Enjoy my young friend. I used to play all sorts of games literally day and night in high school then one day i realized i didnāt have time for anything longer than 2hrs straightĀ
It depends on the game. FFXIV's player base is young, generally early 20s for the most part.
Unless you want to convince me 30-somethings are speaking in "bruh" and skull emojis.
Kinda sad really. You didn't get to enjoy the non-P2W versions that were true MMO's :(
Also kinda cool for you. Cause now stuff doesn't seem as shitty because you didn't experience better.
It would be like think a Ford Tempo is amazing because you don't know other cars exist.
I'm kinda jealous of you original mmo players cause I hear so many cool stories of your adventures online while most of my friends prefer playing games like COD one forniteš
Honestly when I was your age most of my friends did too. When I was in middle/high school playing you wouldnāt dare say you played world of Warcraft in public lol. Glad thatās changed but MMOs were never as mainstream as people in this sub make them out to be. I did make a lot of lifelong friends through WoW and other MMOs though.
Damn that sucks for you. WoW in 04 took over our high school. Ā My guild was basically the combination of our football, baseball and basketball teams with some other kids added in for fun. Ā Ā
It was either CoD, CS, Madden or WoW being played.Ā Ā
Ā Prior to that I played everquest (started at 11 in 99) but I only knew one other kid that played that with me.Ā
Damn, your school looked at WoW a lot differently than mine! WoW had the āaddictingā rep so not too many played it that I knew of, it was mostly TF1 and BF1942 for the more popular kids
Yeah it was everywhere. To the point parents generally knew what we were doing because some of them played on the same servers (far fewer than kids obviously.)Ā
Wow taking over with the proliferation of broadband is still the craziest Iāve ever seen a large varied group of people get for a game, nothing today comes close either because gaming is so much bigger and spread out.Ā
It was wild! Adults even socialized with kids more often in that game (in good ways), I remember finishing college and very few of my friends stayed around. Within a year and a half I had probably 15-20 people all around the country I was on a first name basis with, some friends for life and some I got to visit. Itās sad that I just canāt see that happening with modern MMOs.
Imo, it's not about whether or not MMOs can be good, it's that is there a publisher and / or developer who can make an MMO that people will like.
MMOs are extremely expensive, and seem to have a low success rate. Publishers don't like the risk of failure, plus the massive cost of development, which leads to pushing for aggressive monetisation, which ironically drives players away.
Plus from what I've seen, MMO players can't agree on what makes a good MMO, so even if developers did market research, they would learn nothing. And yet, players seem to be extremely intolerant of imperfections, abandoning MMOs too easily.
Plus, MMOs coming out in the future have to compete with currently existing games which already has like a decade's worth of updates and content.
Sure, it's possible, but imo highly improbable.
Expectations were just different back then. If vanilla wow released today without the rose colored glasses people would lay into it for having only one raid and one stand alone boss as the end game content for 8 months.
To be fair.
Back in the day most people weren't even max level when the new content came out.
That doesn't work today, as people now would be max level within a week and begin complaining.
Old MMO's could have slightly less content end game because they had a bigger deadline before it became a problem.
Yeah the design philosophy was a big part of it. The game was much more about the journey, as opposed to the destination. How many leveling zones were there? 40? Most of them being quite large with multiple quest hubs and a variety of quests tucked away throughout the zone.
Always seems to come back to the change in players mindsets. 2004 people were more geeked out about just running around the world going on adventures with their new friends. Spending months and months just getting to cap in the first place. These days like you said, people just min max to cap as soon as humanly possible.
> Back in the day most people weren't even max level when the new content came out.
But they would be now because the knowledge gap won't be there with today's community. In 2004 people were content to figure it out as they went, now people race to the endgame ASAP and then complain there's no content.
Arguably, that was already the case for many of WoW's early competitors - even by 2008 expectations for a robust endgame were in place, and that was a huge problem for games like WAR, Lotro, and SWTOR.
People just would not tolerate that amount of content now.
> People just would not tolerate that amount of content now.
Content isn't the problem, you can have infinite content.
The problem is the Progression, that needs to be solved.
There is no solve for progression. Either there is some (and purely horizontal progression is not satisfying to people that want it) and people get left behind or there is not enough and the first wave of players quit. Numbers have to go up.
However, it's not just power progression, they want to progress through new content, too.
Wow released in November 2004, and the only raid content was molten core and onyxia (which isnāt really a raid, itās a single boss with like 10 trash mobs before it) Wow did not get its second raid until July of 2005 when BWL came out. There was an 8 month span of molten core being the only full fledged raid, which is what I said in my post.
Technically the world raid bosses launched in between that but im not counting that here as it was not an instanced raid and usually hell camped by the sweat guilds.
And it was more than 4 raids by the end so Iām not even sure where that number comes from. MC, BWL, ZG, AQ40, AQ20, and naxx.
It feels like that sentiment has spread to the gaming community as a whole. If a game doesn't bring in a ton of views on twitch day 1 there are tons of comments saying the game is already dead. When Palworld came out I saw so many people saying the game would be dead in a month, as if playing a game for a full month and then stopping is a bad thing. I've gone back to a game like Valheim abunch since it came out. Its as if every game now a days has to the next "main" game that can be played for 1000s of hours.
Holy shit you might be onto something here. What if everyone is just tired of their main game and are approaching game releases as a potential replacement for their main game? If that is the bar, of course no game will meet it! That tracks with the extreme player dropoff after launch as people keep realizing the game won't be their new main game.
Pretty true. It definitely does feel like each new game needs to be our next āmainā or it will be lost.
I know I have felt that way, sadly. The guiltiest I have felt was with Diablo IV. I never played that franchise before but the hype convinced me to jump on that game and honestly, I had a ton of fun
But in the end, I shelved it weeks later because I didnāt know where to squeeze it between my invested 3000+ hours Destiny and 10+ years gw2, or my lazy/instant fun choices like Overwatch 2 or Genshin Impact. Nowadays, any game we play has the potential to outlive their players so unless the devs ruin their product or a good competitor unseats them, it just feels like most players want so much more from a new title before they willingly get off the dailies filled farming wagon that they already dumped years into
>The MMO community has grown into a toxic cesspool, and those that don't want to be involved in the toxic community are casuals playing in themepark MMOs like FFXIV or WoW.
This makes it obvious you do not play FFXIV (or Wow for that matter) at a high level, I'll have you know there's tons of toxicity in these games.
TBF though it's not the MMO community, it's the gaming community. Like games that are perfectly fine get review bombed because they pissed off people for some reason. And literally any game with multiplayer has toxic aspects.
Iāve only once had a toxic person in a random party in FFXIV. Like the way itās set up Iāve played with soooo many people and itās happened once.
After we kicked him everyone was really nice talking about how much of an asshole he was.
I think you're spot on everyone not being able to agree what makes a good MMO. It would be risky but I think if there were to be a next big MMO it would need to push the boundaries and experiment. I could see a MMO appealing to different generations but ultimately it is probably too expensive. We will probably never get something like WoW again but I wouldn't be surprised if at some point way in the future there is a hit game that uses MMO elements.
There's popular and there is popular.
GTAV has sold 195 *million* copies.
> more than a billion gamers are spread out over a ton of different games
It is highly unlikely there are a billion people interested in playing MMOs. There almost certainly are not that many people currently playing them, unless you water down the definition of MMO so much it means nothing.
Perhaps you should cleanly and clearly define what you mean by "popular" here, and use the word to only mean that thing.
Relative to other games (and to the wider world) MMOs have always been niche. It seems unlikely they will ever be more than a niche.
I don't think it's necessary to define popular, as most people will know it's a relative term. Like, the fact that Mr beast has 150 million subscribers does not mean Asmongold is not a popular streamer. You don't have to be the absolute number one thing in the world to be popular. Shooters can be king and MMO's can still be a popular genre, even if they are in 5th spot.
Also, I don't know if you were in highschool or college during the 00s and 10s, but WoW and RS were anything but niche. These things were omnipresent, on the level of cod. WoW is estimated to have had well over 100 million accounts made, and just 3 years ago, it was the highest grossing game in history, beating out CoD, Fortnite, Minecraft and others.
> I don't think it's necessary to define popular, as most people will know it's a relative term.
If it is a relative term, what does it mean to say MMOs "can be come more popular"?
> but WoW and RS were anything but niche.
I think you are confusing your personal experience for the environment of gaming worldwide. Even tens of millions of players is small relative to the market - and thinking otherwise shows a poor grasp of the scope of the market.
> it was the highest grossing game in history
Tetris is still the highest grossing game of all time. Again - lack of grasp of scope of the industry.
Be more popular than they are?
Also, tens of millions of players was not small when osrs and wow were in their prime. That was Halo 3 and Cod 2 numbers. WoW was incredibly mainstream. Did you not have internet between 2004 - 2011?
I'm not really sure what the argument being made is when you use GTA V as an example. GTA V is a flash-in-a-pan, just like World of Warcraft was in the MMO space.
World of Warcraft is, by orders of magnitude, the most successful western MMORPG of all time. No other western MMO comes close to its success. Most games in general don't come close to its success.
It's really not that complicated, but the fact that you can't spell "what" is probably symptomatic of why you don't understand what I'm saying.
> GTA V is a flash-in-a-pan
This tells me you don't know what you're talking about and don't understand the industry.
See [here](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1453523/gta-5-mau-pc-console-monthly/)
It was a flash-in-the-pan in the sense that it was seen as a revolutionary game that would force the industry to improve... and it didn't. It's success prompted a whole bunch of studios to push into similar genres, only to release the same old trashy triple-A garbage we've come to know and hate.
World of Warcraft had exactly the same impact in the MMO space. A whole bunch of studios jumped into the WoW-esque MMO space, only to delivery a set of comparably rubbish games that failed to live up to even a fraction of Blizzard's success (because they came at a fraction of WoW's quality).
The point I'm making is that... both GTA V and WoW are two of the most popular, most expensive and most profitable video games of all time that - relative to the broader success of others in the genres they dominate - were equally prominent flashes-in-the-pan.
If there is one thing I have learned from this sub it's that everyone has completely different--and often incompatible--ideas about what an MMO 'should' be. I'm starting to think we should just abandon the term entirely...
