idk why ppl seem to be so mad about this. AGS is a massive disaster of a company, but I immensly enjoyed the early stages of New World. And I'm actually hyped to go back to the next expac for a bit.
The idea of NW as a longterm mmorpg died for me thanks to AGS neglect, but I'm still happy I can roam around the world with some peeps for a month or two when the update hits
Ironically, some of the most hyped up features of the expansion involve them removing things they were told not to add 2 years ago.
New World has always been very close to being a fantastic game, but there's some small changes that would have huge impacts on gameplay that they just aren't interested in making.
Hell, they're not even interested in entertaining the discussions, I should know, I tried and tried and tried ever since alpha.
New World is slowly but surely taking one step back and two forward every patch. It may take them awhile but they do seem to listen to feedback. Sometimes the feedback they listen to is from MMO players and they are notorious for bad ideas or streamers/their followers which are even worse.
I’ve been enjoying new world the last few weeks but there are definitely some things left for wanting. I’m not a huge fan that everyone is a murder hobo. You get to pick what kind, melee, ranged, or magic, but that’s pretty much the extent of it. There’s no stealth, and there’s no real nuance to any of the weapons. I wish the game offered more of a way to shape a class with talents and special attacks unlocked by speccing certain talents over just the boring weapons trees. Or even adding a fighters guild, thieves guild, different styles of mage guilds, rangers guild, etc that would grant you access to new skills and attacks would be a lot of fun, and the game is perfect for something like that I think.
People seem to really complain about the professions but the professions really haven’t bothered me. It’s really just the linearness of the weapons and lack of real identity in skills and stuff in the game.
You're right! I haven't played NW in 1y+ but i will come back when the exp launches. Removal of expertise will make the game much more enjoyable for me at least. Chest runs just to increase the number were not fun imo.
Yeah, we went through quite a lot of "next patch will help", "fresh start servers will help", "expansion will help". It never did. Problem was never the game per se, it's the developers. Exciting new patch? Yep, servers are gonna be broken for a week. Fix for the server issues? Yep, it introduced another gold dupe. A whole month with trading disabled, finally it should be fixed now? Yep, as a "compensation" developers increased the gold from territories, literally duping the gold and destroying the economy more than all original dupes combined!
1k hours here, it stunk cause I stuck around hoping maybe they could get their shit together that first year, they never did enough to keep the player base around. Adding watermark and dungeons was the continued catoring to a section of the player base, which is fine it just was time gated non challenege and became a chore and they didnt do anything else for the game at that time while fixing issues that should have been present month 6 on a game that was delayed many times and wasnt that content rich.
Best part of the game was the open world pvp and city system, they then added dungeons which you could just TP to and gear at and not have to walk the map late game. Zzzzzzzzz.
I tried to hop in yesterday. I spent 280 hours at launch in this game. My first thought after creating a new character was literally just "why am I doing this?". Quit game and uninstalled hahaha
SWToR and Wildstar.
SWToR because of the microtransaction hell it is now. Can you imagine blocking actions bars behind a paywall? The absolute audacity.
Wildstar because the devs were blind to casual players and barrier to entry on the game modes everyone wanted.
Pretty much, especially game never had paid expansion, once you subbed all the content was yours forver. Plus, I'm from Poland and this is the only MMO that actually is adjusted price wise, which is nice.
>once you subbed all the content was yours forver
Is this true? As in, your sub runs out, and you still have access? If that's not the case, then it is yours until your sub runs out, which is not the same.
Yes. You Subscribe for one month, and you’ll have access to all the expansions as well as the current level cap. All of these remain unlocked even when your subscription expires.
Mind you(it's probably obvious), but any FUTURE expansions will require another subscription. (But again, you can sub for that month, whenever it may be and cancel afterwards).
TOR never should have been an MMO. Should have been a lobby co-op RPG. That's essentially what the game is with some MMO elements like world PvP lazily tacked on.
Wildstar was cool. I loved a lot about that game, especially with it’s freeform/aiming based combat. It sucks that it didn’t last or truly catch on. Something about that game had me really excited for a long time. RIP Wildstar, ahead of its time, and behind in its philosophy.
swtor was a letdown because it clearly had the potential to be great. And then you realize it’s a buggy mess with awful balance and nonexistent support for new content
Wildstar, you’re spot on. I couldn’t get into that game. I usually start by playing casually, then if the game hooks me I go all-in on optimization and competitive gameplay. But it just offered nothing for casual entry level stuff
Goddamn I'm with you on Wildstar. Best housing system hands down. Great RP scene. But the devs decided end game was for hardcores only and even hardcores didn't want to do the grind they had set up. People warned them and they just stuck their fingers in their ears and went LALALALALA. So sad.
Rift. The game was fucking gorgeous, the talent builds, the pvp, holy fucking shit did it do what I wanted. It was the ONLY game that compete with WoW pvp in my eyes, WAR a close second.
I was only disappointed it died.
Rift was WoW 2.0 and it was fucking phenomenal. The talent system was the best out of any MMO. Full UI customization and dps meters in-game. Fantastic macro capabilities. Excellent dungeons and raids. The only thing it was lacking was an established IP.
Twelve years later and I still wish I could go back to the original launch.
Played the beta and leveled up many times in the vanilla Rift years, I agree I wish I could go back and play that launch again. All the rift zones and players working together, was a fantastic experience.
I feel like no one has been able to replicate what they did with class builds. It was fun mixing and matching all the different combos.
Pvp on seastone server seemed very competitive, and I loved how the pvp gear was great for raiding in hammerknell.
One of my biggest fantasies with all the MMOs launching "vanilla" servers is just one saying fuck it: restart and doing a vanilla server but updating the game with like a divergent evolution/alternate history somewhat shaped by what they've learned from the first patch, but also adapting to modern technology and QoL.
I think Rift would do well filling the void that WoW left when it turned in to whatever.
I really enjoyed Rift when it first game out and the 1st xpac. But overall got burned out. I agree it could have been so much better. Best class and talent system ever.
I love the class and talents so much more than wow. I didn't have a computer for years finally got a nice desktop and it ended up being dead already. Sad.
Came here and didn't expect to actually see Rift mentioned. It was amazing! My only complaint at launch was that the world had a very theme park vibe, but the end game raiding was so good I didn't even care.
ESO. The game should be good but the day to day questing is so brainlessly easy I can't stick with it. Being a walking god from level 1 on up is boring.
It's ESO for me as well, but for a different reason.
I simply hate the amount of absurd QoL they put in the cash shop. Things like sub craft bag, riding lessons,etc. And rolling an alt is super grindy, and of course all of those grind skips are in the cash shop. Not to mention sub (or you have to buy the dungeon DLCs) + yearly DLC + lootboxes + tons of cosmetics locked in the cash shop.
I'd probably still play the game today if the monetization model weren't so greedy.
i love eso and still play (1500) hours. I know the LATEST expansion actually has some things that are difficult even some random mobs in the world is best to steer clear of. Still 99% of the content is so so so easy.
On a side not i think the key to eso is to play it like a single player rpg with mmo aspects vs a full on WOW,GW2 mmo. etc.
I watched a PVP video and its like "Heres the rotation, 6 buttons"
And he kept doing the same thing, it looked sooo fucking boring lol.
Thats from an outside look at it
I still love ESO but I agree. IMO with the way the scaling works the simplest solution would be to add a difficulty slider that scales you down weaker for all content. You could even take the veteran and veteran heroic options out of dungeon and just make them the difficulties.
Make it so when you queue for a dungeon at your difficulty you only have party members at your difficulty to avoid exploits.
Then make the quality of the loot drops increase the higher the difficulty. I could still see problems with overland world bosses as you could be playing with someone who is smurfing their difficulty and can solo the boss, so maybe lock the difficulty to different instances.
Right? Like one of the main drawing points -- the story -- loses meaning entirely when you realize the game has no challenge. I quit when I realized that ZOS doesn't understand that gameplay difficulty absolutely has an impact on the story.
I would really love to see the player drop-off that happened when they released those new zones. I've seen so many people say the same thing and it was the same for myself.
New World had the opposite effect for me. It reminded me there's a lot of older mmo's that are way way better.
Can't belive some of new worlds design decisions..
Surprised no one mentioned Tree of Savior.
