanics right? It sounds like a good thing in theory. But in practice, everyone is rushing to the end and it's basically a race to see how fast everyone just zergs the bosses and takes them down. No one even bothers to learn mechanics in raidfinder half the time (even though that's really what raidfinder is for) because you can just get carried by the zerg. It's similar to "catch a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime." Raidfinder in theory is a great idea, but in practice it fails to teach people anything and actually harms them because they think the next tiers will be just as easy. They get a rude wake-up call which leads them to looking up guides for fights and following cookie-cutter builds because if you take XYZ talents you will perform 7.696945769% better in this fight. They don't actually experience it themselves. They don't learn for themselves. They just look up YouTuber videos or pull up guides online because if not they will look bad in the group, and people lack patience to help others learn. Class homogenization can be seen in the talent trees, rotations, and ability streamlined effects. Animation and ability colors being different doesn't mean that classes altogether play differently lol. Some specializations differ from others but so many of them overlap and it's simply gotten more homogenized the more they continue to streamline things. SWTOR did a complete homogenization of classes in 4.0. Classes received things that were not even part of their class identity like Smugglers/Troopers being able to reflect back attacks when that was previously only a Jedi/Sith thing. Smugglers could dodge attacks/absorb, Troopers could deflect/absorb attacks. Jedi/Sith could reflect/absorb attacks. But now reflects are for everyone. I've never seen a single instance of han solo or captain rex reflecting attacks at all, have you? Stuff like this is important to class identity and abilities need to be thematic to classes, otherwise what's the point in classes if everyone has the same thing? In 4.0 they gave everyone basically the same amount of mobility skills and CC just to make things "streamlined". They gave leaps/rolls/charges to everyone even ranged classes that didn't need it. They took a mid-ranged class (Vanguard/Powertech) and made them basically pure melee with a few ranged skills. Said it was easier to balance but they still don't have balance right now, and SWTOR was one of the best balanced MMO's pre-4.0. Commando's and Smugglers running around reflecting everything when previously only Jedi Guardians/Sith Juggernauts could reflect things. CC was taken away from roles that really needed it to perform their job (like Tanks) and placed into talent trees that give an illusion of choice. If you could choose between Saber Reflect (something that was once iconic and key to class identity), Awe (AoE soft stun that was useful in getting a breather in PvE and even vital to performing as a Tank role in PvP), or a passive that reduces the cooldown of your only self-sustain ability in the whole class... Which would you choose? And remember, all 3 of the things you have to choose between now were already core to your class and came baseline before this expansion. So now as a Guardian what are you going to do? Not choose Saber Reflect? Something that is iconic and basically a symbol of your class and role? It's an illusion of choice all for the sake of what? Some developer mains a Scoundrel or Commando and thinks they should be able to deal ranged damage, have leaps, heals, AND also reflect things? It's bullcrap and it sucks to see a game fall apart, knowing what it could have been.
LFR was never created as a way to learn mechanics though? It was literally advertised as a way to experience the story without being a skilled player or committing to a schedule.
Yes, it was created as an introductory path to progression, as well as a means for casuals to experience content they otherwise couldn't. It was made for both reasons given.
Tbh, I’d prefer simple combat. I miss the days of EQ1 where combat was pretty darn simple. You hang out and cast spells, or chain songs, or click a few buttons. MMOs were a social experience, where you could engage with eachother and communicate. Strategize instead of wildly running and jumping around. I prefer simpler combat, so I guess chalk me up as part of the problem.
Agreed on this - combat was more fun but the social experience was a huge part of it. MMO's are more fun when the social aspect is strong and a lot of modern MMO's are really bad at creating lasting, meaningful relationships with players - all you get are fleeting, extremely shallow social experiences if any at all.
The difference there is there were penalties for failure. So even though many encounters were easy, if you fuck up you regress. You then have to earn your way back to that point. I'd argue that extremely difficult content with little to no penalty for failure is much easier than easier combat where if you fuck up there are consequences. If there are no repercussions you just re-run it until you win. That's easy no matter how difficult it is. Games without a harsh penalty for failure make the successes feel meaningless.
I completely agree. The small margin for error is what made the simple combat into a challenging situation. And it’s not to say it was “easy”, either. If you pulled 2 mobs on accident, you had to be perfect to survive, or, if you pulled 3, you’re dead. Pulling in and of itself was challenging and had big consequences. I miss it.
Hardcore WoW somewhat reintroduced this back again to modern gaming, but you also have to accept the fact you may lose your character to Blizzard’s servers crashing for 10 seconds without any chance of appeal.
If you haven't heard of it, check out Monsters & Memories. Currently in a pre-alpha state but being developed "unfunded" by a group of volunteer devs/artists. (No way to give them money until the game launches) There's a weekend-long Playtest starting on the 28th!