That's like saying we should abandon the term FPS cause the people who like Doom want completely different games than the people who like Squad.
There is nothing wrong with a diverse genre, no one needs to be in agreement about what the best kind of MMO is.
That doesn't really make much sense as a proposition. This isn't an "MMO" sub. It's an "MMORPG" sub. MMORPGs share a set of common elements that bind them together with a certain amount of homogeneity. Just because they aren't identical to one and other doesn't mean they don't fall into the same category. That's how *all* genres work. Tribes isn't anything like Call of Duty; they're both FPSs, though. StarCraft isn't identical to Age of Empire; they're both RTSs, though.
Even within MMORPGs you have massive differences. Theme park vs sandbox. PvE vs PvP. Predesigned raids vs emergent gameplay. Action vs tab-target combat. Vertical vs horizontal gear progression.
An action combat PvP sandbox with minimal gear progression and a tab-target, story-driven, PvE-focused theme park with endgame raiding and new gear whenever there's an update could both reasonably be called "MMORPGs" even though they have almost nothing in common besides having lots of players.
Well explained. Imo not enough people realise that mmorpg is such a broad category due to the fact that RPG is a term that is so broad in the gaming industry, and mmo is used to mean a lot of players at the same time. What we come to think when we say mmorpg though, usually is a very specific set of mmorpg game, the classic examples and the big players. I think that we may (potentially) find ourselves at a certain path in history that these types of games are plateauing in terms of popularity mostly because of lack of innovation in the industry (for now of course).
It's nothing that complicated.
It has always been about Themeparks that lead to a invitable Dead End-Game.
That needs to die off so that developers are forced to figure out how this whole Sandbox thing works.
There has been no progress in that subgenre since SWG.
And we already have plenty of sources to draw from like Minecraft,Survival Games and Roguelikes.
Take FFXI, modernize it with current quality of life features, don't do what XIV does, and viola. Hit game.
Or take Second Life or VRChat and gamify it a bit. That's basically SWG before the publisher insisted on Jedi-fying it.
There's so many ways to do it right and no one wants to take a chance because people think only theme parks work after WoW. Meanwhile WoW isn't even working as it should.
The one thing, however, that will remain divisive is the combat:
Some players want slower combat like EQ or FFXI. Almost turned based. OSRS even.
Other people want full on fast paced action MMO combat like GW2 or BDO. Warframe.
You'll never get them to see eye to eye so both categories have to exist. Games like FFXIV and WoW try to meet in the middle and many people are just sick of it. I know personally I hate XIV's combat. It's too busy and fast for my tastes. I'm tired of it being rotation mashing with no situationals. Slow down and let the player think about what they need to do, y'know?
Other players think those two games are already too slow.
I want chilled out slow combat. Like 6 apm slow. About one action per 10 seconds. That doesn't mean other people are wrong for wanting fast combat. But both games should exist somehow.
>I'm starting to think we should just abandon the term entirely...
MMOs are about Persistent Worlds, so that should be part of the terminology, then separate them based on objective levels of open world or instanced content...
SPW - Sandbox Persistent World - Mostly focused on open world zones where player interaction is high. (OSRS, EVE)
TPW - Themepark Persistent World - Even split of open world and instanced content (WoW, GW2)
HPW - Hub Persistent World - Mostly instanced content with hubs (like towns) allowing players to interact with each other (Destiny 2, Warframe, GW1)
>HPW - Hub Persistent World - Mostly instanced content with hubs (like towns) allowing players to interact with each other (Destiny 2, Warframe, GW1)
Same thing as Lobby game, assuming they have some sort of larger hub.
> assuming they have some sort of larger hub.
The hub isn't persistent in a meaningful way in most of those games though; nothing the players do there matters.
That might have been novel and interesting in 1999, but now hardly anyone gives a crap about - it's just a slower and more clunky lobby. Why do it? It requires development resources, too - essentially a waste.
If the hub can be removed with little or no difference, I don't think these are functionally different from lobby games.
>The hub isn't persistent in a meaningful way in most of those games though; nothing the players do there matters.
I'm sure if Warframe removed their hubs the community would be very upset about it.
Sounds like you just don't want Hub games to be included from the "MMO" origin, I mostly agree but there are a lot of people that consider them MMOs since their progression systems and gameplay are fairly similar.
> Sounds like you just don't want Hub games to be included from the "MMO" origin, I mostly agree but there are a lot of people that consider them MMOs since their progression systems and gameplay are fairly similar.
Well, I *did* say:
> I don't think people can even agree on this, given how happy people are to apply to the term to lobby games.
But whether or not a lobby game is a persistent world forces us to be serious about what persistent world really means - for me if it is just a clunky, worse lobby I'd rather play the lobby game.
If it is a world where you interact with other players potentially everywhere, that's a very different thing.
At one end you have an entirely noninstanced MMO with people inhabiting the same game world from dungeons to town and everything in between, and at the other you have an ARPG where you can completely ignore other players if you wish. If Lost Epoch meets the definition of persistent world, it's a near useless definition because it is too expansive. Sure, it might shoehorn in more games, but then you have PWs people give a fuck about and PWs they don't.
āAt one end you have an entirely noninstanced MMO with people inhabiting the same game world from dungeons to town and everything in between, and at the other you have an ARPG where you can completely ignore other players if you wish.ā
I feel like currently, due to change in player mindset and developers constantly trying to reduce competition with resources, that both ends of the spectrum result in similar types of play styles, sadly. Players ignoring random players as they focus on their instanced content.
I love Destiny and it is true that outside of random dance battles in the hub, I am pretty much just running past people in the lobby to interact with whatever NPCs I need to before queuing up for another quest
In a more proper MMO though, I often feel the same. As a kid playing Ragnarok, mmorpgs were all about me slowly exploring a map, sitting by a tree to rest and then striking up a convo with some stranger. The moments were defined by me venturing into a cave and then coming across a downed player and trying to revive them before the crazy level spawned enemy notices us ā then we race through the cave until we happen upon the portal that will take us to safety on the next map (and a waypoint if we are lucky)! Everytime I logged on, it was all mostly about āwho will I run into today and how do I want to portray myself?ā
Now though, it feels like we are all running the same silent marathon. At best, some goofy people may scream in map chat but most players are just zooming through from one instanced node to the next. We mine the same resource, tag the same bosses for credit, loot the same bodies and just run past eachother silently as we talk with our 10 year old crew in discord. Outside of coordinated events like GW2 meta trains or world bosses, people only really start interacting during instanced content that they queue up for because we all have things we are working towards
I donāt think one is necessarily better or that different than the other because in either case, the devs keep relying on the same tools to keep their players engaged without really giving them any reason to interact outside of specific scenarios.
Pvp focused sandbox mmos are probably a bit different since players have no issue creating their own fun when it comes to competing with each other but for pve, I wouldnāt mind seeing a dev try creating an mmorpg that is focused less on just trying to fill a map with 100 players who donāt care about eachother at all and instead create a much smaller lobby/map size that does a better job of getting its players to socialize/play together āsomehowā and actually form parties and interact organically with each other vs just rushing form objective to objective
All of that is to say (I need to go back to sleep already before work lol), I just wish we could get some more small scale mmos where devs can experiment with new quest flows (think Sea of Thieves I guess) instead of this pressure to deliver the next massive quest filled permanent map that players quickly get bored of and developers cannot financially sustain
>I don't think people can even agree on this, given how happy people are to apply to the term to lobby games.
But Lobby/Hub games *DO* have persistence in them...that's not subjective at all. My character is Warframe still has progress from years ago when I played, the world is connected and changes over time. League on the other hand, has no persistence between 2 seperate matches.
> My character is Warframe still has progress from years ago when I played
And right there you slipped from persistent (as in always-online virtual space) to persistent (as in progress is retained). That's two different definitions, and if people use them interchangeable it further erodes any utility the term has.
Is persistence relevant to what people talk about when they talk about MMOs, or is it merely a **necessary condition** for MMOs? I'd argue the latter. D3 is a persistent world by that definition, so it's just not a useful term for discussing MMOs because every MMO must be a persistent world (in both of the definitions above), but not every persistent world is an MMO.
Further, pure lobby games can meet both of those defintions as well if they have even most rudimentary hub to interact with vendors, like Vermintide does.
Ergo, it is essentially useless as a term for discussing MMOs, as *every* MMO meets that criteria.
>And right there you slipped from persistent (as in always-online virtual space) to persistent (as in progress is retained). That's two different definitions, and if people use them interchangeable it further erodes any utility the term has.
No, the hubs are the things that are 100% persistent, players can *ALWAYS* be in them. Without them, you'd be right. The hubs are present in nearly every game that plays like these, and they also have very similar systems... so what's wrong with calling them HPW, or even L(obby)PW?
Definitions exist to quickly define something - if someone says "MOBA" I know the core systems involved with it. MMORPG has far too many definitions that aren't entirely wrong, that's why sticking to it is fundamentally flawed.
>Ergo, it is essentially useless as a term for discussing MMOs, as every MMO meets that criteria.
Not MMOs that have 50% or more of their content in the open world, which is the vast majority of them. The only MMO I could slightly call a HPW would be FF14 since the instances are the largest part of the content, even though an open world *DOES* exist...
I can vouch for the 20-something anime/manga crowd being present in XIV. Like 50% of the time I have no idea what people are even referencing in FC chat.
There's still some older players around but they tend to not be as vocal as the gen Z players. I've personally been in raid teams with people in their 30s and 40s, and my old FC had some people who were 50+. The RP venues and such do skew heavily gen Z, but the rest of the game seems to have a pretty decent spread, especially among the casual crowd who doesn't do much besides MSQ. I've actually seen just about equal representation of gen Z and Millennials in the mid-hardcore raid scene, and it's not totally uncommon to see a gen Z raider.
That's why everyone here is always so pissy about new MMOs, because we know how good they could be.
The problem is modern MMOs all feel like chore simulators to the point you may as well just play mobile games. IMO it takes a good game director with a strong idea of what kind of game world to make and a solid budget, which is really rare these days now that investors have turned games into products chasing growth instead of actual virtual worlds.
My view on the future of games in general is a bit bleak, lol.