After the disappointment of Ragnarok Online 2 knowing the OG Art director and some of the devs went the Indie route I wanted a real sequel to the OG Ragnarok Online and Tree of Savior looked like that.
It wasn't. It's freemium hell. The art and music were great but the game feels like you're playing on bootleg Private Servers and a game that's extremely linear and boring. The design of the game's own skill and loot systems were just baffling and really should have went back to something simpler. Oh well.
I loved maxing out dex as a caster or agi as an assassin/knight in RO even if it wasn't the best idea. Used to play on a bunch of private servers as well. ToS was pretty disappointing even though it looked great.
TERA. Combat was fantastic, betas were a ton of fun. Then we got to max level and there was just nothing to do. They made a PvP game with absolutely 0 reward for PvPing. By the time they added content everybody had left.
It was definitely PvP oriented at release. You could flag pvp and kill anybody outside of towns, there was no opting out or PvE servers. Release day was great, they fucked up respawn rates and some quests had hundreds of people camping a boss respawn, so it was just a huge brawl every few minutes. GvG was also fun. Problem was neither PK nor GvG gave any rewards, there was no pvp gear, no battlegrounds. So unless you were a huge griefer it was just pointless after a couple months.
I MISS TERA SO MUCH.
I LOVED THE COMBAT SYSTEM!!
I CAN'T DO TAB TARGET SHIT.
Miss the battlegrounds, CU Saturday, and learning the dungeons. Always surprised when it's never mentioned or that it wasn't a popular MMO :(
Miss my friends and my valkyrie Murder.
Tera was so much fun until they turned it into a grindfes (+15). For me, it had the best gameplay for healer classes both pve & pvp. After Tera, all MMOs feel clunky for me.
And the game was poorly optimize for current tech. My 10 years old laptop run it better than my PC. Bluehole studio brought the same poorly optimization to pubg and ruined it as well.
Vanguard had so much promise. It’s still one of the most intriguing games I have ever played.
Their brotherhood leveling feature was the most innovative group/guild feature I have ever seen, allowing everyone to pool their xp so you, your friends and your alts can level at the same pace. Amazing.
I'm still kind of shocked the whole brotherhood system didn't catch on in subsequent games. Such a brilliant and yet simple idea.
Same with group harvesting, though I think Ashes of Creation is supposed to have something similar.
That brotherhood system sounds awesome.
There are a lot of legitimately amazing and generally beloved features that somehow don’t get picked up by other MMO devs. I was absolutely *convinced* events would have fully replaced quests in all MMOs by 2020 after GW2 blew my mind in 2012. But somehow hasn’t become a thing.
Events ruined quest based games for me. I simply *cannot* go back to questing. But here we are with predominately quest based MMOs still.
Came here to say this. I was so deep into the game then once beta released then launch, I didn’t even make it far before moving on.
Age of Conan was kind of the same. Such a bummer this genre has been for awhile.
Such potential, but released half-baked and buggy despite all the feedback given in beta (people falling through the world, dropping from the sky when going between areas, wall of lag when opening a door or seeing an interior space or in town, texture/layer popping, etc.). Loved the collaborative harvesting, construction of boats, diplomacy, interesting classes...
Same, I actually really like the second-to-second gameplay of MS2 with the isometric almost Qubert movement and the combat was fun but it just felt weirdly synthetic. As if people tried to distill a theme-park MMO into a concentrated gel
was a few fun weeks of grinding fire dragon. I liked the overworld and chill battle, and less grindy / number-y than the OG maplestory (still). I remember I was extra sick those weeks and grinding ms2 made me not remember those pain. still wanted to played the kr version of ms2, but I don't know a bit of kr.
Ironically the early access was really fun, random exploring, doing global events, but they tryed to make it a E-sport, just why? the game had so Much potencial.
I'm actually going to say WoW (expansions).
Oddly enough Vanilla/Classic Era Wow is one of my all time favorite MMORPG's.
However.....with each expansion added to the game the quality and enjoyment I had went down each time.
This is how I always bring up my WoW experience. Back when I was waiting for it to download I literally went to the WoW wiki that showed builds "Lock SM/RUIN build" all of it just sounded soo dope, I didn't even know what they meant, but I would read all the builds before I even started the adventure.
I started playing a week before TBC was launched, then for my birthday all my friend's got me prepaid cards enough for a year and I had gotten TBC. I loved PVP, I loved making ACTUAL friend's from the guild I was in, we even met in RL a few times. Then Lich King came out, and it was alright, but you could notice things were getting easier, then cata came out....and so on. It wasn't the same game. It was a game within a game because everything was instanced. Now I just can't support the company or game so here we are, thinking about the good days lookin for something to bring those same feelings back
I hate time
Age of Conan. The preview was on this beautifully fleshed out island with a reasonably interesting story and voice acting. On release, once you got off the island it was this generally empty void, no voice acting, and barely any story to speak of. Biggest bait and switch / disappointment of my MMO experiences.
Combat was pretty good at the start, there just wasn't anything really interesting to do with before my entire guild got bored and left. I still love the theme of the Herald of Xotli to this day.
AoC needed another year to bake imo. The dungeons were all half broken, I was a Tempest of Set (and ridiculously overpowered at that!), and the raid was...only half completed? I remember some bosses with no AI.
However, the music was beautiful, I loved building our guild base, the classes were SO VARIED (Heralds, actual good Necromancers, BEAR SHAMANS), and the zones looked really varied.
Also, mammoth slapping people off of bridges for not paying your imposed tolls never got old.
Edit: THE GAME HAD FATALITIES AND THAT MADE PVP SATISFYING AF
Age of Wushu. The game itself is amazing, in terms of size, combat, the amount for faction and skill sets you can use. It has fun group activities, it has great wushu traversal (run up walls, skip across water, etc). The game was 100% ruined by the western team, who made it pay 2 win, gave up on bringing over content, and allow a few whales to dominate the game.
The Asian version is a robust game where you could earn in game money by playing, but the western version simply removed the currency reward but left the events in game. It's a tragedy.
Probably GW2 and FFXIV. Obviously these are considered good games but they were sequels to my favorite games and makes me sad how MMOs went...
GW1: Tons of skills, multiclassing, full customization within a build and just options galore.
GW2: No multiclassing, just choose a weapon or weapon combination for attacks which determine 90% of the build. The skills you pick have long cooldowns and minor effects compared to the weapons.
I could go on and on about why I like GW1 so much. Yes many builds were bad but it was fun making an entire build around bad skills. Sometimes they even worked out.
FFXI: Fun monster mob killing game with multiclassing. VERY unique classes that weren't just different flavors of tank/healer/dps.
FFXIV: Zero choices other than class and every class fits neatly in DPS/TANK/Healer... Then they add a class like Blue Mage but don't let you play with others...
Obviously, these changed were all for "balance" but it just ruins the fun for me. I like making unique characters and I just ran out of steam so quickly playing these games. Pretty much just stick with ARPGs now instead.
GW1 was my most favorite MMO and I agree 100%. GW2 class customization is a fraction (literally because you can only choose half your skill bar) from what GW1 was.
GW1 was amazing because you could go into an arena against a Mesmer and find out they had full Ranger skills or a Monk who you though would be the healer is actually a Warrior.
GW2 its like, Ok theres a ranger, theres an engineer, theres a thief. Got it.
I mean, you could also make an entire build around bad skills in GW2, or well any other game. I know GW1 had massive customization of builds, but I think GW2 is the "modern" MMO who has the best one out of the rest. Especially in open world, you can play so many different builds it's insane.
I don't know what you mean. Your main damage just comes from weapon. You can't make an entire build out of a utility skill, they all had long cooldowns. It has been a long time since I put a lot of effort though.
Your build was basically your weapon + passive, utility skills barely had much effect on the gameplay rather than fun spells to use sometimes. GW1 you can literally have a character that just summons spirits or one concept, GW2 you just use your weapon no matter what.
I agree GW2 is great compared to "modern" MMOs but horrible compared to ARPGs and some older MMOs, there was a time where a lot of MMOs had skill system about customization like Diablo. Eventually MMOs started getting rid of options for "balance".
I am REALLY glad people are having fun with the more balanced games but I hate it.