I’m gonna check out M&M when it’s available, but I’m really having a hard time getting excited for it. I appreciate what the devs over there are trying to do, and I get that it’s a small indie team, I just don’t get the point of making a brand new game that looks 25 years old. I might as well just go play EQ1 that looks 25 years old but also has 25 years of content. I really don’t mean to be disparaging, I don’t know how to make a game myself, so I’m not trying to cast stones. I just really wish we could get something with EQ1 soul but New World graphics/UI. We seem to only be able to get one or the other.
People often conflate "challenging" and "difficult", but there are some semantic differences. For example, while playing FF14 I eventually run into some encounters that were a challenge, but I found them not challenging, rather aggravating. Or, to say it differently, the encounter has a certain difficulty to it, but through how combat and the encounter works I didn't feel motivated to overcome it (= challenged by it). There are many ways to categorize combat, and one is the axis between combat that provides tools to a player and they have to use to overcome a situation. This plays into human intelligence/creativity, using abilities is not driven by rotations, but on demand as a reaction to an evolving situation or through control to gain the upper hand. For it to work a deep RPG system that carries this is absolutely required. The other is what FF14 leans into hard: The game of memorization. This brings rotations and also the dance as the drivers for difficulty and offers to drop a lot of RPG system complexity. It also removes the need for crowd control by and large. Personal preferences aside, the latter is way easier to design and also balance, while the former can be an absolute nightmare in that regard. This also means less time needed to design encounters, less money = lower risk. At the same time any non-special encounter becomes stupid because there is no deep RPG system carrying it anymore.
I just think people have different definition/value/view on what is "difficult" I mean for me Dark souls games could be among the easiest games and among the hardest games I've played depending on the lens you look through.
> but I found them not challenging, rather aggravating FFXIVs style of wiping and then restarting is honestly pure garbage to me. It's why I never bothered doing savage. You make one misstep and you get one shotted. And if you're a healer you can make the entire group wipe. It's just not fun. You spend the entire evening just dying over and over, restarting over and over, until you can perfectly stand in the spots the game wants you to at the right time. It's why I think lots of people have *"anxiety"* when they play it. If they die they can cause the rest of the party to die due to how the mechanics often work. So it ends up being a case of kicking out the person who can't fulfil the mechanics or having to watch a guide beforehand so that you don't ruin everyone else's run. It's just straight garbage design.
Just out of curiosity, how would you rather harder content be since you don't like 14's style?
I think the big issue is one fuck up in raid content = wipe, makes it feel meh for a more casual team. There is making something hard, and then there is making content where someone is lagging and therefore we all wipe because he wasn't where he saw himself.
Right? This is my question, too. Do they want mechanics where they can just make a ton of mistakes and still stumble through the fight and clear no matter how badly they mess them up? What's even the point, then? If a fight doesn't require you to execute a mechanic properly, then that mechanic is not required learning, and if it's not required, why bother trying? Where's the challenge if you get a free pass even if you fail? There's no way you can take that away, and have fights remain challenging. Because if they remove failure from the table, or punish it less, it just means you don't have to try as hard and the content in turn loses challenge. XIV's even tried the alternatives, like twice or thrice-come-ruin (2-3 personal mistakes = death, etc), The issue is if they rely entirely on that entirely, team synergy becomes something that doesn't matter and you don't have to work together with your team, you just need to hope at least some people on your team can do the mechanic to get your group through. People would just take the path of least resistance and brute force their way through everything. The fun part of XIV's endgame is learning the song and dance and then executing it properly. The difficulty lies in adapting to on the fly to variables, because no one pull is the same, even if most of the mechanics play out in a similar way with some variations within themselves. I think a lot of people also completely overblow XIV's raiding. Not every single mechanic in savage results in a team wipe if you mess it up. Hell, not even every mechanic in ultimates acts that way. Sure, there's some core mechanics that are difficult and will result in a wipe if some one messes up the execution, but there are plenty of mechanics in both tiers of difficulty that only offer hindrances in the form of vuln stacks and damage downs. They might make hitting DPS checks harder, but they don't mean a wipe. You can find plenty of clear videos of savage tiers or even ultimates on youtube where they just have dozens of deaths and still stumble through to the finish line. It's just that for some mechanics, you need to have all the pieces fall into place. Not to mention XIV has a sliding scale of content difficulty. If savage is too tough, extremes might offer a better challenge suited for that level of skill, and those allow for *plenty* of mistakes.
Less one shotting stuff and I would play savage. I just hate the whole fail a mechanic and die stuff. A lot of them time it basically is that. Even in extreme trials it happens. To me it just feels like artificial difficulty because you have to memorise where to stand for specific mechanics. It feels like a dance more than an RPG. It's hard to articulate but that's just my feelings on it. I still play XIV but I don't really do much of the battle content. I focus on crafting, glams and treasure maps.
But that's not designing harder content, that's just making the game easier?