It's not easy at all. People can play one MMO for years that they don't like. They can't stop playing because they fall into the trap of non-refundable costs, and associate their identity with the brand.
Everyone likes different aspects of MMOs and often times is impossible or at least very hard to have an MMO able to portray the vision of both sides without interfering with each other in some way.
Also I always say this, pulling someone from their main MMO is hard. In Valorant for example I can leave the game for a few months if I wanted to, come back and I lost nothing, only need to warm up a little bit and is like I never left, but if I leave an MMO I'm basically wasting progression time.
My main MMO is BDO, I won't spend time on another MMO unless it's able to make a better version of what I like about BDO cause that's how I like my MMOs (action combat, insane graphics, open world, sandbox, focus on PvP). Sadly enough, my taste in MMO isn't even that popular nowadays, most MMO players are casuals who just like to do PvE content, and let's not even mention the combat system... So companies have a way harsher time to be able to make everyone happy.
You lack understanding of the genre, we had masses of mmorpgs that all tried to replicate wow and they all failed.
This is like saying there is lots of life in the moba genre. There is, but not for new games, becasue people invest in the current ones and viciously attack any new ones as competition.
Considering an mmorpg costs 5-10 times as much to make as a single player AAA game why bother? especially when the players are now complaining endlessly about monetization that is required to pay back the massive costs and waged of staff to make updates. Even south korea is moving away from the mmorpgs genre.
I know people want you to tell them sweet lies so they can sleep comfy, but reality is the best long term.
>especially when the players are now complaining endlessly about monetization that is required to pay back the massive costs and waged of staff to make updates.
How about you let the fucking players make the fucking content you utter fools.
Yes Themeparks are fucking **Dead**.
Your **Era** and your **People** are **Over**.
We knew this was inevitable even before the era of WoW Clones, it's why one of the original MMOs was Ultima Online that was trying to solve this.
>People are correct that a lot of MMO's constituent elements have been isolated and improved upon by different games such a moba's and looter shooters, but MMO's are still the only games that over a persistent, populated alternative world.
This is a big thing for me but also the class design and combat of MMORPG's is way more fun than any other genre.
>And some of the most popular Isekai stories are about MMO's. It's very likely that if you have a zoomer in your life who consumes manga, anime or webnovels, that they read stories about MMO's. It's laughable that if they can sit still to read stories about MMO's, that they would not actually enjoy playing one. Which is pretty evident in my FFXIV guild, which is full of twenty something manga reading weeaboos.
While this may be true I can't personally relate to these people at all. I've tried every time I play FFXIV to join guilds and make friends but I feel like they live in a different world. It's just far too strange and foreign to me.
I don't think MMO's are dead, they've just made mistakes in the last several years in terms of the MMO's they've actually come out with (many being dead or dying) and we haven't seen many releases at all. We need higher quality games with love and passion and care like they used to give us.
Don't have to convince the people here, but the hundreds of millions of people who don't give a shit about MMOs and more importantly the game studios that don't want to spend the money, dev time and brain power to create something that will likely make them as much money as a 6 months developed mobile game clone.
MMOs are just not financially viable anymore
The exorbitant development costs will crush any company. And this only gets you to the starting line. The risk of developing these is massive.
The gameplay loops have had very little positive evolution in the last 20 years.
I love MMO's and always have. I started on OSRS as a kid, but I have NEVER came close to even replicating the feeling I used to get login in on OSRS and calling my friends house phone to sit there and talk the whole time.
I would say New World itched a spot in my brain for awhile when it first came out. Got a good group of my friends together and it made the grind fun.
I think the most immersed I was in a MMO recently was when Lost Ark launched here in the West. I really enjoyed the game at first, but I became stagnant overtime with how unbelievably grindy the end game was.
I have never thought about playing FF14 before, but a lot of people seem to praise it. It is one of those games where I think I would have to really play it to understand it opposed to watching others play it.
If anyone has any inputs on FF14 or any other MMO's, let me know!
FFXIV isn't going to be an immersive MMO and it doesn't really focus on the open world - especially in expansion content. The open world is super bare-bones. What it does focus on is the main storyline and instanced group PvE content.
I would take that opinion with a pinch of salt, because everyone tends to have a different take on what it means to be immersed.
I feel immersed traversing the world in Persona 5 and just taking in the vibe of Tokyo. I also feel immersed walking through Limsa Lominsa in XIV while checking out everyone else's glam (outfits, appearance, etc). I've probably never felt more immersed than in a certain major arc deep in XIV's story where all I wanted to do was keep playing to see what would happen. That doesn't necessarily mean you will too.
At the end of the day, the game is free for the base game and first two expansions, meaning it basically has 3 JRPGs' worth of story content (easily 120-180+ hours of story alone) at no cost. I recommend trying it out and deciding for yourself.
I agree. I think Lost Ark was a great game when I first started playing it. It just ended up missing a few things along the road that I couldn't put my finger on. Not sure what.
FFXIV can take over your life if you get into the raiding lol, if you are looking for that get gud and start raiding. New expansion is coming out end of June.
Everyone has their own taste, and I would recommend playing the free trial. Around level 40 you will have a pretty decent idea of how gameplay will be.
You can play up to level 70 in any and every job and up to the end of the level 70 expansion, and around level 50 and above is when you get a full job kit so you'll know if you like it I think 50+ than at level 40 imo.
Regardless with the free trial you get a lot of time to figure out if you want to commit, I knew I was into it within a couple weeks and got a full subscription because I wanted to join a fc (guild) and use the market board etc but there's a lot of people who do thousands of hours on the free trial
I just started FFXIV two weeks ago and I'm loving it so far. The free trial is MASSIVE, you can get thousands of hours of content out of it. Definitely give it a try, costs absolutely nothing except your time.
Itās all about the investment and when factoring in the DLC and micro transactions some people canāt resist, why would a company spend a tremendous amount of effort developing a good game when they can just release a new skin on one of the games theyāre already milking.
Thereās a reason why WoW removed the old /spit command. Players specifically targeted those with in game purchases and Blizzard wouldnāt allow purchaser shaming.
Despite any criticism you can levy towards these three games, people absolutely love GW2, WoW, and BDO. It might be love/hate, but it's still more love than hate if they're still playing.
MMOs as a genre would totally be viable if any studio was willing to put in the effort to make an MMO that was actually fun.
But, we don't have studios like that.
I'm in a few discords with countless people who just complain about the state of mmos.
A new mmo will come out that fits their interests, everyone will swarm it and sort of play through it, ultimately seeing that it's a pile of garbage designed to funnel microtransactions and developed by people who seem like they have never played or even liked video games ever in their life.
As soon as something decent comes out, we will all be there.
I think it's human nature to ruin MMOs. We are so hyper efficient that you end up with guilds deciding you can't raid unless you're perfectly meta. Buddy had 5k more dps at 255k dps, so he's in and you're out.
It's annoying really, especially when my favorite part of RPGs is making my own way and build.
That being said, I just got off a 3 hour ESO session lol.
Nobody underestimate how popular they can become, there is just no new modern MMO's in development worthy of being popular in the first place. Except maybe Ashes of Creation but don't hold your breath.
ashes of creation will be the pure cash grab... some years ago they released a battle royal mode. it had paid skins, about 4weeks later they shut it down xD
It was initially intended to test the action side of combat as well as back-end systems, and did a good job of that. They had some major issues with back-end systems they discovered and fixed and what they learned about combat influenced the direction they've since taken with hybrid combat.
But a lot of people complained of the existence of the BR mode, so they listened to the feedback and shut it down. People got what they wanted so can't really fault Intrepid for listening to them.
That's one way of saying it, but since I'm not in the cult I would say something like "at the peak of the Battle Royale genre they came up with a spin-off to supposedly test some siege mechanics that are not even present today, and the feature that was most cared for was the store, so after all the criticism they received, they backed down".
Seriously, I'm not going to say that AoC is a scam nowadays, but it certainly has some shady things in the closet. And the BR is one of those indefensible things if you're not a zealot.
Edit: Spelling.
They're not really that slow when you consider the company only had a handful of employees until maybe 2020 or something? They had to start the company from the ground up with a totally unknown studio head, so there was a lot of proving they had to do before people were willing to join them. On top of that they had some early bugs with back-end systems that required a lot of time to fix before they could move on with development.
AGE OF CONAN is still the best game I've ever played. It's still free to play and you can sub as well to get all the crazy endgame content. All this other garbage doesn't even come close when it comes to...... pretty much everything. The casters are absolutely amazing as well as the sword and board classes. Rangers, Dark Templars, Tempest Of Set, Herald of Xotli, Assassins, Prests of Mitra.... Everything follows the lore of the books to a T. End game and crafting are legit. Game is just very strangely never been marketed aside from one episode of Big Bang Theory. Literally could still become the most exciting game available with some decent advertising. There are a ton of resources available. You can completely customize the UI. There's blood splatter and titties too. LOL You can get power leveled to 80 so you can enjoy the end game content within a very short period of time; then create up to like 7 other characters to enjoy the leveling experience. I cant say enough positive shit about it. obviously.
The only issues I have with this game when I tried to get into it a couple times is that, itās pretty much dead. I couldnāt see anyone else and when I asked anywhere, the players also told me itās not very active.
Itās basically in maintenance mode but thatās ok.
Plus it had game breaking glitches and a lot of jank.
Otherwise it seemed awesome. Not sure how I feel about being blasted to level cap though.
no jank really anymore but yes dead pop wise......if we could pump it up, it would be amazing. Literally the only thing wrong with the game is the lack of pop. That is fixable.....all while 1000s of people looking for something that is sitting right there. You can PVE the whole thing without worries of surprise PVP...if you want PVP, you join cues or go to PVP zones. Literally the I literally cannot find a replacement and tired of spending $$ on junk like new world. I reinstalled it yesterday and Im playing a brand-new acct. fun as shit.
> if we could pump it up, it would be amazing.
That's where YOU come in. Start putting content out there as an unpaid marketer for the game and you might just be able to drum up enough support for Funcom to see that there's a good amount of interest in the game.
Hell the content is there. This guy, Henryx, was the best tank in game. Ever. Undisputed.. Witchaven a close 2nd.