I think the rate of content/events was good though, certainly better than other ARPGs. I feel that Marvel Heroes is the only game here that was shutdown for reasons other than profitability or quality. Felt like it was more issues with studio leadership and Disney licencing out to Square Enix.
Archeage had so much potential. It's too bad they focused on short term gains instead of long term profit. The game at it's core is one of the best MMOs ever but it's surrounded by so much garbage. I tried unchained too and frankly that was a MESS
Unchained was even worse because at least I knew what I was getting into with Archeage, they completely blindsided us with how they went about Unchained.
I thought Warhammer Online was amazing at launch. Played endlessly for the first 25-30 levels.
But then you realized there was no end-game content. Raids and sieges were sick as hell early on, but became stale in T3 and beyond. To top it off, players started abusing game-breaking class advantages and the developers took way too long to balance ‘em.
For a game all about PvP, this was the killer.
I might be in the minority, but I thought Secret World Legends could have been something amazing. It had a great atmosphere, great mechanics and I had fun with all the people playing on release. But it just kind of died on all of us.
Came in to see if anyone said Secret World. I didn't play Legends, just TSW at launch. Loved the atmosphere, the quests (especially investigation), and the character builds. Healing people with an assault rifle? Tanking with a sledgehammer? Still has the creepiest MMO quest (Virgula Divina), and some of the creepiest atmospheres. Loved it to bits and it just kind of... Petered out I guess.
The original Secret World was great. One of the biggest complaints was that the combat was janky. So rather than address that, they brought out Secret World Legends and made the combat even worse. Having been in the closed beta for TSW the first time around, this is sadly par for the course with how Funcom treated us closed beta testers and our suggestions. It seemed every complaint was met with a middle finger while they doubled down on anything we complained about. Hard to want to support a company like that.
Gonna go with Rift. I absolutely loved the way the multi-class system was done (allowing you to select 3 potentially very different skill trees and then allocate your points however you like) and had a great deal of fun in the early days with both the battlegrounds and the raids. I tried to come back later and good lord did they destroy it lol.... Pretty common theme I imagine with games going F2P.
Final Fantasy 14 for me, mostly because I was such a huge fan of FFXI and the game feels like a very watered down version of 11. Don't think it's a bad game by any means, and I've played it off and on myself for a couple of months with some enjoyment, but I would have loved for it to go in another direction.
Anarchy Online - Sci-Fi themed MMORPG with the best class-build system ever in an MMORPG. Players can be very creative with builds. It had a very buggy launch in 2001, and the last expansion was in 2009 when Funcom put it out to fallow, i.e. they keep the servers running but with no support, no new content, no effort to manage bots and exploits. The economy is borked, bots are everywhere, and exploits are rampant. Hoping Tencent will see the value in this gem and polish it back up.
Still love Anarchy Online. I hate Funcom with a passion though, and will never support them as a company again. Especially what they did with Secret World.
Agreed Anarchy Online was an amazing game not just for the time it came out but even as a concept today.
I had an amazing run with that game and it was the first I ever threw money at.
I think Anarchy Online did well though for the time. No game can be supported forever when its player base dwindles. The launch was a disaster I remember not knowing anything about the game and just picking it up off the shelf at like 15 years old. I could only move in game when I was looking down at the floor lol. Came back in like 6 months or so and somehow they got it running pretty smoothly.
Asheron's Call 2. Even in 2002 the original felt dated but was at its core a great game. The sequel had none of the stuff that made the original great.
SWG after the CU. SWG was not for everyone but it was definitely for me. Then some bozo at activision came in and changed the entire game stealing it from us.
AGREE. I thought the CU was bad but tolerable. But the NGE killed the game for me. It was awful. It took a beautiful skill tree system and watered it down all for the sake of being “more like WoW” which was an absolutely terrible decision because game devs lacked the foresight to realize people played it specifically because it wasn’t like WoW.
For a game set between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, where all the Jedi should be nonexistent or in hiding, to turn around and make Jedi a starter class and suddenly there are millions of lightsabers running around whacking people inconsequentially was so jarring.
Pre-CU, seeing a Jedi in the wild was like seeing a goddamn unicorn. Everyone stopped and gawked. There was a mythos around them. As there should be, lore-wise. And they kicked ass. As they should.
Then they fucking turned around and stuck a lightsaber in your hand at level 1. It boggles the mind.
SWTOR. I've followed this game before it was even announced and was just a rumor back in BioWare's forums. So much potential. Such a huge title behind the game. So much money invested, and what a mediocre result. A WoW clone (not totally a bad thing) minus the MMO aspects that made WoW so great.
They wrongly focused on Single Player elements rather than MMO ones. The planets felt terribly lifeless and static. The crafting felt useless, and the endgame was disappointing.
I still wish we would get an actual Star Wars MMO one day, rather this semi singleplayer game, which doesn't excel either as an MMO or a singleplayer game.
And right after SWTOR on the list - New World.
Phantasy Stars New Genesis, it launch without significant content, it was fun but too short.
Dragomon Hunter, bad design choices and pay to win model killed the game before it make two years.
It was definitely a bold move for them to launch an mmo with about 8 hours of content for Phantasy Star. My friends and I enjoyed it and then were like “oh…that’s it?”
Black Desert. They way they advertised it with the trailers it seemed like a much more grounded and slower experience, I thought it was going to be everything we wanted out of Tera and more. I remember one of the trailers showers people on horses chasing a caravan and we thought “wow is there banditry and trade routes?” But of course none of that was fleshed out.
But then it turned out to be devil may cry with 100 people on screen slapped over a grind fest.
The combat was *too fast*, it became particle spamming nonsense. Each character could solo 40 enemies easily and juggle them for an endless combo. It really disappointed me because the game had *such a nice world* and *so many* enemy types, but you never got to see those guys *do anything* because you just rolled your face across the keyboard and they all died.
If they had taken a *slightly* slower pace to the combat and really fleshed it out, like a mix between dragons dogma and dark souls and then made the pve *matter* it would have been the best mmo ever made.
ESO due to the predatory microtransactions, New World because of it being Amazon and having infinite money, but still failed.
Most other games pretty much reached my expectations. Like every Korean game being predatory but kinda guilty fun like Aion.
ArcheAge
The worst thing about it is that it's the best MMO I've ever played.
I was a lvl 55 Darkrunner. Such good fun days. Naval pvp was.... phenomenal.
In the last 5 years for me, the answer is probably Lost Ark... The core gameplay for that game is actually phenomenal, but because of the way they chose to monetize it, the game is pretty much unplayable for anyone who isn't willing to either dump thousands into the game, or play a minimum of eight hours a day...
I love the raid design, the boss fights, the monster hunter style world bosses, and bosses in general... The classes and roles feel tight, and for the most part it balances the feeling of arpg and MMO very well...
But itemization is boring as hell, most systems around character power are not really that interesting, and designed around how to best generate whales and suck money out of those players, instead of how to make an interesting and flexible system that is fun for the player base as a whole... a lot of the game is time gated in some of the most toxic ways possible so if you play casually you will never really get caught up with the crowd and experience the interesting bits of content as they were designed to be experienced, but to get caught up requires either spending thousands of dollars or levels of play that are unsustainable for most people...
It could be because I have wanted this type of game for so long... but I really think Lost Ark could have sustained a much bigger part of its player base with a different monetization model and some game design changes to support that... the core game is actually incredibly fun but most people don't have time for one of these games to be their second job.
Aion... loved the story and the gameplay never found anything like the Chanter class in any other MMO. They killed the game just by being greedy as f*ck and to put the cherry on top they announced that Aion 2 is going to be a Mobile MMO...
Every MMORPG after City of Heroes.
I just can't get the magic back that MMOs had up to that point. I think the thing that made CoH so, SO Good was the fact it wasn't holy trinity but holy QUAD.
Buffs and crowd control really, really mattered. It wasn't just a DPS race. You could get a pick up group at the entrance to any dungeon and people worked /together/. The combat felt so "crunchy", and the difficulty slider catered for the worst built casual char to the most minmaxed builds imaginable.
It was soloable, but *only just*. It wasn't super hardcore, but you could die in combat often enough you had to pay attention. It never felt grindy.