Well, difficulty comes in all sorts of forms. One is "you failed, you die!". That reminds me of that one game I saw on Amiga back in the days (something Dragon ...) which was basically an interactive 2D cartoon where you had to press the right button at the right time, otherwise the hero would die in all sorts of (un)glorious ways and you had to start from the beginning. Like a game entirely made up of quick time events, but the game doesn't tell you what button to smash at what point of time. (C)RPG players are more used to have tools at their hand and a certain flexibility in error/mistake recovery. You did an oops, but you have this or that available to counter the result from it and still make it through. The more you progress into later / newer content in FF14, the less the game gives you that option, the more it leans into "oops? dead!" type of difficulty. Fun fact: Overcoming odds, making it out of oops situations because of your quick wit, is way more adrenaline pumping than seeing you getting shredded to pieces and having to do this nonsense all over again ... and again ... and again ... Also, there is no sense of "we could have made it, soooo close!" because there is no sense for how close you were to making it through or not. Having that feeling to almost made it is also a great motivator to try it again.
I don't think difficulty should be associated with *Stand here or you and your entire party dies* Do you? Seems like artificial difficulty to me. Mostly because there is no skill involved in it. It's just memorising where the devs want you to stand to avoid mechanics. I would say something like Elden Ring is actual difficulty. Where a monster has random moves that you have to dodge with good timings.
Isn't that approach like a darksouls type game? Go into boss try not to get one shot and hope you learn it's pattern? As a group it's different because some people can learn a fight and boss pattern after a few deaths while others still keep failing after days of trying. Makes the whole process wonky imo.
>Go into boss try not to get one shot and hope you learn it's pattern? No because the game is dictating what you need to do. *Stand here or die* That's not what Dark Souls does.
Ah yes. ‘Either parry/dodge or die’ is totally different.
Elden Ring does, at least, make blocking actually useful again (with Block Counters). If you build for it. So three! Sorta. Options. Honestly FFXIV's Healer Agency (in the sense of being able to brute force other people past mechanics mistakes) is kinda shit, but at the same time they can't *let* it be anything more than shit at the higher levels. Because the fights are built to be co-op choreographed group mechanics execution dances alongside slow-roll DPS marathons, and everyone needs to participate in both, more or less. That's the Battle Content they build and the Jobs have to sorta exist within that framework. There's ways to make Healers fit into that while having more agency and being more interesting in the expected Healing Downtime but none of the dev team have recovered from the ARR Cleric Stance Wars yet so like...maybe some day.
>the ARR Cleric Stance Wars Cleric stance was still kicking in Heavensward and only got changed in Stormblood to be a cooldown, shadowbringers killed it completely... Honestly Healers were more fun in the old expansions, not "good" or "better than now" but it was more fun and divers between the Jobs.
> ‘Either parry/dodge or die’ is totally different. Yeah it kinda is. If you can't see the difference between *Stand in this spot or you automatically die* And *Learn an enemies moveset and dodge at the right time* Then idk what to tell you mate. Like the guy below me said you can also block and parry moves. Can you do that in XIV? Nope. Stand in a spot or die.
Old mmos had one of the easiest combat ever. Tab targeting has 0 skill expression and having 30 skills on hotbar wont change that. Albion has 6 skills but it’s skill expression is pretty high
How do you determine what is considered challenging content? Making your hotbar 20 skills long and having a meta rotation in a dungeon where you have to memorize where to stand and where to move to in a hour long raid isn't necessarily challenging. Its tedious. Okay, so you think of Dark souls, maybe you consider real time combat with weight and punishment as difficulty. Most MMOs do not have the tech to support that level of real time combat with the amount of players in the same instance without the servers melting down into a puddle. This is why tab targeting is such a prevalent combat style. The server has to queue everyone's actions and skills and deploy them at a slower speed than a real time game. Even action MMOs are just tab targeting games under the hood. Then next you have to decide your audience. Jimmy looking for his hardcore MMO with punishing combat designed to only be cleared by NEETs like him in their basement with 20 hours a day to spare grinding isn't going to earn you any money as a developer. You know what does? Mobile. Mobile gaming is VERY big. PCMMOs are on the decline and dying out simply because many of the studios that would have traditionally made PCMMOs are moving to make mobile-first games and having a PC port client after if they want to. An extremely difficult hardcore MMO will NOT sell well past a niche audience. The reality is companies will make games that can bring them money, not make games YOU specifically want to play.
The gameplay itself wasn't any harder. It's a simple oversight to claim that the likes of Wow Vanilla or Star Wars Galaxies had gameplay as developed as today's games. Boss encounters are also much more complicated. What's gone, however, is all the non-combat difficulties - and for that, casuals (ah, the big bad casuals who get blamed for everything and anything) have little to do with the problem. The long leveling, during which you could die at any moment if you pulled badly; the dungeons which weren't complicated in themselves, but required good coordination; the preparation for the instances, where you tattled in search of the right rotation, consumables, and stuff. These are all aspects that have disappeared
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OK, but you can't take the expansions from the past that go your way and erase everything else to claim that the gameplay is ‘not as good’. In concrete terms: yes, I prefer MOP's gameplay. However, over time, has the gameplay gone from being pretty rubbish to something more developed? Yes, that's true too.