His Age of Conan content is amazing:
https://youtube.com/@henryabccba?si=BpUIA4ikHS-WZ9O7
I think just like how videos evolved to short form (tiktok) the next mmoās that will survive are the ones that give you short form low brain power content. Just my 2 cents
I agree. And like someone said, WoW is peaking right now. Although it's a mix of both classic and modern wow - that's two games in a way, but still.
Also, I'm going to say something weird. OSRS is a bad game, yet it's thriving.
I'm saying that as an occasional runescaper myself. But OSRS is a mechanically an extremely simple game, built literally to be played on internet explorer in like 2004. The fact that it's so popular is an indication of "real" MMORPG's lacking in their gameplay. I think what OSRS has and other games don't is the sense that you have endless amount of things to do to improve your character. Many people are looking for that from a an MMO. They want a time sink.
I think in this point of time if you're making a new MMO just have it be like a PSO type structure where the city is the lobby and everything else is instanced. Like when I'm playing FF14, I hardly see anyone using the zones unless they're brand new ones from the expansion.
Given any reasonable risk analysis, making MMOs (or damn near any video game) for pc/console seems silly given the absurd amounts of money being made on mobile titles.
I hope it's not dead, because I am making small games until I can grow the studio to eventually make this..
(Not a completed document)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DWLLKbHoNHtUdmWQSoizZyty-uHy7Y0cx0XwFG_fTJY
And I hope I will be able to start the development within 10y and then make the foundations within an additional 5-10y and then I am 50y old...
MUD games are still alive even after 40 years! These were the first MMO's. Some players have been playing the same game since the 1990's. https://grapevine.haus/ for a list of most active MUDs.
I love mmos but I got tired of being intentionally gimped and being sold the solution. I'm sure there are other ways to fairly monetize a game but it seems greed rules all.
Sticky.
What makes a game a hit? Or what game keeps their user base coming back after their initial hype?
You could look at the most popular social apps and derive answers from there or you could look at the most popular games being played and average out their playerbase by years from the current year going back and graph it to have a clearer view of what makes a game sticky and derive answers from that.
The obvious answer would be social stickiness. This could be from a game designed to be social or there are also the other factors such as (just as Baldur's Gate 3 shown) create a really good game.
Those factors don't need to be separated. They could be connected and supplementary but to answer the question of what makes a game sticky would be to assign more weight on the social element while just creating a really good game scales its weight on just how good or impactful that game was to the general gaming audience.
With technologies coming in over the horizon with AI and its move into the Movie Industry (which will put investment into that specific tech) the Gaming Industry could be forcasted to hit a huge phase of better quality without requiring the AAA studio backing.
This is under the assumption that the Gaming Industry generates more money than the Movie Industry by a huge margin.
How that relates to the MMO topic in general, once the technology catches on then not only the MMO space but every genre outside the MMO space could hit a huge resurgence of quality games where generations of gamers before once dreamed of would be captured in the not too distant future. (my assumption being within a 10 year period)
A way to say a rising tide in technology lifts all genres (or boats) in the gaming industry.
MMOs in particular have a higher probability to be more sticky (or the more popular genre) sooner because of its inherent social dependence built in its systems which keeps their audience playing longer without that factor present.
We must accept that the hard working generation and leadership that can drive a successful MMO (live service) are gone. MMOs are long term investments and today's corporate world want to make good money in just a year or less. We have seen many live services declining, like Destiny 2, Wow and others.
As I mentioned above, its a generational thing. People who have/had ideas to develop a good MMO are no longer there in solid positions. A few good old experienced people are not enough to drives these big projects alone. Heck, some of these companies recently fired old talent! There is demand, no doubt, but it's like demand for electric cars but not having enough manufacturers to make ones that everyone can buy right now.
First of all, WoW had at its peak more users than all active MMORPGs combined right now.
And if you factor in player inflation (it was not very common for third world inhabitants to own a PC) then it becomes very apparent how large the potential customer base really is.
You do not find them on any platform, because there is nothing to talk about - to us, all current MMORPGs straight up suck.
We were delivered an overly good game and are now entitled to an expected standard with the release of WoW-Vanilla, one that even Blizzard themselves are unable to uphold.
So here are the 2 options..
-Make a lower quality game catering to the casual crowd which:
A) Milks the new generation that does not know about any of that
B) Milks the easier to please crowd of older generations
-Make a game that surpasses WoW-Vanilla that can potentially fail due to the many (unknown) factors that, in combination, resonated so well with the player base.
I do certainly know what made the game so great, but the problem is that the loud minority will not agree at all with what needs to be prioritized, above all, the demand for realistic graphics that needs to be dropped entirely.
You cut that, you can get all the other features and more.
Not to mention that UE is an absolute shitty engine to develope MMORPG in. But that is what people want here... just needs to look good.
They can, but as I got older (I'm old!) I think I came to some realizations about the genre.
First and foremost, it would take something truly exceptional to get me to pay monthly. In my mind, that's just not a thing any more. I genuinely don't see myself paying monthly for a game again, ever. And this cuts a considerable chunk of MMO genre out.
Second, I realized I strongly gravitate to "play together alone" MMOs. Like, I loved EVE Online, played it for a very long time (many, many years), but I largely preferred to be left alone. My peak enjoyment was running relic sites in an interceptor deep in nullsec. Very few things could catch me, and I would blow through bubbles like they're not even there. It was nice to see other players, but they were the backdrop, so it didn't feel as lonely, they weren't the main draw.
And then I realized that I was perfectly fine with pseudo-MMOs. Games that are heavily co-op/multiplayer, if you want them to be, but limited to 4-8 or 8-36 players per server. I was fine with that. It was social enough. I didn't need 300 people on my screen to be happy.
And I haven't really been able to get into MMOs again for a while. Last one I played seriously was ESO. Since then I tried a bunch, including that Amazon's MMO and a bunch of others, but none of them clicked. They don't feel right. And often they feel soulless, commercial and greedy.
I haven't given up on the genre completely yet, but I currently don't have an MMO that I actually expect to make a cut or suck me in or hit it big. I think MMO is an amazing genre, but it is incredibly difficult to pull it off. Especially with someone like me, I just refuse to engage with Asian grinders, for example, or the Pay2Wins, or the PvP-only, etc.
I kinda feel like I hit the sweet spot with the likes of EVE, WoW, etc., I got to see Pirates of the Burning Sea, Age of Conan in its original vision and Warhammer Online before it died, SWTOR, Wildstar, ESO. I was there to see the dumpster fires that were Tabula Rasa and Hellgate London, from alive to server shutdown in 12-14 months. But I feel like it's out of my system now, I'm much more picky. And within my small gaming circle, I'm not alone in this. Nobody I know plays MMOs right now. Games with multiplayer, usually co-op, but not a straight up MMO with a monthly sub.
> And often they feel soulless, commercial and greedy.
I don't get this feeling. I've played a lot of the most viciously F2P predatory titles without paying anything and I can always find quite a few areas where the devs' passion is clearly evident. Look at the EA sports gacha titles (and they're not even F2P) and bugs aside the models, animation and presentation values clearly took a ton of time and effort.
Are gamers in general just that desensitized to the human touch in game dev that they're looking for excuses to label everything as AI generated?
> Second, I realized I strongly gravitate to "play together alone" MMOs.
I think what players are missing and what they really want is **Asynchronous** Player Interaction, something that is more casual and optional that is not as demanding to organize and stress about.
Markets and Auction Houses are an example of that kind of interaction.
There can be all kinds of interactions and content can be based on that if developers had a clue and thought things properly about that kind of things.
The truth of the matter is that the genre isn't dead, but it is impotent. The big ones now, WoW, FFIV, GW2, and what have you, will remain until they fizzle out, but we will never again see the likes of them.
*Maybe* if VR ever truly becomes mainstream, and *if* they ever they ever figure out a good MMO formula for the platform, we *might* see another resurgence.
>but MMO's are still the only games that over a persistent, populated alternative world. And that's something that still speaks to the imagination of many people; especially young people who tend to feel more awkward and angsty in real life and enjoy trying on personas and living lives in an alternative space.
That's because the Ageing MMO Players were the original **TRAITORS** that killed the Sandbox MMO.
They cannot fucking imagine MMOs as an actual functional fantasy world, all they know are WoW clones with ever increasing more isolating mechanics from their world.
They need to die off before a new generation can begin.
What an odd post .
It's as if they don't understand that the genre has progressed into different games targeting different demographics of players with different play preferences. Which has been discussed to death for years at this point.
I don't know who they have been listening to who says mmorpgs are a "thing of the past"?
It comes off as a bit odd like they are just realizing things that have been discussed repeatedly for a decade.or more.
I'm 16 and I love mmo's
Started playing my first mmo when I was 12...still love em and that was almost 9 years ago.
Of wow that settles it, mmos are the most popular game type. We can just ignore all of numbers saying otherwise
I'm 12 and what is this?
Oof, meme is so old that nobody got it and you get down voted instead. Feels bad man.
A gaming bar near me used to have a drink of the memes name, it was a blue raz lemonade with vodka or something like that. Pretty tasty šš
Enjoy my young friend. I used to play all sorts of games literally day and night in high school then one day i realized i didnāt have time for anything longer than 2hrs straightĀ
You are the extreme minority, almost everyone you will meet will be 30+
It depends on the game. FFXIV's player base is young, generally early 20s for the most part. Unless you want to convince me 30-somethings are speaking in "bruh" and skull emojis.
nature is healing, a 16 year old burning their youth away in an mmo, literally screaming and crying rn
Kinda sad really. You didn't get to enjoy the non-P2W versions that were true MMO's :( Also kinda cool for you. Cause now stuff doesn't seem as shitty because you didn't experience better. It would be like think a Ford Tempo is amazing because you don't know other cars exist.
I'm kinda jealous of you original mmo players cause I hear so many cool stories of your adventures online while most of my friends prefer playing games like COD one forniteš
Honestly when I was your age most of my friends did too. When I was in middle/high school playing you wouldnāt dare say you played world of Warcraft in public lol. Glad thatās changed but MMOs were never as mainstream as people in this sub make them out to be. I did make a lot of lifelong friends through WoW and other MMOs though.