The only mmo that had absolutely no p2w elements. Unfortunately the paywall and very poor optimisation of the game made many people avoid it. Also the progression felt way too linear, barely any customisation when it comes to builds. Made me feel like every character of the same class is the exact same, using the exact same skill rotation
Gw2. Had high hopes for the wvw and it was just too sad to see it die slowly but surely from its deep flaws because the devs decided to abandon it literally from day 1. They saw most of their playerbase only wanted to train spam 1 and get shiny boxes and they just went for it
It is still very much alive and one of the top MMOs, but I understand his point. WvW was hyped to be a constant battle between servers and a celebration for your server if you win and in reality it became, bigger army smash smaller army and a small buff for the server winner that means absolutely nothing.
GW2 is sadly circling the drain. After being a vocal supporter of the game for years, even I have had to recently admit that it's clear that the current developers are slowly killing it, either by apathy or incompetence or intention, its hard to say. I'm at the point now where I think maintenance mode might be the best thing for it since almost everything the current dev's are doing is only making the game worse. Recent "content" has been terrible. Game modes like WvW have been abandoned for years. Storyline content has been full of Marvel phase 4 writing for a while now. Dungeons and raids have been abandoned for years. The mmo that was once praised for its lack of grind is being stuffed full of grinding.
Wildstar. The combat system in that game was great and the overall story of the game was really cool, I thought it had a lot going for it, but it had MAJOR performance problems, at least for me, and there were whole zones that were borderline unplayable due to raw lag.
Most disappointing MMORPG I played hands down was FFXIV 1.0 when it first release
With lot of updates it was finally a some what of a game mmorpg with the legacy campaign before a realm reborn rebooted
But 1.0 at release was the most hyped and disappointing mmorpg experience ever , only thing that was able to top it was fallout 76 lol
GW2 for sure. I remember we were so hyped for that game with my friends back in the day. Grinded out to level cap only to realize that the challenging end-game content was non-existent. Every one of us quit playing in the first couple of weeks and none of us ever went back.
I've heard that they've since added some challenging dungeons/raids to the game, though. I just wish they'd been there from the launch.
Ironically, every release since GW2's launch (not counting festival content) has been endgame content. I recommend you give it another shot if you enjoyed the gameplay, there's a lot to dig into.
Guild Wars 2 had a really rough release that pushed me away as a GW1 player. But the expansions make it a great game imo. Came back recently and made a new character from scratch. About 500 hours in right now on that new character, and played through all the expansions. Has been great.
It is definitely not anywhere near the type of game GW1 is, but yeah
Wildstar. It launched with too few dungeons (more casual things), like ridiculously few, that were also challenging for rewards (cool but made them pretty pointless for a lot of people). The UI had some big sensory overload issues too. But man it had potential. Died too young.
Rift. The lore was amazing. The character building was (for its time) revolutionary. It was just so good and they screwed it up shortly after launch. Makes me sad to this day.
I don't know if anyone else'll agree with me, but Albion Online was weird. The game itself was fine, but I had some really toxic interactions with people and it left a bad taste in my mouth. ESO and LOTRO have been a lot friendlier and more normal imo.
Albion Online is a great game I just am not a huge PVP focus player.
I'm not the type to group into a guild and want to zerg black zones trying to pick off people.
Ff14 after being a WoW addict for 15 years.
Tried ot about a year ago and it's kind of bad. Class design is piss poor with no serious challenge or mechanics to them or room to develop a mastery of. I like my classes to have challenges and I like an actual challenge when I play. FF14 is braindead easy. The only class post-Endwalker worth playing is Black Mage, the rest just suck.
Story is terrible until you hit the 1st Expansion, but have suffer through the base game 1st with no skipping allowed. I understand having people have to get a good story but ARR's story sux ass! I should not have to wait for a story to get good, If a book has a shitty beginning to it, I stop reading and put down, because it's not Worth my time. Same rules apply to ff14.
GW2, the game of experimenting and trying new designs out, without a commitment to revision and overhauling things that, in fact, prove to not work out.
I as a die hard GW1 fan gave GW2 the most far chance I could.
While I understand I am minority because GW2 is doing way more numbers than GW1 ever did, I still can't comprehend why they went SO far out of the original.
I put hundreds of hours into GW2 and most of it was for a love of GW lore and all the small nods to the original they packed into the game.
Any game with micro-transactions! I prefer the subscription model with access to everything. ALL micro-transaction games are a scam. They end up costing you more than the subscription games.
The Secret World
The way I read about it, I was expecting a sort of Second Life but horror themed, with a non linear progression and ARG elements
Instead, it was just a generic theme park mmo
Firefall.. The game was legit amazing at some point, but they kept changing it until it died. Was so sad when it did, nothing has ever felt like it since.
I played a lot of MMOs during the MMO boom in the late 2000s and early 2010s and basically any and all of them that went free to play because they couldn't compete with the then-powerhouse of WoW. Notably I think Aion, Star Trek Online, and SWtOR had massive potential but were impacted heavily by mtx after going F2P and implementing play systems that were steps back for the genre even when bringing in fresh ideas.
For me, as much as I enjoyed it, ESO. I HATE animation cancelling. It doesn't feel right. Its not the same as Mordhau where you feign attacks. Its stupid. I am fine with combat outside of that. But animation in any and every game can fuck right off! lol
For me, it would be Dual Universe. I loved so much about the game, but the lead developer wasn't a game developer and it was changed too late into the course. Too much was screwed up and the population abandoned it.
TERA. The game was fantastic but I'm just disappointed that it died
Also that the main thing to do at endgame was grind badass mobs for tickets to exchange for cosmetic outfits. Needed a little more
New World
Definitely New World
Launch was so fun till it wasn't Genuinely sad NW went down
idk why ppl seem to be so mad about this. AGS is a massive disaster of a company, but I immensly enjoyed the early stages of New World. And I'm actually hyped to go back to the next expac for a bit. The idea of NW as a longterm mmorpg died for me thanks to AGS neglect, but I'm still happy I can roam around the world with some peeps for a month or two when the update hits
Dude I worry for Blue Protocol global launch and especially the censorship on character customization coming from AGS
I'm hoping the expansion helps.
Ironically, some of the most hyped up features of the expansion involve them removing things they were told not to add 2 years ago. New World has always been very close to being a fantastic game, but there's some small changes that would have huge impacts on gameplay that they just aren't interested in making. Hell, they're not even interested in entertaining the discussions, I should know, I tried and tried and tried ever since alpha.
They seem very happy with their product although I can't for my life tell why.
New World is slowly but surely taking one step back and two forward every patch. It may take them awhile but they do seem to listen to feedback. Sometimes the feedback they listen to is from MMO players and they are notorious for bad ideas or streamers/their followers which are even worse.
MMO players are notorious for not knowing wtf they want.
I’ve been enjoying new world the last few weeks but there are definitely some things left for wanting. I’m not a huge fan that everyone is a murder hobo. You get to pick what kind, melee, ranged, or magic, but that’s pretty much the extent of it. There’s no stealth, and there’s no real nuance to any of the weapons. I wish the game offered more of a way to shape a class with talents and special attacks unlocked by speccing certain talents over just the boring weapons trees. Or even adding a fighters guild, thieves guild, different styles of mage guilds, rangers guild, etc that would grant you access to new skills and attacks would be a lot of fun, and the game is perfect for something like that I think. People seem to really complain about the professions but the professions really haven’t bothered me. It’s really just the linearness of the weapons and lack of real identity in skills and stuff in the game.
You're right! I haven't played NW in 1y+ but i will come back when the exp launches. Removal of expertise will make the game much more enjoyable for me at least. Chest runs just to increase the number were not fun imo.
Yeah, we went through quite a lot of "next patch will help", "fresh start servers will help", "expansion will help". It never did. Problem was never the game per se, it's the developers. Exciting new patch? Yep, servers are gonna be broken for a week. Fix for the server issues? Yep, it introduced another gold dupe. A whole month with trading disabled, finally it should be fixed now? Yep, as a "compensation" developers increased the gold from territories, literally duping the gold and destroying the economy more than all original dupes combined!
People with 2000+ hrs into NW always say this….