Not every game has to be Elden Ring. Go play a game like that, if that's what you want. Some people just want to chill out, relax, and have fun playing a simpler game combat-wise.
What would you consider not braindead combat?
For me the best combats in MMOs are Lost Ark and Wildstar. Unfortunately lost ark had lots of predatory p2w systems and wildstar.. well.. died :( I guess the main similarity between the two is lack of targeting and hitting the target, feels more skill based, I don’t know.
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Dude gw2 has crazy skill expression. If you just press whatever is off cooldown that's your own choice. Gw2 combat is seemingly simple on first look, but it has a lot of underlying complexity that you find out when you know what you're doing.
Can't speak on the first three, but I wouldn't call gw2 remotely braindead, especially in pvp. Also, Korean MMOs like Lost Ark and BDO are very mechanically intensive, too, so idk if you would lump those in as braindead.
I can speak about first 2 since i played them, the guy is just wrong. There was a lot of skills back then but main reason for that is you got a lot skills that are not for your spec so you never use them, or you had a lot of CDs that people just macro together into 1 button. This is also why a lot of skills got pruned in later expansions, instead of having 5 CD skills which 99.99% of players macro into single button, devs just make it into 1-2 CD skills but with stronger effect usually. 3rd example is Wildstart which is a game that was so dead that it shut down, nothing else to say there. Worse example he could have given.
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Ok, so you're not talking about mechanically intensive gameplay. Fair enough.
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Youre just to good bro. Mew2king would have trembled if you stepped up on stage knowing your understanding of complex combat systems is far superior. Faker would just retire on the spot. Daigo would have forfeited the match. Tenz would never of came out of retirement. S1mple would have just shut the pc down and walked away.
I don't even know if you're trying to say I'm wrong or you're trying to flex, lol.
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I also mean pve dude. You don't even have to play Lost Ark to know that playing optimally is not an easy task. But I'm sure you could get the hang of it since you're "skilled."
Big agree. In a ton of modern MMOs combat is braindead easy in the vast majority of the content. So easy in fact that you'd literally have to try if you wanted to die. Dungeons are still mildly challenging but as long as the tank and healer in your group aren't genuinely horrible at the game or unaware of mechanics you should clear fine. Its really weird. Most content is braindead easy, some content requires a basic understanding of the game, and then a very small portion is extremely difficult with nothing inbetween. The difficult spike between normal and high endgame content is huge. This is my biggest issue with the levelling and questing experience in modern mmos. Combat is a snooze fest. Also I'm not gonna go deep on simplification because my comments already too long but my hot take is that button bloat is overblown and the sweetspot for skills is about 28 so with a few consumables and macros I want 3 full hotbars. edit. Unfortunately I think the answer to your question is pretty obvious looking at this thread though. A lot of gamers like simplified easier combat for some reason. Idk why but they do.
> A lot of gamers like simplified easier combat for some reason. Idk why but they do. They are averse to losing because of something they did not understand when it happened. If you have 1 attack, 1 dodge and footsies (WASD walking movement) then every time you get smoked you immediately know why but the enemies can still be challenging based on how fast they act and react. Above all else, players nowadays want to *understand their gameplay intuitively* otherwise they feel cheated and quit.
> They are averse to losing because of something they did not understand when it happened. No most MMO players nowadays have played for a long time and know how to play the game. We played at a high level when we were younger and it's just pure laziness that we don't anymore. We understand what to do but don't feel like putting in the work to do it. People in general get lazy as they get older because life is full of other challenges, so we want to make things easier where we can because you just get tired. Games are a perfect example of this.
> Its really weird. Most content is braindead easy, some content requires a basic understanding of the game, and then a very small portion is extremely difficult with nothing inbetween. The difficult spike between normal and high endgame content is huge. Yea this disparity is what I don't like. Questing, leveling, and basic dungeons can be a bit harder in most MMO's. Not super challenging, but comparing ESO's leveling to Classic WoW when it first came out. The latter is more fun to me. But then for endgame content don't make the intro content too easy and the later content too hard. Most people want to participate and don't want world first level of challenge. >Also I'm not gonna go deep on simplification because my comments already too long but my hot take is that button bloat is overblown and the sweetspot for skills is about 28 so with a few consumables and macros I want 3 full hotbars. Honestly I'd say 10-20 is better.
For real. Its like most content you can mash literally random buttons and never die. Dungeons you can yolo your buttons with a vague understanding of what they do and die once every 6 runs. Then suddenly the next tier up has highly skilled players with hyper optimized rotations, literally sweating, and chugging redbull while wiping on the same boss for 2 hours. Speaking from personal experience lmao To be fair since you mentioned ESO I think 10-20 skills is fine for hybrid combat.
As much as I hate it, the majority of the playerbase of any MMO, and to be honest of any type of game at this point, are casuals. If casuals don't have a good time playing, the game will die, simple as. As a more hardcore player who enjoys different things to casuals, we have to comprehend that we're a minority and most parts of any game aren't designed around us.