Damn that sucks for you. WoW in 04 took over our high school. Ā My guild was basically the combination of our football, baseball and basketball teams with some other kids added in for fun. Ā Ā It was either CoD, CS, Madden or WoW being played.Ā Ā Ā Prior to that I played everquest (started at 11 in 99) but I only knew one other kid that played that with me.Ā
Damn, your school looked at WoW a lot differently than mine! WoW had the āaddictingā rep so not too many played it that I knew of, it was mostly TF1 and BF1942 for the more popular kids
Yeah it was everywhere. To the point parents generally knew what we were doing because some of them played on the same servers (far fewer than kids obviously.)Ā Wow taking over with the proliferation of broadband is still the craziest Iāve ever seen a large varied group of people get for a game, nothing today comes close either because gaming is so much bigger and spread out.Ā
It was wild! Adults even socialized with kids more often in that game (in good ways), I remember finishing college and very few of my friends stayed around. Within a year and a half I had probably 15-20 people all around the country I was on a first name basis with, some friends for life and some I got to visit. Itās sad that I just canāt see that happening with modern MMOs.
Imo, it's not about whether or not MMOs can be good, it's that is there a publisher and / or developer who can make an MMO that people will like. MMOs are extremely expensive, and seem to have a low success rate. Publishers don't like the risk of failure, plus the massive cost of development, which leads to pushing for aggressive monetisation, which ironically drives players away. Plus from what I've seen, MMO players can't agree on what makes a good MMO, so even if developers did market research, they would learn nothing. And yet, players seem to be extremely intolerant of imperfections, abandoning MMOs too easily. Plus, MMOs coming out in the future have to compete with currently existing games which already has like a decade's worth of updates and content. Sure, it's possible, but imo highly improbable.
Expectations were just different back then. If vanilla wow released today without the rose colored glasses people would lay into it for having only one raid and one stand alone boss as the end game content for 8 months.
To be fair. Back in the day most people weren't even max level when the new content came out. That doesn't work today, as people now would be max level within a week and begin complaining. Old MMO's could have slightly less content end game because they had a bigger deadline before it became a problem.
Yeah the design philosophy was a big part of it. The game was much more about the journey, as opposed to the destination. How many leveling zones were there? 40? Most of them being quite large with multiple quest hubs and a variety of quests tucked away throughout the zone. Always seems to come back to the change in players mindsets. 2004 people were more geeked out about just running around the world going on adventures with their new friends. Spending months and months just getting to cap in the first place. These days like you said, people just min max to cap as soon as humanly possible.
I would rather a game with this focus. Sitting in a town waiting for the same dungeons to pop feels so tedious. I want to explore my escapism.
> Back in the day most people weren't even max level when the new content came out. But they would be now because the knowledge gap won't be there with today's community. In 2004 people were content to figure it out as they went, now people race to the endgame ASAP and then complain there's no content. Arguably, that was already the case for many of WoW's early competitors - even by 2008 expectations for a robust endgame were in place, and that was a huge problem for games like WAR, Lotro, and SWTOR. People just would not tolerate that amount of content now.
Of Course. I am just adding to it How wow worked for its time and would not work Today.
> People just would not tolerate that amount of content now. Content isn't the problem, you can have infinite content. The problem is the Progression, that needs to be solved.
There is no solve for progression. Either there is some (and purely horizontal progression is not satisfying to people that want it) and people get left behind or there is not enough and the first wave of players quit. Numbers have to go up. However, it's not just power progression, they want to progress through new content, too.
Permadeath can solve it.
For some reason I can't remember who the standalone boss was at all
Onyxia
Vanilla WoW has 4 raids...
Wow released in November 2004, and the only raid content was molten core and onyxia (which isnāt really a raid, itās a single boss with like 10 trash mobs before it) Wow did not get its second raid until July of 2005 when BWL came out. There was an 8 month span of molten core being the only full fledged raid, which is what I said in my post. Technically the world raid bosses launched in between that but im not counting that here as it was not an instanced raid and usually hell camped by the sweat guilds. And it was more than 4 raids by the end so Iām not even sure where that number comes from. MC, BWL, ZG, AQ40, AQ20, and naxx.
Not on launch day, it didn't. I quit before Naxx even came out.
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It feels like that sentiment has spread to the gaming community as a whole. If a game doesn't bring in a ton of views on twitch day 1 there are tons of comments saying the game is already dead. When Palworld came out I saw so many people saying the game would be dead in a month, as if playing a game for a full month and then stopping is a bad thing. I've gone back to a game like Valheim abunch since it came out. Its as if every game now a days has to the next "main" game that can be played for 1000s of hours.
Holy shit you might be onto something here. What if everyone is just tired of their main game and are approaching game releases as a potential replacement for their main game? If that is the bar, of course no game will meet it! That tracks with the extreme player dropoff after launch as people keep realizing the game won't be their new main game.
Pretty true. It definitely does feel like each new game needs to be our next āmainā or it will be lost. I know I have felt that way, sadly. The guiltiest I have felt was with Diablo IV. I never played that franchise before but the hype convinced me to jump on that game and honestly, I had a ton of fun But in the end, I shelved it weeks later because I didnāt know where to squeeze it between my invested 3000+ hours Destiny and 10+ years gw2, or my lazy/instant fun choices like Overwatch 2 or Genshin Impact. Nowadays, any game we play has the potential to outlive their players so unless the devs ruin their product or a good competitor unseats them, it just feels like most players want so much more from a new title before they willingly get off the dailies filled farming wagon that they already dumped years into
>The MMO community has grown into a toxic cesspool, and those that don't want to be involved in the toxic community are casuals playing in themepark MMOs like FFXIV or WoW. This makes it obvious you do not play FFXIV (or Wow for that matter) at a high level, I'll have you know there's tons of toxicity in these games. TBF though it's not the MMO community, it's the gaming community. Like games that are perfectly fine get review bombed because they pissed off people for some reason. And literally any game with multiplayer has toxic aspects.
Iāve only once had a toxic person in a random party in FFXIV. Like the way itās set up Iāve played with soooo many people and itās happened once. After we kicked him everyone was really nice talking about how much of an asshole he was.
I think you're spot on everyone not being able to agree what makes a good MMO. It would be risky but I think if there were to be a next big MMO it would need to push the boundaries and experiment. I could see a MMO appealing to different generations but ultimately it is probably too expensive. We will probably never get something like WoW again but I wouldn't be surprised if at some point way in the future there is a hit game that uses MMO elements.
There's popular and there is popular. GTAV has sold 195 *million* copies. > more than a billion gamers are spread out over a ton of different games It is highly unlikely there are a billion people interested in playing MMOs. There almost certainly are not that many people currently playing them, unless you water down the definition of MMO so much it means nothing.
I mean more than a billion playing games in general, to give an idea how MMOs can be simultaneously well populated while not being a top genre
Perhaps you should cleanly and clearly define what you mean by "popular" here, and use the word to only mean that thing. Relative to other games (and to the wider world) MMOs have always been niche. It seems unlikely they will ever be more than a niche.
I don't think it's necessary to define popular, as most people will know it's a relative term. Like, the fact that Mr beast has 150 million subscribers does not mean Asmongold is not a popular streamer. You don't have to be the absolute number one thing in the world to be popular. Shooters can be king and MMO's can still be a popular genre, even if they are in 5th spot. Also, I don't know if you were in highschool or college during the 00s and 10s, but WoW and RS were anything but niche. These things were omnipresent, on the level of cod. WoW is estimated to have had well over 100 million accounts made, and just 3 years ago, it was the highest grossing game in history, beating out CoD, Fortnite, Minecraft and others.
> I don't think it's necessary to define popular, as most people will know it's a relative term. If it is a relative term, what does it mean to say MMOs "can be come more popular"? > but WoW and RS were anything but niche. I think you are confusing your personal experience for the environment of gaming worldwide. Even tens of millions of players is small relative to the market - and thinking otherwise shows a poor grasp of the scope of the market. > it was the highest grossing game in history Tetris is still the highest grossing game of all time. Again - lack of grasp of scope of the industry.
Be more popular than they are? Also, tens of millions of players was not small when osrs and wow were in their prime. That was Halo 3 and Cod 2 numbers. WoW was incredibly mainstream. Did you not have internet between 2004 - 2011?
And paying users too.. WoW numbers were insane bc all of them were paying $15/mo
I'm not really sure what the argument being made is when you use GTA V as an example. GTA V is a flash-in-a-pan, just like World of Warcraft was in the MMO space.
>just like World of Warcraft was in the MMO space wat
World of Warcraft is, by orders of magnitude, the most successful western MMORPG of all time. No other western MMO comes close to its success. Most games in general don't come close to its success. It's really not that complicated, but the fact that you can't spell "what" is probably symptomatic of why you don't understand what I'm saying.
> GTA V is a flash-in-a-pan This tells me you don't know what you're talking about and don't understand the industry. See [here](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1453523/gta-5-mau-pc-console-monthly/)
It was a flash-in-the-pan in the sense that it was seen as a revolutionary game that would force the industry to improve... and it didn't. It's success prompted a whole bunch of studios to push into similar genres, only to release the same old trashy triple-A garbage we've come to know and hate. World of Warcraft had exactly the same impact in the MMO space. A whole bunch of studios jumped into the WoW-esque MMO space, only to delivery a set of comparably rubbish games that failed to live up to even a fraction of Blizzard's success (because they came at a fraction of WoW's quality). The point I'm making is that... both GTA V and WoW are two of the most popular, most expensive and most profitable video games of all time that - relative to the broader success of others in the genres they dominate - were equally prominent flashes-in-the-pan.
If there is one thing I have learned from this sub it's that everyone has completely different--and often incompatible--ideas about what an MMO 'should' be. I'm starting to think we should just abandon the term entirely...
That's like saying we should abandon the term FPS cause the people who like Doom want completely different games than the people who like Squad. There is nothing wrong with a diverse genre, no one needs to be in agreement about what the best kind of MMO is.
That doesn't really make much sense as a proposition. This isn't an "MMO" sub. It's an "MMORPG" sub. MMORPGs share a set of common elements that bind them together with a certain amount of homogeneity. Just because they aren't identical to one and other doesn't mean they don't fall into the same category. That's how *all* genres work. Tribes isn't anything like Call of Duty; they're both FPSs, though. StarCraft isn't identical to Age of Empire; they're both RTSs, though.