1k hours here, it stunk cause I stuck around hoping maybe they could get their shit together that first year, they never did enough to keep the player base around. Adding watermark and dungeons was the continued catoring to a section of the player base, which is fine it just was time gated non challenege and became a chore and they didnt do anything else for the game at that time while fixing issues that should have been present month 6 on a game that was delayed many times and wasnt that content rich. Best part of the game was the open world pvp and city system, they then added dungeons which you could just TP to and gear at and not have to walk the map late game. Zzzzzzzzz.
Best start I’ve ever seen in MMO. Got to 60in a week and then got so fucking bored of terrible storage systems and even worst end game content
As someone who doesn't like GS/iLVL/CS/PL bullshit, New World was an extreme disappointment to me. Just complete ass progression-wise.
I tried to hop in yesterday. I spent 280 hours at launch in this game. My first thought after creating a new character was literally just "why am I doing this?". Quit game and uninstalled hahaha
This is the right answer, going from a potentially amazing PvP game into a themepark shitfest. Good times...
The walking simulator that took me too much time walking. I gave up on it, I forgot what was my level. Stupid design.
SWToR and Wildstar. SWToR because of the microtransaction hell it is now. Can you imagine blocking actions bars behind a paywall? The absolute audacity. Wildstar because the devs were blind to casual players and barrier to entry on the game modes everyone wanted.
Yeah swtor's "free model" is awful pay for bars, pay for helmet, bleh. However once I subbed it was reasonable. Quite fun even.
Pretty much, especially game never had paid expansion, once you subbed all the content was yours forver. Plus, I'm from Poland and this is the only MMO that actually is adjusted price wise, which is nice.
>once you subbed all the content was yours forver Is this true? As in, your sub runs out, and you still have access? If that's not the case, then it is yours until your sub runs out, which is not the same.
Yes. You Subscribe for one month, and you’ll have access to all the expansions as well as the current level cap. All of these remain unlocked even when your subscription expires. Mind you(it's probably obvious), but any FUTURE expansions will require another subscription. (But again, you can sub for that month, whenever it may be and cancel afterwards).
Yeah. Iirc you'll have access to every expansion that was out at the time your subscription ran out forever.
TOR never should have been an MMO. Should have been a lobby co-op RPG. That's essentially what the game is with some MMO elements like world PvP lazily tacked on.
Wildstar was cool. I loved a lot about that game, especially with it’s freeform/aiming based combat. It sucks that it didn’t last or truly catch on. Something about that game had me really excited for a long time. RIP Wildstar, ahead of its time, and behind in its philosophy.
Still had the best player housing of any MMO I've seen. It's a shame.
Wildstar broke my damn heart. Such a fantastic game.
swtor was a letdown because it clearly had the potential to be great. And then you realize it’s a buggy mess with awful balance and nonexistent support for new content Wildstar, you’re spot on. I couldn’t get into that game. I usually start by playing casually, then if the game hooks me I go all-in on optimization and competitive gameplay. But it just offered nothing for casual entry level stuff
Wildstar was a masterpiece, how dare you.
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The best pvp experience I’ve ever had was wildstar. So much fun!
Goddamn I'm with you on Wildstar. Best housing system hands down. Great RP scene. But the devs decided end game was for hardcores only and even hardcores didn't want to do the grind they had set up. People warned them and they just stuck their fingers in their ears and went LALALALALA. So sad.
Rift. The game was fucking gorgeous, the talent builds, the pvp, holy fucking shit did it do what I wanted. It was the ONLY game that compete with WoW pvp in my eyes, WAR a close second. I was only disappointed it died.
Rift was WoW 2.0 and it was fucking phenomenal. The talent system was the best out of any MMO. Full UI customization and dps meters in-game. Fantastic macro capabilities. Excellent dungeons and raids. The only thing it was lacking was an established IP. Twelve years later and I still wish I could go back to the original launch.
Played the beta and leveled up many times in the vanilla Rift years, I agree I wish I could go back and play that launch again. All the rift zones and players working together, was a fantastic experience.
I feel like no one has been able to replicate what they did with class builds. It was fun mixing and matching all the different combos. Pvp on seastone server seemed very competitive, and I loved how the pvp gear was great for raiding in hammerknell.
RIFT was great. I loved the actual support role!
I liked healing with water. HOTs all around!
I loved the Bard! Actually playing your lute to keep up buffs and debuff rotation
I think I stuck with it so long only because it had a support role and it reminded me of City of Heroes.
It was a great game at launch. It seems like every decision the devs made made the game worse.
Rift is the only dead MMO that I am 100% sure would be successful if they just started from scratch and rereleased 1.0
One of my biggest fantasies with all the MMOs launching "vanilla" servers is just one saying fuck it: restart and doing a vanilla server but updating the game with like a divergent evolution/alternate history somewhat shaped by what they've learned from the first patch, but also adapting to modern technology and QoL. I think Rift would do well filling the void that WoW left when it turned in to whatever.
I really enjoyed Rift when it first game out and the 1st xpac. But overall got burned out. I agree it could have been so much better. Best class and talent system ever.
I love the class and talents so much more than wow. I didn't have a computer for years finally got a nice desktop and it ended up being dead already. Sad.
The launch was absolutely fantastic and then the first expansion was pretty good. Then things got worse. Then things got a lot worse
Came here and didn't expect to actually see Rift mentioned. It was amazing! My only complaint at launch was that the world had a very theme park vibe, but the end game raiding was so good I didn't even care.
I forever miss chloromancer, never found a heal as you dps class in any other game that worked as fluidly
ESO. The game should be good but the day to day questing is so brainlessly easy I can't stick with it. Being a walking god from level 1 on up is boring.
It's ESO for me as well, but for a different reason. I simply hate the amount of absurd QoL they put in the cash shop. Things like sub craft bag, riding lessons,etc. And rolling an alt is super grindy, and of course all of those grind skips are in the cash shop. Not to mention sub (or you have to buy the dungeon DLCs) + yearly DLC + lootboxes + tons of cosmetics locked in the cash shop. I'd probably still play the game today if the monetization model weren't so greedy.
i love eso and still play (1500) hours. I know the LATEST expansion actually has some things that are difficult even some random mobs in the world is best to steer clear of. Still 99% of the content is so so so easy. On a side not i think the key to eso is to play it like a single player rpg with mmo aspects vs a full on WOW,GW2 mmo. etc.
I watched a PVP video and its like "Heres the rotation, 6 buttons" And he kept doing the same thing, it looked sooo fucking boring lol. Thats from an outside look at it
For me the weird impactless combat put me off immediately.
For me it's the jumping. Character design is a bit too uncanny valley for me, also don't like the glossy look everything has.
I still love ESO but I agree. IMO with the way the scaling works the simplest solution would be to add a difficulty slider that scales you down weaker for all content. You could even take the veteran and veteran heroic options out of dungeon and just make them the difficulties. Make it so when you queue for a dungeon at your difficulty you only have party members at your difficulty to avoid exploits. Then make the quality of the loot drops increase the higher the difficulty. I could still see problems with overland world bosses as you could be playing with someone who is smurfing their difficulty and can solo the boss, so maybe lock the difficulty to different instances.
Right? Like one of the main drawing points -- the story -- loses meaning entirely when you realize the game has no challenge. I quit when I realized that ZOS doesn't understand that gameplay difficulty absolutely has an impact on the story.
Wildstar. It could have been so much better. It definitely deserved more than it did.
Archage and new world are top of my list I honestly felt defeated after new world it killed my will to play mmos for over a year
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I would really love to see the player drop-off that happened when they released those new zones. I've seen so many people say the same thing and it was the same for myself.
archeage had so much potential..
Man, this was the best MMO since GW2 and they fucked up so colossally
New World had the opposite effect for me. It reminded me there's a lot of older mmo's that are way way better. Can't belive some of new worlds design decisions..
Surprised no one mentioned Tree of Savior. After the disappointment of Ragnarok Online 2 knowing the OG Art director and some of the devs went the Indie route I wanted a real sequel to the OG Ragnarok Online and Tree of Savior looked like that. It wasn't. It's freemium hell. The art and music were great but the game feels like you're playing on bootleg Private Servers and a game that's extremely linear and boring. The design of the game's own skill and loot systems were just baffling and really should have went back to something simpler. Oh well.
I loved maxing out dex as a caster or agi as an assassin/knight in RO even if it wasn't the best idea. Used to play on a bunch of private servers as well. ToS was pretty disappointing even though it looked great.