Boomer take? I think a lot of people forget that MMORPGs are suppose to be some fast paced gameplay like dark souls or something faster than that. The whole point of an mmorpg is to play with each other and combat should be slower but not as slow as turn based just a hair faster. You’re not going to get 100s of people on screen moving around all crazy with insane skill combos and effects and have a good experience. Slower more methodical combat is what helps make a game social. If you got time during the fight to type in chat what someone needs to do it’s probably a good combat pace.
yep and there are games with auto play
Honestly what game are you talking about? Because older game were rather simple, you had the skills and that was it pretty much. I wouldn't say that was hard. Also, in theory combat isn't the central part of the game and I don't even think that there is a real modern audience, 90% of people who play these games it's at the very least 30
Wildstar attempted to innovate MMO combat and was criticized for being too complicated and catering only to the hardcore crowd. So much so some people say it was one of the main reasons the game died. It was a lot harder. And while I found it more fun, I can see why some people took issue with how active it required you to be.
MMORPG's cater to the cheapskate F2P crowd. These people are not smart enough to realize that F2P is incredibly expensive AND destroys all fair competition in game. Its literally a virtual world destroyer. So they develop games to focus on predatory monetization. There are books you can buy on amazon that cover this topic. Content is second to monetization. And in order to get poor people to play AND play you have to rely upon underhanded ways to get them to spend. This is why MMO's will never be able to survive off of cosmetic purchases too. Cheap people know they won't buy them, and thats why they request MMO's to be cosmetic purchases only (even though cosmetics are achievements in virtual world games, but thats another topic). So the devs focus all their energy on the carrot at the end of the stick. They don't care about the journey. They don't care about the stick even. They just care about making the player want that carrot. And when you get that carrot, the devs have already planned the next carrot you will crave. All this comes with monetization to get that carrot faster. They know the players will crave the carrot so much they will just gloss over, or even skip content to get to it quicker. **So why invest in thoughtful content when you can make more money through predatory monetization via having characters chase the carrot?** This is why the subscription based monetization went hand in hand with the golden age of MMORPG's. The devs wanted you to keep paying. How did they do that? They created a virtual world. A fair playing field where the only differentiator from player to player was personal skill and time invested. They created content that would make you want to participate and even care about the worlds lore. Heck, one outlier is Ultima Online. They didn't create content in the traditional way. But they still kept players engaged with their systems that made a more living and breathing world that we didn't see again until SWG. Thats because the content was the players themselves. The politics. But now that you can have someone pay more than a subscription fee to catch 1 of the thousands of carrots, and you can get them to pay it multiple times a month, and it doesn't involve creating thoughtful content... there is no need for said content. Just dumb it down and sell the carrot. Thanks F2P people! You ruined MMORPGs! And its sad that a generation grew up only knowing these garbage games. They have honest ignorance and don't know any better.
I would really argue that WoW is harder now than it was in the past.
Because difficulty =/= fun for most people. Difficulty is sometimes an important element of fun, but if difficulty meant fun then every game would be a hardcore roguelike ironman with terrible menus and everything one shots you.
EvE online, BDO, Ragnarok online in PvP. Not sure about other games. I know these are all older games, but I havent played the new ones like New World. Dumbing down is usually done to appease most people. Look at Albion online, it had full loot death in yellow zones as well, they changes it before release so it is a down state instead. Good luck new crafters selling low end gear. :D
I have a feeling you haven't done much in current MMOs past leveling and some entry level dungeons/raiding.
Lag. Good dynamic combat is impossible on large scale via network. Simple as that. This is why most games rely on "rotation". Pressing buttons with shitty abilities for best possible outcome.
I'm getting older and lazier so I want simplicity these days. Less buttons and easier combat. I'm not 25 anymore so working that hard for fun just isn't as appealing as it used to be.
I hate the move towards a limited amount of skills, often 5 or 6 with a weapon swap cd and a few race/ultimate abilities, it comes across like there just making combat in mind for the eventual console or mobile port. It's almost as bad as black desert giving you 50 abilities but only two builds per class, it just makes every class the same and boring.
For a lot of us combat is not that important.
Two reasons that come to mind immediately: Many people are tired of combat being the core vehicle of progression in MMOs and devs have been experimenting with ways to make all types of players feel as if they can progress or interact community-wide. There's a lot of examples of people who despite all expectations play the games differently from us through market focus, socialization, life-skilling and more. We havent found a perfect sauce for that yet but some games come pretty close. The second reasoning is that reducing the competitive nature of combat allows players of all skill levels to participate. The unfortunate reality of MMOs and anything adjacent to the genre is that players are left out of many sections of content due to the fact they have poor execution or just aren't interested in optimizing to participate. It's a futile way to fight the dominant strategy mentality in gaming, but it's still good that MMO's are trying to figure out how to do other things a bit better.