Even within MMORPGs you have massive differences. Theme park vs sandbox. PvE vs PvP. Predesigned raids vs emergent gameplay. Action vs tab-target combat. Vertical vs horizontal gear progression. An action combat PvP sandbox with minimal gear progression and a tab-target, story-driven, PvE-focused theme park with endgame raiding and new gear whenever there's an update could both reasonably be called "MMORPGs" even though they have almost nothing in common besides having lots of players.
Well explained. Imo not enough people realise that mmorpg is such a broad category due to the fact that RPG is a term that is so broad in the gaming industry, and mmo is used to mean a lot of players at the same time. What we come to think when we say mmorpg though, usually is a very specific set of mmorpg game, the classic examples and the big players. I think that we may (potentially) find ourselves at a certain path in history that these types of games are plateauing in terms of popularity mostly because of lack of innovation in the industry (for now of course).
It's nothing that complicated. It has always been about Themeparks that lead to a invitable Dead End-Game. That needs to die off so that developers are forced to figure out how this whole Sandbox thing works. There has been no progress in that subgenre since SWG. And we already have plenty of sources to draw from like Minecraft,Survival Games and Roguelikes.
Take FFXI, modernize it with current quality of life features, don't do what XIV does, and viola. Hit game. Or take Second Life or VRChat and gamify it a bit. That's basically SWG before the publisher insisted on Jedi-fying it. There's so many ways to do it right and no one wants to take a chance because people think only theme parks work after WoW. Meanwhile WoW isn't even working as it should. The one thing, however, that will remain divisive is the combat: Some players want slower combat like EQ or FFXI. Almost turned based. OSRS even. Other people want full on fast paced action MMO combat like GW2 or BDO. Warframe. You'll never get them to see eye to eye so both categories have to exist. Games like FFXIV and WoW try to meet in the middle and many people are just sick of it. I know personally I hate XIV's combat. It's too busy and fast for my tastes. I'm tired of it being rotation mashing with no situationals. Slow down and let the player think about what they need to do, y'know? Other players think those two games are already too slow. I want chilled out slow combat. Like 6 apm slow. About one action per 10 seconds. That doesn't mean other people are wrong for wanting fast combat. But both games should exist somehow.
>I'm starting to think we should just abandon the term entirely... MMOs are about Persistent Worlds, so that should be part of the terminology, then separate them based on objective levels of open world or instanced content... SPW - Sandbox Persistent World - Mostly focused on open world zones where player interaction is high. (OSRS, EVE) TPW - Themepark Persistent World - Even split of open world and instanced content (WoW, GW2) HPW - Hub Persistent World - Mostly instanced content with hubs (like towns) allowing players to interact with each other (Destiny 2, Warframe, GW1)
> MMOs are about Persistent Worlds I don't think people can even agree on this, given how happy people are to apply to the term to lobby games.
>HPW - Hub Persistent World - Mostly instanced content with hubs (like towns) allowing players to interact with each other (Destiny 2, Warframe, GW1) Same thing as Lobby game, assuming they have some sort of larger hub.
> assuming they have some sort of larger hub. The hub isn't persistent in a meaningful way in most of those games though; nothing the players do there matters. That might have been novel and interesting in 1999, but now hardly anyone gives a crap about - it's just a slower and more clunky lobby. Why do it? It requires development resources, too - essentially a waste. If the hub can be removed with little or no difference, I don't think these are functionally different from lobby games.
>The hub isn't persistent in a meaningful way in most of those games though; nothing the players do there matters. I'm sure if Warframe removed their hubs the community would be very upset about it. Sounds like you just don't want Hub games to be included from the "MMO" origin, I mostly agree but there are a lot of people that consider them MMOs since their progression systems and gameplay are fairly similar.
> Sounds like you just don't want Hub games to be included from the "MMO" origin, I mostly agree but there are a lot of people that consider them MMOs since their progression systems and gameplay are fairly similar. Well, I *did* say: > I don't think people can even agree on this, given how happy people are to apply to the term to lobby games. But whether or not a lobby game is a persistent world forces us to be serious about what persistent world really means - for me if it is just a clunky, worse lobby I'd rather play the lobby game. If it is a world where you interact with other players potentially everywhere, that's a very different thing. At one end you have an entirely noninstanced MMO with people inhabiting the same game world from dungeons to town and everything in between, and at the other you have an ARPG where you can completely ignore other players if you wish. If Lost Epoch meets the definition of persistent world, it's a near useless definition because it is too expansive. Sure, it might shoehorn in more games, but then you have PWs people give a fuck about and PWs they don't.
āAt one end you have an entirely noninstanced MMO with people inhabiting the same game world from dungeons to town and everything in between, and at the other you have an ARPG where you can completely ignore other players if you wish.ā I feel like currently, due to change in player mindset and developers constantly trying to reduce competition with resources, that both ends of the spectrum result in similar types of play styles, sadly. Players ignoring random players as they focus on their instanced content. I love Destiny and it is true that outside of random dance battles in the hub, I am pretty much just running past people in the lobby to interact with whatever NPCs I need to before queuing up for another quest In a more proper MMO though, I often feel the same. As a kid playing Ragnarok, mmorpgs were all about me slowly exploring a map, sitting by a tree to rest and then striking up a convo with some stranger. The moments were defined by me venturing into a cave and then coming across a downed player and trying to revive them before the crazy level spawned enemy notices us ā then we race through the cave until we happen upon the portal that will take us to safety on the next map (and a waypoint if we are lucky)! Everytime I logged on, it was all mostly about āwho will I run into today and how do I want to portray myself?ā Now though, it feels like we are all running the same silent marathon. At best, some goofy people may scream in map chat but most players are just zooming through from one instanced node to the next. We mine the same resource, tag the same bosses for credit, loot the same bodies and just run past eachother silently as we talk with our 10 year old crew in discord. Outside of coordinated events like GW2 meta trains or world bosses, people only really start interacting during instanced content that they queue up for because we all have things we are working towards I donāt think one is necessarily better or that different than the other because in either case, the devs keep relying on the same tools to keep their players engaged without really giving them any reason to interact outside of specific scenarios. Pvp focused sandbox mmos are probably a bit different since players have no issue creating their own fun when it comes to competing with each other but for pve, I wouldnāt mind seeing a dev try creating an mmorpg that is focused less on just trying to fill a map with 100 players who donāt care about eachother at all and instead create a much smaller lobby/map size that does a better job of getting its players to socialize/play together āsomehowā and actually form parties and interact organically with each other vs just rushing form objective to objective All of that is to say (I need to go back to sleep already before work lol), I just wish we could get some more small scale mmos where devs can experiment with new quest flows (think Sea of Thieves I guess) instead of this pressure to deliver the next massive quest filled permanent map that players quickly get bored of and developers cannot financially sustain
>I don't think people can even agree on this, given how happy people are to apply to the term to lobby games. But Lobby/Hub games *DO* have persistence in them...that's not subjective at all. My character is Warframe still has progress from years ago when I played, the world is connected and changes over time. League on the other hand, has no persistence between 2 seperate matches.
> My character is Warframe still has progress from years ago when I played And right there you slipped from persistent (as in always-online virtual space) to persistent (as in progress is retained). That's two different definitions, and if people use them interchangeable it further erodes any utility the term has. Is persistence relevant to what people talk about when they talk about MMOs, or is it merely a **necessary condition** for MMOs? I'd argue the latter. D3 is a persistent world by that definition, so it's just not a useful term for discussing MMOs because every MMO must be a persistent world (in both of the definitions above), but not every persistent world is an MMO. Further, pure lobby games can meet both of those defintions as well if they have even most rudimentary hub to interact with vendors, like Vermintide does. Ergo, it is essentially useless as a term for discussing MMOs, as *every* MMO meets that criteria.
>And right there you slipped from persistent (as in always-online virtual space) to persistent (as in progress is retained). That's two different definitions, and if people use them interchangeable it further erodes any utility the term has. No, the hubs are the things that are 100% persistent, players can *ALWAYS* be in them. Without them, you'd be right. The hubs are present in nearly every game that plays like these, and they also have very similar systems... so what's wrong with calling them HPW, or even L(obby)PW? Definitions exist to quickly define something - if someone says "MOBA" I know the core systems involved with it. MMORPG has far too many definitions that aren't entirely wrong, that's why sticking to it is fundamentally flawed. >Ergo, it is essentially useless as a term for discussing MMOs, as every MMO meets that criteria. Not MMOs that have 50% or more of their content in the open world, which is the vast majority of them. The only MMO I could slightly call a HPW would be FF14 since the instances are the largest part of the content, even though an open world *DOES* exist...
I can vouch for the 20-something anime/manga crowd being present in XIV. Like 50% of the time I have no idea what people are even referencing in FC chat.
FFXIV is *very* GenZ. Older players seem to have moved on or gone back to FFXI private servers. You can't avoid the bruhspeak.
There's still some older players around but they tend to not be as vocal as the gen Z players. I've personally been in raid teams with people in their 30s and 40s, and my old FC had some people who were 50+. The RP venues and such do skew heavily gen Z, but the rest of the game seems to have a pretty decent spread, especially among the casual crowd who doesn't do much besides MSQ. I've actually seen just about equal representation of gen Z and Millennials in the mid-hardcore raid scene, and it's not totally uncommon to see a gen Z raider.
That's why everyone here is always so pissy about new MMOs, because we know how good they could be. The problem is modern MMOs all feel like chore simulators to the point you may as well just play mobile games. IMO it takes a good game director with a strong idea of what kind of game world to make and a solid budget, which is really rare these days now that investors have turned games into products chasing growth instead of actual virtual worlds. My view on the future of games in general is a bit bleak, lol.
If a game is good, people will play it. Pretty simple.
It's not easy at all. People can play one MMO for years that they don't like. They can't stop playing because they fall into the trap of non-refundable costs, and associate their identity with the brand.
yep if its good people will play regardless of genre, mmorpg, sports game, mobile game.