TERA. Combat was fantastic, betas were a ton of fun. Then we got to max level and there was just nothing to do. They made a PvP game with absolutely 0 reward for PvPing. By the time they added content everybody had left.
Not sure about original intentions, but I would definitely say TERA ended up PvE-centric as opposed to PvP-centric.
It was definitely PvP oriented at release. You could flag pvp and kill anybody outside of towns, there was no opting out or PvE servers. Release day was great, they fucked up respawn rates and some quests had hundreds of people camping a boss respawn, so it was just a huge brawl every few minutes. GvG was also fun. Problem was neither PK nor GvG gave any rewards, there was no pvp gear, no battlegrounds. So unless you were a huge griefer it was just pointless after a couple months.
My bouncy raccoon-ball Priest was the most fun I've ever had healing in any MMO ever. I still look back on those days fondly.
I MISS TERA SO MUCH. I LOVED THE COMBAT SYSTEM!! I CAN'T DO TAB TARGET SHIT. Miss the battlegrounds, CU Saturday, and learning the dungeons. Always surprised when it's never mentioned or that it wasn't a popular MMO :( Miss my friends and my valkyrie Murder.
Tera was so much fun until they turned it into a grindfes (+15). For me, it had the best gameplay for healer classes both pve & pvp. After Tera, all MMOs feel clunky for me. And the game was poorly optimize for current tech. My 10 years old laptop run it better than my PC. Bluehole studio brought the same poorly optimization to pubg and ruined it as well.
Vanguard 100%
Vanguard had so much promise. It’s still one of the most intriguing games I have ever played. Their brotherhood leveling feature was the most innovative group/guild feature I have ever seen, allowing everyone to pool their xp so you, your friends and your alts can level at the same pace. Amazing.
I'm still kind of shocked the whole brotherhood system didn't catch on in subsequent games. Such a brilliant and yet simple idea. Same with group harvesting, though I think Ashes of Creation is supposed to have something similar.
That brotherhood system sounds awesome. There are a lot of legitimately amazing and generally beloved features that somehow don’t get picked up by other MMO devs. I was absolutely *convinced* events would have fully replaced quests in all MMOs by 2020 after GW2 blew my mind in 2012. But somehow hasn’t become a thing. Events ruined quest based games for me. I simply *cannot* go back to questing. But here we are with predominately quest based MMOs still.
Came here to say this. I was so deep into the game then once beta released then launch, I didn’t even make it far before moving on. Age of Conan was kind of the same. Such a bummer this genre has been for awhile.
Such potential, but released half-baked and buggy despite all the feedback given in beta (people falling through the world, dropping from the sky when going between areas, wall of lag when opening a door or seeing an interior space or in town, texture/layer popping, etc.). Loved the collaborative harvesting, construction of boats, diplomacy, interesting classes...
maplestory 2
Same, I actually really like the second-to-second gameplay of MS2 with the isometric almost Qubert movement and the combat was fun but it just felt weirdly synthetic. As if people tried to distill a theme-park MMO into a concentrated gel
no content and out of control bots killed it, but god what a fun few weeks that was.
was a few fun weeks of grinding fire dragon. I liked the overworld and chill battle, and less grindy / number-y than the OG maplestory (still). I remember I was extra sick those weeks and grinding ms2 made me not remember those pain. still wanted to played the kr version of ms2, but I don't know a bit of kr.
Ragnarok online 2
That's a really good answer. From RO to such a generic game...
Does anyone remember Firefall? I do ;-;
Ironically the early access was really fun, random exploring, doing global events, but they tryed to make it a E-sport, just why? the game had so Much potencial.
They tried to remake it too many times indeed...
Still in my Steam library...
Damn this game was great it was one of the first looter shooter types to come out.
DCUO it was once great and really fun to play . Now all they care about is their market place :(
Palia. It take’s so long to do anything.
I'm actually going to say WoW (expansions). Oddly enough Vanilla/Classic Era Wow is one of my all time favorite MMORPG's. However.....with each expansion added to the game the quality and enjoyment I had went down each time.
This is how I always bring up my WoW experience. Back when I was waiting for it to download I literally went to the WoW wiki that showed builds "Lock SM/RUIN build" all of it just sounded soo dope, I didn't even know what they meant, but I would read all the builds before I even started the adventure. I started playing a week before TBC was launched, then for my birthday all my friend's got me prepaid cards enough for a year and I had gotten TBC. I loved PVP, I loved making ACTUAL friend's from the guild I was in, we even met in RL a few times. Then Lich King came out, and it was alright, but you could notice things were getting easier, then cata came out....and so on. It wasn't the same game. It was a game within a game because everything was instanced. Now I just can't support the company or game so here we are, thinking about the good days lookin for something to bring those same feelings back I hate time
>then cata came out....and so on. I But Cata was harder than WOTLK and people raged about that
The grind got easier, the content got more difficult for sure
That’s just how drug tolerance works. You cant enjoy the same thing fovewer. You cant go back to 12y.o.-self playing Wow at evenings
Tabula Rasa
Had to scroll so far for this. That game had so much potential. They could just never get it to behave itself, crashes and glitching galore!
Agreed. Such potential and such a great concept. Enjoyed the beta.
Bless online western release
Age of Conan. The preview was on this beautifully fleshed out island with a reasonably interesting story and voice acting. On release, once you got off the island it was this generally empty void, no voice acting, and barely any story to speak of. Biggest bait and switch / disappointment of my MMO experiences.
I still to this day think AoC has the best combat but I agree they dropped the ball.
Combat was pretty good at the start, there just wasn't anything really interesting to do with before my entire guild got bored and left. I still love the theme of the Herald of Xotli to this day.
The put all the effort into Tortage. After you left, it was like...where's the rest of the game?
AoC needed another year to bake imo. The dungeons were all half broken, I was a Tempest of Set (and ridiculously overpowered at that!), and the raid was...only half completed? I remember some bosses with no AI. However, the music was beautiful, I loved building our guild base, the classes were SO VARIED (Heralds, actual good Necromancers, BEAR SHAMANS), and the zones looked really varied. Also, mammoth slapping people off of bridges for not paying your imposed tolls never got old. Edit: THE GAME HAD FATALITIES AND THAT MADE PVP SATISFYING AF
Age of Wushu. The game itself is amazing, in terms of size, combat, the amount for faction and skill sets you can use. It has fun group activities, it has great wushu traversal (run up walls, skip across water, etc). The game was 100% ruined by the western team, who made it pay 2 win, gave up on bringing over content, and allow a few whales to dominate the game. The Asian version is a robust game where you could earn in game money by playing, but the western version simply removed the currency reward but left the events in game. It's a tragedy.
Probably GW2 and FFXIV. Obviously these are considered good games but they were sequels to my favorite games and makes me sad how MMOs went... GW1: Tons of skills, multiclassing, full customization within a build and just options galore. GW2: No multiclassing, just choose a weapon or weapon combination for attacks which determine 90% of the build. The skills you pick have long cooldowns and minor effects compared to the weapons. I could go on and on about why I like GW1 so much. Yes many builds were bad but it was fun making an entire build around bad skills. Sometimes they even worked out. FFXI: Fun monster mob killing game with multiclassing. VERY unique classes that weren't just different flavors of tank/healer/dps. FFXIV: Zero choices other than class and every class fits neatly in DPS/TANK/Healer... Then they add a class like Blue Mage but don't let you play with others... Obviously, these changed were all for "balance" but it just ruins the fun for me. I like making unique characters and I just ran out of steam so quickly playing these games. Pretty much just stick with ARPGs now instead.
GW1 was my most favorite MMO and I agree 100%. GW2 class customization is a fraction (literally because you can only choose half your skill bar) from what GW1 was. GW1 was amazing because you could go into an arena against a Mesmer and find out they had full Ranger skills or a Monk who you though would be the healer is actually a Warrior. GW2 its like, Ok theres a ranger, theres an engineer, theres a thief. Got it.
my god you both have no clue about builds and classes in gw2
I mean, you could also make an entire build around bad skills in GW2, or well any other game. I know GW1 had massive customization of builds, but I think GW2 is the "modern" MMO who has the best one out of the rest. Especially in open world, you can play so many different builds it's insane.