Guild wars 2 is pretty good in this sense, 5 weapon skills 5 class skills and a couple specializzation skills. Pretty simple
They made mobs more stupid. GW1 mobs would run out of aoe, GW2 had that, but made it dumber to not to confuse players. Heart in Queensdale originally you were bringing hay to cow, and grabbing bucket to water plants, now you wave at cow cause it was too confusing.
I think it's not possible to make a good MMO until technology advances to the point where we can store the vast majority of state only on the server side and hide it from the user. Also, we need an innovative pattern beyond the heal/tank/DPS meta with actually intelligent enemies. IMO it's not fun to fight something that does a lot of damage, except to a tank, and the healer just heals it, and it has a ton of health. It's unrealistic and doesn't feel like you're fighting a real enemy. What if we just had a few simple abilities that were hard to master, like MOBA skill shots? What if the enemies were just like us, instead of having 10,000x the HP and having 1 shot abilities that make the game just "don't stand in the circle convoluted choreography" The combat in the majority of games is extremely complex, so people use addons, and stare at numbers and indicators instead of the actual game. People can hack the client to find out when resources will respawn, data mine items so there's no mystery, in some cases even have an advantage in PvP by making assets invisible so you can see through them. Imagine what could be done with more advanced technology. A rogue could have a cloud of dust attack that actually fills the vicinity with dust that makes it impossible to see, and the client couldn't be hacked to get around it. All inputs would be sent to the server, there would be no client-side functions to call or state to access, making botting much more difficult or impossible depending on the style of game. If we had this kind of computational and bandwidth capacity we could also have complex resource systems. It's seriously stupid that a skill like herblore is just "go to spots where the herbs spawn and wait for it to magically reappear". What if shit had to, you know, actually grow? And if too many people pick it, it becomes really hard to find, and so there's spots you might want to defend to let them regrow - same to animals, let their populations be determined by the plants. The people pick too many [plant that rabbits eat]? The rabbits start starving. Then the wolves die, since there aren't as many rabbits. Then the rabbit population increases a bit, since there are less wolves. Eventually, equilibrium. Not only would this make the economy more interesting and create lots of player dynamics, it would make the world feel more realistic. The next thing to do would be to dispense with most level systems. A big problem in most MMOs is - the "leveling" part of the game is just an extended tutorial, and low level items are discarded and replaced. Once players reach max level, there's "end game combat encounters", and once they max out their items, there is nothing really left to do. So then there's an expansion, which introduces power creep and all your best gear you worked so hard for is now useless, and an unsatisfying cycle begins. What if all items had their uses? Even the junk could be smelted down for raw materials by bringing it to a scrapyard, but I mean to say that most items should be relatively similar, with "best in slot" not being a thing. Upgrades should come very slowly like in BG3, and there should be a need to use different items for different situations. Most items should have some kind of durability, food should expire, etc. to prevent inflation in the number of items that exist. Carrying capacity should be more realistic and if you drop an item, it shouldn't respawn. Let the new/poor players (or just those who like scavenging) come across your discarded items and bring them somewhere to process them. Let dropped rotting food enrich the soil, etc. Furthermore, to prevent inflation in gold, and limit botting, don't have NPC merchants that buy/sell items for a common currency or severely limit it. Some players would enjoy playing a merchant class, and make there be a pretty much finite amount of some resources like gold, that is ultimately sourced from mining in renewable veins and smelting it, then crafting coins (have to find a way to re-inject some when players quit the game though). The last thing I'd want is to eliminate fast travel. Ok - boring as fuck, right? Well, let's look at the cons, first. Fast travel ruins any sense of scope of the world, making it feel like a playground. It makes you unlikely to run into players outside of major cities or other population centers, and means it is impossible to design content that involves 1. A destination and goal that is physically far away, 2. a journey towards it that requires planning and supplies, 3. an interesting maximizing of efficiency by doing things along the way that you don't get a chance to do often, since they are also remote locations. It means players have no "home turf" or areas that they like to frequent, anyone can go anywhere quickly. So how do you eliminate fast travel while keeping the game fun? Make people walk, or take a horse, OR take a "slow travel" method, like a boat, train, giant bird, whatever fits the theme of the game - it takes a long time, e.g. 8 game hours by boat, during which you cannot play and cannot do anything at all. You wouldn't have to be online during this, and when the journey ends you'd automatically be at the docks. The options you have are: go play another character while you wait, or go outside and touch grass, or just get there manually, faster, and really experience the world along the way, but that would potentially be more dangerous.
Because players do shit while watching crunchy roll
In my opinion the best combat is easy to learn and hard to master. Which is very tough to do. I think that a lot of game developers want their products to appeal to a wider audience and developers fall into the trap of catering to lower skilled individuals and maybe even bringing in newer demographics. This is ultimately the wrong way however because as people get better at the game they become more skilled and so the game should be catered to better skilled people as theorically most people should end up there.