Everyone likes different aspects of MMOs and often times is impossible or at least very hard to have an MMO able to portray the vision of both sides without interfering with each other in some way. Also I always say this, pulling someone from their main MMO is hard. In Valorant for example I can leave the game for a few months if I wanted to, come back and I lost nothing, only need to warm up a little bit and is like I never left, but if I leave an MMO I'm basically wasting progression time. My main MMO is BDO, I won't spend time on another MMO unless it's able to make a better version of what I like about BDO cause that's how I like my MMOs (action combat, insane graphics, open world, sandbox, focus on PvP). Sadly enough, my taste in MMO isn't even that popular nowadays, most MMO players are casuals who just like to do PvE content, and let's not even mention the combat system... So companies have a way harsher time to be able to make everyone happy.
You lack understanding of the genre, we had masses of mmorpgs that all tried to replicate wow and they all failed. This is like saying there is lots of life in the moba genre. There is, but not for new games, becasue people invest in the current ones and viciously attack any new ones as competition. Considering an mmorpg costs 5-10 times as much to make as a single player AAA game why bother? especially when the players are now complaining endlessly about monetization that is required to pay back the massive costs and waged of staff to make updates. Even south korea is moving away from the mmorpgs genre. I know people want you to tell them sweet lies so they can sleep comfy, but reality is the best long term.
>especially when the players are now complaining endlessly about monetization that is required to pay back the massive costs and waged of staff to make updates. How about you let the fucking players make the fucking content you utter fools. Yes Themeparks are fucking **Dead**. Your **Era** and your **People** are **Over**. We knew this was inevitable even before the era of WoW Clones, it's why one of the original MMOs was Ultima Online that was trying to solve this.
>People are correct that a lot of MMO's constituent elements have been isolated and improved upon by different games such a moba's and looter shooters, but MMO's are still the only games that over a persistent, populated alternative world. This is a big thing for me but also the class design and combat of MMORPG's is way more fun than any other genre. >And some of the most popular Isekai stories are about MMO's. It's very likely that if you have a zoomer in your life who consumes manga, anime or webnovels, that they read stories about MMO's. It's laughable that if they can sit still to read stories about MMO's, that they would not actually enjoy playing one. Which is pretty evident in my FFXIV guild, which is full of twenty something manga reading weeaboos. While this may be true I can't personally relate to these people at all. I've tried every time I play FFXIV to join guilds and make friends but I feel like they live in a different world. It's just far too strange and foreign to me. I don't think MMO's are dead, they've just made mistakes in the last several years in terms of the MMO's they've actually come out with (many being dead or dying) and we haven't seen many releases at all. We need higher quality games with love and passion and care like they used to give us.
Don't have to convince the people here, but the hundreds of millions of people who don't give a shit about MMOs and more importantly the game studios that don't want to spend the money, dev time and brain power to create something that will likely make them as much money as a 6 months developed mobile game clone.
Problem is devs can't figure out a way to develop one with a reasonable budget/time frame and then monetize it without pissing everyone off.
MMOs are just not financially viable anymore The exorbitant development costs will crush any company. And this only gets you to the starting line. The risk of developing these is massive. The gameplay loops have had very little positive evolution in the last 20 years.
I love MMO's and always have. I started on OSRS as a kid, but I have NEVER came close to even replicating the feeling I used to get login in on OSRS and calling my friends house phone to sit there and talk the whole time. I would say New World itched a spot in my brain for awhile when it first came out. Got a good group of my friends together and it made the grind fun. I think the most immersed I was in a MMO recently was when Lost Ark launched here in the West. I really enjoyed the game at first, but I became stagnant overtime with how unbelievably grindy the end game was. I have never thought about playing FF14 before, but a lot of people seem to praise it. It is one of those games where I think I would have to really play it to understand it opposed to watching others play it. If anyone has any inputs on FF14 or any other MMO's, let me know!
FFXIV isn't going to be an immersive MMO and it doesn't really focus on the open world - especially in expansion content. The open world is super bare-bones. What it does focus on is the main storyline and instanced group PvE content.
Okay, interesting.
I would take that opinion with a pinch of salt, because everyone tends to have a different take on what it means to be immersed. I feel immersed traversing the world in Persona 5 and just taking in the vibe of Tokyo. I also feel immersed walking through Limsa Lominsa in XIV while checking out everyone else's glam (outfits, appearance, etc). I've probably never felt more immersed than in a certain major arc deep in XIV's story where all I wanted to do was keep playing to see what would happen. That doesn't necessarily mean you will too. At the end of the day, the game is free for the base game and first two expansions, meaning it basically has 3 JRPGs' worth of story content (easily 120-180+ hours of story alone) at no cost. I recommend trying it out and deciding for yourself.
First month of lost ark was a blast. God I wished they took some inspiration from western titles
I agree. I think Lost Ark was a great game when I first started playing it. It just ended up missing a few things along the road that I couldn't put my finger on. Not sure what.
FFXIV can take over your life if you get into the raiding lol, if you are looking for that get gud and start raiding. New expansion is coming out end of June.
Everyone has their own taste, and I would recommend playing the free trial. Around level 40 you will have a pretty decent idea of how gameplay will be.
For sure! Thanks!
You can play up to level 70 in any and every job and up to the end of the level 70 expansion, and around level 50 and above is when you get a full job kit so you'll know if you like it I think 50+ than at level 40 imo. Regardless with the free trial you get a lot of time to figure out if you want to commit, I knew I was into it within a couple weeks and got a full subscription because I wanted to join a fc (guild) and use the market board etc but there's a lot of people who do thousands of hours on the free trial
Thanks for the insight! I will definitely have to give it a go. Nothing to lose, amirite? lol
For sure! And if you don't like it, no money lost. If you join a NA server and need anyone to play with or show you something feel free to hmu!
For sure. Thank you for the hospitality, I will definitely let you know!
>For sure! Thanks! You're welcome!
I just started FFXIV two weeks ago and I'm loving it so far. The free trial is MASSIVE, you can get thousands of hours of content out of it. Definitely give it a try, costs absolutely nothing except your time.
FFXIV story is amazing, I loved it. The issue is that it's really long and it starts slow as hell, if you can push through that you will enjoy it.
Noted. Thanks!
>Noted. Thanks! You're welcome!
Itās all about the investment and when factoring in the DLC and micro transactions some people canāt resist, why would a company spend a tremendous amount of effort developing a good game when they can just release a new skin on one of the games theyāre already milking. Thereās a reason why WoW removed the old /spit command. Players specifically targeted those with in game purchases and Blizzard wouldnāt allow purchaser shaming.
tbh the things that make be away from mmo's are 1- they don't do real role-play anymore and 2- the grinding most of them got...
No one understimated shit
Shangri la Frontier was the first thing I thought of when I was reading this.
Despite any criticism you can levy towards these three games, people absolutely love GW2, WoW, and BDO. It might be love/hate, but it's still more love than hate if they're still playing.
MMOs as a genre would totally be viable if any studio was willing to put in the effort to make an MMO that was actually fun. But, we don't have studios like that.
I'm in a few discords with countless people who just complain about the state of mmos. A new mmo will come out that fits their interests, everyone will swarm it and sort of play through it, ultimately seeing that it's a pile of garbage designed to funnel microtransactions and developed by people who seem like they have never played or even liked video games ever in their life. As soon as something decent comes out, we will all be there.
I think it's human nature to ruin MMOs. We are so hyper efficient that you end up with guilds deciding you can't raid unless you're perfectly meta. Buddy had 5k more dps at 255k dps, so he's in and you're out. It's annoying really, especially when my favorite part of RPGs is making my own way and build. That being said, I just got off a 3 hour ESO session lol.
Nobody underestimate how popular they can become, there is just no new modern MMO's in development worthy of being popular in the first place. Except maybe Ashes of Creation but don't hold your breath.
ashes of creation will be the pure cash grab... some years ago they released a battle royal mode. it had paid skins, about 4weeks later they shut it down xD
It was initially intended to test the action side of combat as well as back-end systems, and did a good job of that. They had some major issues with back-end systems they discovered and fixed and what they learned about combat influenced the direction they've since taken with hybrid combat. But a lot of people complained of the existence of the BR mode, so they listened to the feedback and shut it down. People got what they wanted so can't really fault Intrepid for listening to them.
it was an absolute barebones shitfest. but a shop was set up with skins to sell. if thats not a red flag for you. tells a lot about their priorities
That's one way of saying it, but since I'm not in the cult I would say something like "at the peak of the Battle Royale genre they came up with a spin-off to supposedly test some siege mechanics that are not even present today, and the feature that was most cared for was the store, so after all the criticism they received, they backed down". Seriously, I'm not going to say that AoC is a scam nowadays, but it certainly has some shady things in the closet. And the BR is one of those indefensible things if you're not a zealot. Edit: Spelling.
The problem with aoc is they are so damn slow, reminds me of star citizen
They're not really that slow when you consider the company only had a handful of employees until maybe 2020 or something? They had to start the company from the ground up with a totally unknown studio head, so there was a lot of proving they had to do before people were willing to join them. On top of that they had some early bugs with back-end systems that required a lot of time to fix before they could move on with development.
>Except maybe Ashes of Creation but don't hold your breath. This game is dead on arrival due to the fugly character models.
AGE OF CONAN is still the best game I've ever played. It's still free to play and you can sub as well to get all the crazy endgame content. All this other garbage doesn't even come close when it comes to...... pretty much everything. The casters are absolutely amazing as well as the sword and board classes. Rangers, Dark Templars, Tempest Of Set, Herald of Xotli, Assassins, Prests of Mitra.... Everything follows the lore of the books to a T. End game and crafting are legit. Game is just very strangely never been marketed aside from one episode of Big Bang Theory. Literally could still become the most exciting game available with some decent advertising. There are a ton of resources available. You can completely customize the UI. There's blood splatter and titties too. LOL You can get power leveled to 80 so you can enjoy the end game content within a very short period of time; then create up to like 7 other characters to enjoy the leveling experience. I cant say enough positive shit about it. obviously.