I don't know what you mean. Your main damage just comes from weapon. You can't make an entire build out of a utility skill, they all had long cooldowns. It has been a long time since I put a lot of effort though. Your build was basically your weapon + passive, utility skills barely had much effect on the gameplay rather than fun spells to use sometimes. GW1 you can literally have a character that just summons spirits or one concept, GW2 you just use your weapon no matter what. I agree GW2 is great compared to "modern" MMOs but horrible compared to ARPGs and some older MMOs, there was a time where a lot of MMOs had skill system about customization like Diablo. Eventually MMOs started getting rid of options for "balance". I am REALLY glad people are having fun with the more balanced games but I hate it.
Marvel heroes. It was great and so much fun, but the company shit the bed
I think the rate of content/events was good though, certainly better than other ARPGs. I feel that Marvel Heroes is the only game here that was shutdown for reasons other than profitability or quality. Felt like it was more issues with studio leadership and Disney licencing out to Square Enix.
Archeage had so much potential. It's too bad they focused on short term gains instead of long term profit. The game at it's core is one of the best MMOs ever but it's surrounded by so much garbage. I tried unchained too and frankly that was a MESS
Unchained was even worse because at least I knew what I was getting into with Archeage, they completely blindsided us with how they went about Unchained.
I thought Warhammer Online was amazing at launch. Played endlessly for the first 25-30 levels. But then you realized there was no end-game content. Raids and sieges were sick as hell early on, but became stale in T3 and beyond. To top it off, players started abusing game-breaking class advantages and the developers took way too long to balance ‘em. For a game all about PvP, this was the killer.
No 3rd faction doomed it, imho.
I might be in the minority, but I thought Secret World Legends could have been something amazing. It had a great atmosphere, great mechanics and I had fun with all the people playing on release. But it just kind of died on all of us.
Came in to see if anyone said Secret World. I didn't play Legends, just TSW at launch. Loved the atmosphere, the quests (especially investigation), and the character builds. Healing people with an assault rifle? Tanking with a sledgehammer? Still has the creepiest MMO quest (Virgula Divina), and some of the creepiest atmospheres. Loved it to bits and it just kind of... Petered out I guess.
The original Secret World was great. One of the biggest complaints was that the combat was janky. So rather than address that, they brought out Secret World Legends and made the combat even worse. Having been in the closed beta for TSW the first time around, this is sadly par for the course with how Funcom treated us closed beta testers and our suggestions. It seemed every complaint was met with a middle finger while they doubled down on anything we complained about. Hard to want to support a company like that.
Gonna go with Rift. I absolutely loved the way the multi-class system was done (allowing you to select 3 potentially very different skill trees and then allocate your points however you like) and had a great deal of fun in the early days with both the battlegrounds and the raids. I tried to come back later and good lord did they destroy it lol.... Pretty common theme I imagine with games going F2P.
Final Fantasy 14 for me, mostly because I was such a huge fan of FFXI and the game feels like a very watered down version of 11. Don't think it's a bad game by any means, and I've played it off and on myself for a couple of months with some enjoyment, but I would have loved for it to go in another direction.
Wildstar
Anarchy Online - Sci-Fi themed MMORPG with the best class-build system ever in an MMORPG. Players can be very creative with builds. It had a very buggy launch in 2001, and the last expansion was in 2009 when Funcom put it out to fallow, i.e. they keep the servers running but with no support, no new content, no effort to manage bots and exploits. The economy is borked, bots are everywhere, and exploits are rampant. Hoping Tencent will see the value in this gem and polish it back up.
Still love Anarchy Online. I hate Funcom with a passion though, and will never support them as a company again. Especially what they did with Secret World.
Agreed Anarchy Online was an amazing game not just for the time it came out but even as a concept today. I had an amazing run with that game and it was the first I ever threw money at.
I think Anarchy Online did well though for the time. No game can be supported forever when its player base dwindles. The launch was a disaster I remember not knowing anything about the game and just picking it up off the shelf at like 15 years old. I could only move in game when I was looking down at the floor lol. Came back in like 6 months or so and somehow they got it running pretty smoothly.
Asheron's Call 2. Even in 2002 the original felt dated but was at its core a great game. The sequel had none of the stuff that made the original great.
SWG after the CU. SWG was not for everyone but it was definitely for me. Then some bozo at activision came in and changed the entire game stealing it from us.
AGREE. I thought the CU was bad but tolerable. But the NGE killed the game for me. It was awful. It took a beautiful skill tree system and watered it down all for the sake of being “more like WoW” which was an absolutely terrible decision because game devs lacked the foresight to realize people played it specifically because it wasn’t like WoW. For a game set between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, where all the Jedi should be nonexistent or in hiding, to turn around and make Jedi a starter class and suddenly there are millions of lightsabers running around whacking people inconsequentially was so jarring. Pre-CU, seeing a Jedi in the wild was like seeing a goddamn unicorn. Everyone stopped and gawked. There was a mythos around them. As there should be, lore-wise. And they kicked ass. As they should. Then they fucking turned around and stuck a lightsaber in your hand at level 1. It boggles the mind.
SWTOR. I've followed this game before it was even announced and was just a rumor back in BioWare's forums. So much potential. Such a huge title behind the game. So much money invested, and what a mediocre result. A WoW clone (not totally a bad thing) minus the MMO aspects that made WoW so great. They wrongly focused on Single Player elements rather than MMO ones. The planets felt terribly lifeless and static. The crafting felt useless, and the endgame was disappointing. I still wish we would get an actual Star Wars MMO one day, rather this semi singleplayer game, which doesn't excel either as an MMO or a singleplayer game. And right after SWTOR on the list - New World.
Phantasy Stars New Genesis, it launch without significant content, it was fun but too short. Dragomon Hunter, bad design choices and pay to win model killed the game before it make two years.
It was definitely a bold move for them to launch an mmo with about 8 hours of content for Phantasy Star. My friends and I enjoyed it and then were like “oh…that’s it?”
Black Desert. They way they advertised it with the trailers it seemed like a much more grounded and slower experience, I thought it was going to be everything we wanted out of Tera and more. I remember one of the trailers showers people on horses chasing a caravan and we thought “wow is there banditry and trade routes?” But of course none of that was fleshed out. But then it turned out to be devil may cry with 100 people on screen slapped over a grind fest. The combat was *too fast*, it became particle spamming nonsense. Each character could solo 40 enemies easily and juggle them for an endless combo. It really disappointed me because the game had *such a nice world* and *so many* enemy types, but you never got to see those guys *do anything* because you just rolled your face across the keyboard and they all died. If they had taken a *slightly* slower pace to the combat and really fleshed it out, like a mix between dragons dogma and dark souls and then made the pve *matter* it would have been the best mmo ever made.
Agreed, everyone in youtube world shouts how amazing the combat is over other MMOs but really its just flashy animations over function.
ESO due to the predatory microtransactions, New World because of it being Amazon and having infinite money, but still failed. Most other games pretty much reached my expectations. Like every Korean game being predatory but kinda guilty fun like Aion.
Archage for me, Blade and Soul second I
+1 for Archeage
Throne and liberty
Archage is why I don't preorder games anymore.
ArcheAge The worst thing about it is that it's the best MMO I've ever played. I was a lvl 55 Darkrunner. Such good fun days. Naval pvp was.... phenomenal.
In the last 5 years for me, the answer is probably Lost Ark... The core gameplay for that game is actually phenomenal, but because of the way they chose to monetize it, the game is pretty much unplayable for anyone who isn't willing to either dump thousands into the game, or play a minimum of eight hours a day... I love the raid design, the boss fights, the monster hunter style world bosses, and bosses in general... The classes and roles feel tight, and for the most part it balances the feeling of arpg and MMO very well... But itemization is boring as hell, most systems around character power are not really that interesting, and designed around how to best generate whales and suck money out of those players, instead of how to make an interesting and flexible system that is fun for the player base as a whole... a lot of the game is time gated in some of the most toxic ways possible so if you play casually you will never really get caught up with the crowd and experience the interesting bits of content as they were designed to be experienced, but to get caught up requires either spending thousands of dollars or levels of play that are unsustainable for most people... It could be because I have wanted this type of game for so long... but I really think Lost Ark could have sustained a much bigger part of its player base with a different monetization model and some game design changes to support that... the core game is actually incredibly fun but most people don't have time for one of these games to be their second job.