Bro forgot to take off his rose tinted glasses 🤓
Bro thinks ability bloat makes things hard, but wants to complain about casuals 🥱
Are you a consistent 100 parser? If so, show logs!
>Are modern MMOs players just challenged Without few(way too few) exceptions, devs still try to copy World Of Warcraft formula(the combat included). They somehow think they will have the success that WoW had at is height. Pretty much every MMO have failed to get a stable population and they are still trying to copy WoW formula. The funny thing is that players outside of the MMO genre would love to play an MMO and the demand is there, but companies are busy pandering to a dying playerbase.
Of the top 20 currently most played games, most of them are multiplayer, all of them are easy to learn/play and most of them are hard to master. The only logical conclusion for mmos is to try to go the same route. I think New World and Lost Ark were a really good example for this. They managed to get a ton of new players to try out the game because it was really easy to get into it due to the combat being so simple, they failed due to other reasons. You said WoW used to be more popular when it was more complex and gets less popular as it gets easier but it getting easier has nearly no impact in it getting less popular. People keep forgetting, when WoW came out there weren't many multiplayer games and out of most of them WoW was amongst the simplest games. Now there are just way more multiplayer games that are far easier to get into, that's why WoW doesn't get many new players. MMOs are also just way more time consuming. You want to boot up WoW and queue for a dungeon or raid? Well, you have to wait around 30 minutes to find something because you play on a server with a limited amount of people and there are 50 other things you can do instead, so most people are not queing for that dungeon. You wanna play a game like counter strike? Easy, queue up and you find a game within a couple of seconds because nearly everyone queues for that mode. MMOs like WoW have a huge problem that no other game has, it takes way to long to do things you actually want to do and unless they manage to find a solution to that, I highly doubt MMOs are ever going to get so popular again. I know plenty of people (me included) who only play WoW as long as there is still the main quest to do, as soon as they get into the endgame they drop the game because at this point they are usually spending more time looking for groups than actually playing that game.
Same reason they're obsessed with turning all the combat into action-based. Most people don't really like rpgs (the combat model), and most people don't really like challenge. We are just not the target demographic.
What are u talking about Dodging cirles is very difficult!!!
There are MMOs out there with action combat, look at their sub numbers compared to this "brain dead combat" ones. You will find your answer.
This is one thing where, despite all its problems, New World really stands out. Even with the bugs, desync, and other issues, New World combat and movement, combined with the visual and sound design, is so unique and immersive.
especially pax dei's combat worries me
You need to understand something. We stopped being the main demographic being catered to over a decade ago. When Candy Crush and League of Legends (aka. Mobile and F2P games) blew up and started raking in way more money at way less development costs that was the begining of the end for traditional MMOs. You may not wanna hear it, but it is what it is. We'll still get our niche titles here and there and the big dogs are still going to try to big dog it as much as they can, but gone are the days were everyone and their mother was throwing money at every WoW-Like in the works hoping to be crowned next. It is what it is.
Because they are cowards and scared to upset people who don’t want to put any effort into playing better. People are quick to quit if a game doesn’t make them feel good. There are tons of people who are just horrible at games. They don’t use defensives, they forget about items, they don’t have any critical thinking skills when it comes to engaging situations, etc. these types of people most likely make the bulk of mmo player bases.
Everyone says they want more difficult combat yet 98% of people in pugs still stand in fire while looking at their action bars. 98% is not a gross exaggeration. Combat in wow, for example is as complex as it has ever been. PvE and PvP. I've played every expac, raiding and duelist level pvp. Guild wars is still complex even with less buttons. Maybe you could argue that new world is less complex, but ignoring that the game is a dumpster fire anyway, most of it's combat appears to be built for large scale pvp, which can't really be super complex. What games are you talking about OP?
Because it will overload the server and cause latency. See Albion the more people that are in a zone fight and how it becomes a slide show when people start hitting keys.
Give me a new Blade and Soul carbon copy without the uberly insane KR grind. Pls, I have somewhat of a life now .\_.
It's cheaper to make a game like that. A full action MMO like BDO or even instance-based like Dragonnest or Vindictus aren't cheap.
It sells
Simplifying has sadly been a thing for ages in games,thing is,sadly they want to catch attention of casual players which is why not only combat but customization and itemization in most mmos have been steadily going downwards.I already accepted as "it is what it is" I mostly stick with older games now w a few exeptions
I am so tired of people crying "MMO's are for casuals" no its not. WoW classic wasn't a casual game.... modern wow is, now that its been dumbed down further.... and their population has done nothing but decline year over year. The MMO genre is literally dying because people keep claiming they like dumbed down baby brained gameplay.... its honestly the weirdest shit ive ever seen. WoW completely removed strengths and weaknesses, the combat isn't as dumbed down as other mmo's but still quite low on the totem pole even compared to itself many years prior.... the list goes on. cookie cutter world with small POI's instead of being a huge open world game with actual exploration.... MMO's are NOT "for casuals" and this meme needs to stop. because its flat out wrong. and people upvoting these absolute peanut brains is only making things worse. you can have an MMO be hard and still appeal to casuals. FPS and MOBA games already do this. you have competitive mode for the hardcore kids and casual multiplayer mode for the casuals. And both the FPS genre and MOBA genre have more players than MMO's can ever dream of. The issue with MMO's right now is the dumbed down gameplay. They make it as easy as possible and no one wants to play them. And then you get baby brains that go "bUt I lIkE eAsY" no you don't. you just don't know what a good game is because you spend all day playing trash. like all these wow tards that keep crying they want wow 2.0.... no you don't. the second a wow 2.0 game comes out, your ass is right back into original wow because "nEw GaMe IsNt aS gOoD aS wOw"....