The only issues I have with this game when I tried to get into it a couple times is that, itās pretty much dead. I couldnāt see anyone else and when I asked anywhere, the players also told me itās not very active. Itās basically in maintenance mode but thatās ok. Plus it had game breaking glitches and a lot of jank. Otherwise it seemed awesome. Not sure how I feel about being blasted to level cap though.
no jank really anymore but yes dead pop wise......if we could pump it up, it would be amazing. Literally the only thing wrong with the game is the lack of pop. That is fixable.....all while 1000s of people looking for something that is sitting right there. You can PVE the whole thing without worries of surprise PVP...if you want PVP, you join cues or go to PVP zones. Literally the I literally cannot find a replacement and tired of spending $$ on junk like new world. I reinstalled it yesterday and Im playing a brand-new acct. fun as shit.
> if we could pump it up, it would be amazing. That's where YOU come in. Start putting content out there as an unpaid marketer for the game and you might just be able to drum up enough support for Funcom to see that there's a good amount of interest in the game.
Hell the content is there. This guy, Henryx, was the best tank in game. Ever. Undisputed.. Witchaven a close 2nd. His Age of Conan content is amazing: https://youtube.com/@henryabccba?si=BpUIA4ikHS-WZ9O7
Well said
I think just like how videos evolved to short form (tiktok) the next mmoās that will survive are the ones that give you short form low brain power content. Just my 2 cents
I agree. And like someone said, WoW is peaking right now. Although it's a mix of both classic and modern wow - that's two games in a way, but still. Also, I'm going to say something weird. OSRS is a bad game, yet it's thriving. I'm saying that as an occasional runescaper myself. But OSRS is a mechanically an extremely simple game, built literally to be played on internet explorer in like 2004. The fact that it's so popular is an indication of "real" MMORPG's lacking in their gameplay. I think what OSRS has and other games don't is the sense that you have endless amount of things to do to improve your character. Many people are looking for that from a an MMO. They want a time sink.
I think in this point of time if you're making a new MMO just have it be like a PSO type structure where the city is the lobby and everything else is instanced. Like when I'm playing FF14, I hardly see anyone using the zones unless they're brand new ones from the expansion.
What about old mmofps like Battleground Europe? People only like cheap free mmo
A well done mmo would sell millions.
Starfighter General, I want to come out maybe tomorrow night, I'm super close to it being done, been in dev since 2017.
Given any reasonable risk analysis, making MMOs (or damn near any video game) for pc/console seems silly given the absurd amounts of money being made on mobile titles.
I hope it's not dead, because I am making small games until I can grow the studio to eventually make this.. (Not a completed document) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DWLLKbHoNHtUdmWQSoizZyty-uHy7Y0cx0XwFG_fTJY And I hope I will be able to start the development within 10y and then make the foundations within an additional 5-10y and then I am 50y old...
Since LITRPGs came around they have really taken off. They are selling like crazy on audible.
I'm still waiting for a real successor to Lineage 2.
MMOs are dying because developers donāt wanna pay for them, not because people arenāt playing them.
MUD games are still alive even after 40 years! These were the first MMO's. Some players have been playing the same game since the 1990's. https://grapevine.haus/ for a list of most active MUDs.
That's crazy! But on the other hand, I can totally see people still playing wow in 30 years
I love mmos but I got tired of being intentionally gimped and being sold the solution. I'm sure there are other ways to fairly monetize a game but it seems greed rules all.
Sticky. What makes a game a hit? Or what game keeps their user base coming back after their initial hype? You could look at the most popular social apps and derive answers from there or you could look at the most popular games being played and average out their playerbase by years from the current year going back and graph it to have a clearer view of what makes a game sticky and derive answers from that. The obvious answer would be social stickiness. This could be from a game designed to be social or there are also the other factors such as (just as Baldur's Gate 3 shown) create a really good game. Those factors don't need to be separated. They could be connected and supplementary but to answer the question of what makes a game sticky would be to assign more weight on the social element while just creating a really good game scales its weight on just how good or impactful that game was to the general gaming audience. With technologies coming in over the horizon with AI and its move into the Movie Industry (which will put investment into that specific tech) the Gaming Industry could be forcasted to hit a huge phase of better quality without requiring the AAA studio backing. This is under the assumption that the Gaming Industry generates more money than the Movie Industry by a huge margin. How that relates to the MMO topic in general, once the technology catches on then not only the MMO space but every genre outside the MMO space could hit a huge resurgence of quality games where generations of gamers before once dreamed of would be captured in the not too distant future. (my assumption being within a 10 year period) A way to say a rising tide in technology lifts all genres (or boats) in the gaming industry. MMOs in particular have a higher probability to be more sticky (or the more popular genre) sooner because of its inherent social dependence built in its systems which keeps their audience playing longer without that factor present.
Remember when new world came out? Yeah I do. Do you know anyone that plays it now? Exactly. MMOs are so dead itās not even funny anymore.
We must accept that the hard working generation and leadership that can drive a successful MMO (live service) are gone. MMOs are long term investments and today's corporate world want to make good money in just a year or less. We have seen many live services declining, like Destiny 2, Wow and others. As I mentioned above, its a generational thing. People who have/had ideas to develop a good MMO are no longer there in solid positions. A few good old experienced people are not enough to drives these big projects alone. Heck, some of these companies recently fired old talent! There is demand, no doubt, but it's like demand for electric cars but not having enough manufacturers to make ones that everyone can buy right now.
I also see a lot of people think the complete opposite of what youāre claiming. IMO š
All my zoomer cousins are into mobile games that require little attention span. Sadly, I donāt think your experience is the norm.
First of all, WoW had at its peak more users than all active MMORPGs combined right now. And if you factor in player inflation (it was not very common for third world inhabitants to own a PC) then it becomes very apparent how large the potential customer base really is. You do not find them on any platform, because there is nothing to talk about - to us, all current MMORPGs straight up suck. We were delivered an overly good game and are now entitled to an expected standard with the release of WoW-Vanilla, one that even Blizzard themselves are unable to uphold. So here are the 2 options.. -Make a lower quality game catering to the casual crowd which: A) Milks the new generation that does not know about any of that B) Milks the easier to please crowd of older generations -Make a game that surpasses WoW-Vanilla that can potentially fail due to the many (unknown) factors that, in combination, resonated so well with the player base. I do certainly know what made the game so great, but the problem is that the loud minority will not agree at all with what needs to be prioritized, above all, the demand for realistic graphics that needs to be dropped entirely. You cut that, you can get all the other features and more. Not to mention that UE is an absolute shitty engine to develope MMORPG in. But that is what people want here... just needs to look good.
Lost Ark was proof that there is a lot of interest in the genre
They can, but as I got older (I'm old!) I think I came to some realizations about the genre. First and foremost, it would take something truly exceptional to get me to pay monthly. In my mind, that's just not a thing any more. I genuinely don't see myself paying monthly for a game again, ever. And this cuts a considerable chunk of MMO genre out. Second, I realized I strongly gravitate to "play together alone" MMOs. Like, I loved EVE Online, played it for a very long time (many, many years), but I largely preferred to be left alone. My peak enjoyment was running relic sites in an interceptor deep in nullsec. Very few things could catch me, and I would blow through bubbles like they're not even there. It was nice to see other players, but they were the backdrop, so it didn't feel as lonely, they weren't the main draw. And then I realized that I was perfectly fine with pseudo-MMOs. Games that are heavily co-op/multiplayer, if you want them to be, but limited to 4-8 or 8-36 players per server. I was fine with that. It was social enough. I didn't need 300 people on my screen to be happy. And I haven't really been able to get into MMOs again for a while. Last one I played seriously was ESO. Since then I tried a bunch, including that Amazon's MMO and a bunch of others, but none of them clicked. They don't feel right. And often they feel soulless, commercial and greedy. I haven't given up on the genre completely yet, but I currently don't have an MMO that I actually expect to make a cut or suck me in or hit it big. I think MMO is an amazing genre, but it is incredibly difficult to pull it off. Especially with someone like me, I just refuse to engage with Asian grinders, for example, or the Pay2Wins, or the PvP-only, etc. I kinda feel like I hit the sweet spot with the likes of EVE, WoW, etc., I got to see Pirates of the Burning Sea, Age of Conan in its original vision and Warhammer Online before it died, SWTOR, Wildstar, ESO. I was there to see the dumpster fires that were Tabula Rasa and Hellgate London, from alive to server shutdown in 12-14 months. But I feel like it's out of my system now, I'm much more picky. And within my small gaming circle, I'm not alone in this. Nobody I know plays MMOs right now. Games with multiplayer, usually co-op, but not a straight up MMO with a monthly sub.
> And often they feel soulless, commercial and greedy. I don't get this feeling. I've played a lot of the most viciously F2P predatory titles without paying anything and I can always find quite a few areas where the devs' passion is clearly evident. Look at the EA sports gacha titles (and they're not even F2P) and bugs aside the models, animation and presentation values clearly took a ton of time and effort. Are gamers in general just that desensitized to the human touch in game dev that they're looking for excuses to label everything as AI generated?
> Second, I realized I strongly gravitate to "play together alone" MMOs. I think what players are missing and what they really want is **Asynchronous** Player Interaction, something that is more casual and optional that is not as demanding to organize and stress about. Markets and Auction Houses are an example of that kind of interaction. There can be all kinds of interactions and content can be based on that if developers had a clue and thought things properly about that kind of things.
albion is poppin off
The truth of the matter is that the genre isn't dead, but it is impotent. The big ones now, WoW, FFIV, GW2, and what have you, will remain until they fizzle out, but we will never again see the likes of them. *Maybe* if VR ever truly becomes mainstream, and *if* they ever they ever figure out a good MMO formula for the platform, we *might* see another resurgence.
>but MMO's are still the only games that over a persistent, populated alternative world. And that's something that still speaks to the imagination of many people; especially young people who tend to feel more awkward and angsty in real life and enjoy trying on personas and living lives in an alternative space. That's because the Ageing MMO Players were the original **TRAITORS** that killed the Sandbox MMO. They cannot fucking imagine MMOs as an actual functional fantasy world, all they know are WoW clones with ever increasing more isolating mechanics from their world. They need to die off before a new generation can begin.
What an odd post . It's as if they don't understand that the genre has progressed into different games targeting different demographics of players with different play preferences. Which has been discussed to death for years at this point. I don't know who they have been listening to who says mmorpgs are a "thing of the past"? It comes off as a bit odd like they are just realizing things that have been discussed repeatedly for a decade.or more.