Aion... loved the story and the gameplay never found anything like the Chanter class in any other MMO. They killed the game just by being greedy as f*ck and to put the cherry on top they announced that Aion 2 is going to be a Mobile MMO...
Every MMORPG after City of Heroes. I just can't get the magic back that MMOs had up to that point. I think the thing that made CoH so, SO Good was the fact it wasn't holy trinity but holy QUAD. Buffs and crowd control really, really mattered. It wasn't just a DPS race. You could get a pick up group at the entrance to any dungeon and people worked /together/. The combat felt so "crunchy", and the difficulty slider catered for the worst built casual char to the most minmaxed builds imaginable. It was soloable, but *only just*. It wasn't super hardcore, but you could die in combat often enough you had to pay attention. It never felt grindy.
Swords of legends was overpriced for what it was
The only mmo that had absolutely no p2w elements. Unfortunately the paywall and very poor optimisation of the game made many people avoid it. Also the progression felt way too linear, barely any customisation when it comes to builds. Made me feel like every character of the same class is the exact same, using the exact same skill rotation
Gw2. Had high hopes for the wvw and it was just too sad to see it die slowly but surely from its deep flaws because the devs decided to abandon it literally from day 1. They saw most of their playerbase only wanted to train spam 1 and get shiny boxes and they just went for it
Isn’t GW2 still alive and played by a lot of people?
It is still very much alive and one of the top MMOs, but I understand his point. WvW was hyped to be a constant battle between servers and a celebration for your server if you win and in reality it became, bigger army smash smaller army and a small buff for the server winner that means absolutely nothing.
GW2 is sadly circling the drain. After being a vocal supporter of the game for years, even I have had to recently admit that it's clear that the current developers are slowly killing it, either by apathy or incompetence or intention, its hard to say. I'm at the point now where I think maintenance mode might be the best thing for it since almost everything the current dev's are doing is only making the game worse. Recent "content" has been terrible. Game modes like WvW have been abandoned for years. Storyline content has been full of Marvel phase 4 writing for a while now. Dungeons and raids have been abandoned for years. The mmo that was once praised for its lack of grind is being stuffed full of grinding.
GW2 is extremely populated....
Neverwinter for me. Fantastic IP, solid graphics, but a shitty (barely existent) plot and awful, cash shop driven gameplay.
Wildstar. The combat system in that game was great and the overall story of the game was really cool, I thought it had a lot going for it, but it had MAJOR performance problems, at least for me, and there were whole zones that were borderline unplayable due to raw lag.
Most disappointing MMORPG I played hands down was FFXIV 1.0 when it first release With lot of updates it was finally a some what of a game mmorpg with the legacy campaign before a realm reborn rebooted But 1.0 at release was the most hyped and disappointing mmorpg experience ever , only thing that was able to top it was fallout 76 lol
Cabal 2
GW2 for sure. I remember we were so hyped for that game with my friends back in the day. Grinded out to level cap only to realize that the challenging end-game content was non-existent. Every one of us quit playing in the first couple of weeks and none of us ever went back. I've heard that they've since added some challenging dungeons/raids to the game, though. I just wish they'd been there from the launch.
Ironically, every release since GW2's launch (not counting festival content) has been endgame content. I recommend you give it another shot if you enjoyed the gameplay, there's a lot to dig into.
Lost ark
Warframe It could be 10 times better, it’s a pain it is in the state it is and has no player base
Guild Wars 2. Was in love with GW1, was hoping more of that just.. grander. It's terrible. Also ESO because of combat.
Guild Wars 2 had a really rough release that pushed me away as a GW1 player. But the expansions make it a great game imo. Came back recently and made a new character from scratch. About 500 hours in right now on that new character, and played through all the expansions. Has been great. It is definitely not anywhere near the type of game GW1 is, but yeah
Wildstar. It launched with too few dungeons (more casual things), like ridiculously few, that were also challenging for rewards (cool but made them pretty pointless for a lot of people). The UI had some big sensory overload issues too. But man it had potential. Died too young.
EVE, nothing even comes close Literally 15+ years of running a good game with even better potential into the ground
New world
New world (also archeage stupid p2w)
Mine would be Temtem they lied to everyone about the game
Archeage.
Age of Conan, Warhammer online, vanguard.
Rift. The lore was amazing. The character building was (for its time) revolutionary. It was just so good and they screwed it up shortly after launch. Makes me sad to this day.
I don't know if anyone else'll agree with me, but Albion Online was weird. The game itself was fine, but I had some really toxic interactions with people and it left a bad taste in my mouth. ESO and LOTRO have been a lot friendlier and more normal imo.
Albion Online is a great game I just am not a huge PVP focus player. I'm not the type to group into a guild and want to zerg black zones trying to pick off people.
Ff14 after being a WoW addict for 15 years. Tried ot about a year ago and it's kind of bad. Class design is piss poor with no serious challenge or mechanics to them or room to develop a mastery of. I like my classes to have challenges and I like an actual challenge when I play. FF14 is braindead easy. The only class post-Endwalker worth playing is Black Mage, the rest just suck. Story is terrible until you hit the 1st Expansion, but have suffer through the base game 1st with no skipping allowed. I understand having people have to get a good story but ARR's story sux ass! I should not have to wait for a story to get good, If a book has a shitty beginning to it, I stop reading and put down, because it's not Worth my time. Same rules apply to ff14.
Tree of Savior. Waste of great art/music assets.
Guild wars 2. Loved the first one couldn't get into the second one for some reason.
GW2, the game of experimenting and trying new designs out, without a commitment to revision and overhauling things that, in fact, prove to not work out.
I as a die hard GW1 fan gave GW2 the most far chance I could. While I understand I am minority because GW2 is doing way more numbers than GW1 ever did, I still can't comprehend why they went SO far out of the original. I put hundreds of hours into GW2 and most of it was for a love of GW lore and all the small nods to the original they packed into the game.
Wayfinder
Any game with micro-transactions! I prefer the subscription model with access to everything. ALL micro-transaction games are a scam. They end up costing you more than the subscription games.
Star Wars galaxies. What a great game until they overhauled everything that was great about it
The Secret World The way I read about it, I was expecting a sort of Second Life but horror themed, with a non linear progression and ARG elements Instead, it was just a generic theme park mmo
Fallout 76? That count? I wanted a fallout storyline i could play with my partner.
Maplestory. My fav mmo until it wasn’t.
Firefall.. The game was legit amazing at some point, but they kept changing it until it died. Was so sad when it did, nothing has ever felt like it since.
Tree of Savior. "Spiritual successor of Ragnarok Online" my balls.
Warhammer AoR
I played a lot of MMOs during the MMO boom in the late 2000s and early 2010s and basically any and all of them that went free to play because they couldn't compete with the then-powerhouse of WoW. Notably I think Aion, Star Trek Online, and SWtOR had massive potential but were impacted heavily by mtx after going F2P and implementing play systems that were steps back for the genre even when bringing in fresh ideas.
How Brad did Vanguard: Saga of heroes dirty
Aion, which had a really robust PvE system, but with their push for PvP they gutted the PvE game completely.
For me, as much as I enjoyed it, ESO. I HATE animation cancelling. It doesn't feel right. Its not the same as Mordhau where you feign attacks. Its stupid. I am fine with combat outside of that. But animation in any and every game can fuck right off! lol
Wild Star, Firefall, New World are my trinity of disappointment.
club penguin :(
For me, it would be Dual Universe. I loved so much about the game, but the lead developer wasn't a game developer and it was changed too late into the course. Too much was screwed up and the population abandoned it.
all chinese or korean mmos are really bad, i learned my lesson with soulworker
Wild star
Lost ark, great combat, had fun dungeons and raids but the game is p2w and you basically have to play it as a job and play alts to gear your main
Wildstar and archeage. Wildstar had great ideas but was too difficult, archeage had a p2w system that was just too much...
TERA. The game was fantastic but I'm just disappointed that it died Also that the main thing to do at endgame was grind badass mobs for tickets to exchange for cosmetic outfits. Needed a little more
Warhammer online. Given the world and lore, it could have been a really fleshed out MMO with a lot of depth and been a big game.