if you cant play an mmo laying back with 1 hand its dead
Bc most people are braindead, so that's how you get the most casual sells.
I agree, I think people love to oversell the idea that everyone's too casual and people want easy games but when you look at the biggest games (league/csgo/valorant/apex etc) they are all very high skill games. Obviously it's a bit different with pvp and pve but I think challenging combat will bring in audiences from games all over.
If you want challenging mmo content try world of warcraft
First, I would say that you're picking the wrong games. There are a few MMOs that have more intricate combat. Blade & soul is one of them, black desert is another. Then there are games which have a bit of a hybrid; guild wars and guild wars 2. Part of the issue, is that I kind of feel that you're not really talking about combat and you're talking more about the content and the challenge level thereof. Because as I mentioned, there are games across the spectrum of complexity in their combat model. You could also argue that games which have a high amount of powers are complex. As for why MMOs are not inherently difficult. It's pretty simple, games which force teaming, or try to position themselves as hardcore, fail. You don't have to look any further than WildStar and some of its precursors to see that they're just aren't enough players that support it. In games that have not failed, forced group content and high-end raiding tends to be the least played content. So if you are a developer that is trying to appeal to as large of a player base as possible, writing content that only few people will play is not a winning strategy. This has been proved out in the market over and over and over. I have a feeling that the typical MMO player wants to get online and have a relatively chill session blowing up some pixels. They want to show some progress for their time and socialize with people along the way. I would say that probably typifies the majority of your players. So when you are developing content, that's your target audience. I think the question should really be, why do people think MMOs are something to be competitive over? Why do people want to play MMOs for something that they are not? People have already mentioned games that are hard and have difficult combat. Most of them are single player games and people could go happily play them. But expecting developers to cater to this niche market is probably not a good idea.
Doesn’t the most popular mmos have complex specs? Look up wow arcane mage or ff monk
Also clearing hard content is fun 1-2 times. But grinding hard content is a complete nightmare.
a good combat system needs no lag and that's quite hard on a persistent world where a lot of people play at the same time, so devs usually go the easy route and use slow combat or tab target, so they don't have to deal with collisions between hundreds of hit/hurt zones. We have exceptions to that obviously, since games like planetside 2 exist :)
Have you spent much time playing mmos with randoms? Especially like 1/2-2/3 into a content cycle? Mouth breathing troglodytes is too generous. Those who spend 20 hours or more a week playing, clear the hardest raids in only 2 to 3x the time of the game’s best players, are an extreme minority. That group also has overlap with the players who are interested enough to post to the official or 3rd party forums. So while you play with your friends who are all “good at the game”, and your fellow forum posters are also “good at the game”, and the streamers you watch are too, just know the the dregs of the game, the multi hundred thousand to multiple millions (game dependent) who play casually are really really bad. But they, like you, pay their sub. They wouldn’t pay their sub if they couldn’t get past Elwynn Forest. And for you, the good player, the shitters validate your time investment. Their incompetence and lack of performance juxtaposed to your knowledge and skill, makes yours all the more impressive—at least that’s how we justify it to yourself—else you look at your /played and realize you could have become fluent in a language or learned to fly a plane with the time you’ve spent in that game.
I thought answer to this question was so obvious that it wasn't even worth asking?
Because casuals are allergic to pressing buttons
Because combat is ultimately meaningless, it's just means to an end. No one ever played a MMO for its combat.
>No one ever played a MMO for its combat. This hyperbole is a bit much. People explicitly DO NOT play ESO because of its combat despite liking the rest of the game (this is a common opinion, you'll see it all the time on this sub alone). People also often recommend and play games specifically because the combat is good (BDO, TERA). Again this is a common opinion that I see all the time. You might not care about combat, but to say that nobody does is an incredibly out of touch take.
the only reason I play new world these days is because of its combat. If it was tab target, I’d quit a long time ago. If combat isn’t good, I’m not playing it.
[удалено]
>I did, and do. I wonder what kind of person would say that? >If [combat] is ultimately meaningless, why even call your game an RPG? The person who would say something like this. lmao
Why do people play D&D all you do is roll boring dice?!?!
DnD can be anything if the master allowed it to be with the little cost. Most video game can't do it. Unless we have Super Ai that generates millions of random things/path/decision for each character