Why Oh Why Have Good MMORPGs Died?

[jaqie]

I have one word for you: Neverwinter.


No, not NWN..... check it out.

 

[justin4pack]

I have one word for you: Neverwinter.


No, not NWN..... check it out.

I started playing nevrrwinter last night. We will see....

 

[diesbudt]

I think this is true for many games, eg. if I think back about playing games back on a C64 or Amiga just to realize how incredible 'primitive' the games were at that time...but does not entirely apply to WoW or MMORPGs in general, at least for me.

First, Wow wasn't the first MMORPG and many people who palyed and loved Wow LIKELY also already played DAoC, EQ, UO etc...so the genre and the MMORPG concept was nothing new for many people.

In this case I really don't think that it's really "player fatigue" but rather on account of many negatives changes WoW did. As I said earlier, I might as well STILL play today and still enjoy exploration and adventure because the game *per se* was good at one time.

Rather than down-dumbing the game constantly and actively make NEGATIVE changes, they could have "just" added new zones, fixed bugs etc. to keep the game interesting with areas "to explore".

(By the way the WoW world IS huge and even when I still played there were zones I never saw before even after years playing, just as an example).

But WoW of course went the exact opposite route and sacrificed those good elements and replaced it with "insta-gratification" and "buy a mount for $30" nonsense, along with things like eliminating class quests, allowing flying everywhere etc...which gradually literally killed ALL adventure/exploration aspects of the game.

The fun in the game once was that you were immersed in a "virtual world" where, as you say already, you could explore and go on adventures...TODAY what you do is log in and queue up and then wait because you KNOW that if you don't beat a boss in this or that raid you will never get this or that piece of equipment...and the rest is doing dailies where you repeat the same thing over and over and over.

This has nothing to do with "player fatigue" where a genre simply becomes less attractive in time...but more with really bad, bad changes which were made to an otherwise good game. You know, people STILL play good RPGs if certain things are right, people still play shooters if they're done right and so forth. WoW COULD still be appealing today if bliz would not have done those things.

Actually a lot of people's first MMO was WoW. It hit over 12 million subs at one point. EQ, AC, DAOC, etc. all at tops broke just above a million if an article I remember I read.

So assuming 100% of them picked up WoW as their next MMO, that still leaves 9million players who did not play much of an MMO before hand.

But that aside, I was not talking about WoW. I was talking about people looking back at EQ / AC / DAOC and thinking that was the best MMO they played. Because it most likely was not. A lot of those games became very dated. Not just in graphics, but basically everything in them. The new generation of MMO players (You know the 6mil + that tried the genre through WoW) are not interested in MMO styles to older MMOs. And while an MMO can survive around 1 million subs and be content (enough to satisfy the people who enjoy that type) it is not a smart business design to just target them. So they have to add in solo player, easier things and quicker things other players can do.

Also, game difficulty has come down, and player ability as a whole has come up. So games that before seemed long, and hard are no longer hard. Just long. And long games get boring fast. So the design a lot of MMOs are going to is shorter challenges but trying to increase the difficulty to make it more engaging and fun vs the long and now only mediocre difficult games.

 

[KMFJD]

I have one word for you: Neverwinter.


No, not NWN..... check it out.

It's fun at first but it get's boring at the end game

 

[Craig234]

nm

 

[blackened23]

Actually a lot of people's first MMO was WoW. It hit over 12 million subs at one point. EQ, AC, DAOC, etc. all at tops broke just above a million if an article I remember I read.

So assuming 100% of them picked up WoW as their next MMO, that still leaves 9million players who did not play much of an MMO before hand.

But that aside, I was not talking about WoW. I was talking about people looking back at EQ / AC / DAOC and thinking that was the best MMO they played. Because it most likely was not. A lot of those games became very dated. Not just in graphics, but basically everything in them. The new generation of MMO players (You know the 6mil + that tried the genre through WoW) are not interested in MMO styles to older MMOs. And while an MMO can survive around 1 million subs and be content (enough to satisfy the people who enjoy that type) it is not a smart business design to just target them. So they have to add in solo player, easier things and quicker things other players can do.

Also, game difficulty has come down, and player ability as a whole has come up. So games that before seemed long, and hard are no longer hard. Just long. And long games get boring fast. So the design a lot of MMOs are going to is shorter challenges but trying to increase the difficulty to make it more engaging and fun vs the long and now only mediocre difficult games.

Oh, cool. If that's the new thing with MMOs then I gladly applaud the fact that it is a dying genre. WoW made MMOs attractive to those who don't even play games. Soccer moms. Teenage girls. Great, good for blizzard.

WoW turned everything that put RPG into MMO and turned it into convenience and catering to whiners. Purples are the new blue. Everyone gets purples. Don't want to group? Just sit in orgrimmar all day and queue it up. No need for exploration, no need for socializing, no need for any effort. Just sit there AFK and queue it up. You know what? Screw this. That isn't a RPG. That is garbage. I want exploration, journey, and I want to savor it. I don't want a game to be based around my convenience. I don't want a RPG or MMO to be based on whiners, which is what blizzard caters to.

As a game that's not what I want. What some 30 year old mother who plays 30 minutes a day wants in a game isn't what *I* want in a game. Thank GOODNESS mmo's are dying, lol. Didn't blizzard lose nearly 2 million subscriptions in their past earnings call? Good riddance. If this is the future of MMOs, I happily accept the death of the genre - and the fact that every P2P MMO has outright failed. And it appears that others feel the same way since blizzard's sub numbers have done nothing except dwindle by the millions every quarter. Again, good riddance to MMOs. You will hardly be missed.

 

[diesbudt]

You're not appreciating some things about the early games that weren't 'game features', though.

To this day people from my EQ server are still on a message board for it who haven't played in 10 years. How many games have that?

It might be a little like the first few airplane pilots - their planes were crap, but wow what an exciting activity then.

There are people not even on warcraft Forums (see AToT lol) and who have not played WoW in 5 years doing the same thing too. No real point here. People will always give stories and recall the past of their greatest feeling, which goes back to normally ones first MMO.

And I am appreciating the old games though. For what they were and what they springboarded, but their time has passed. Anything else was a game feature. As it was in the game.

 

[sm625]

The entire genre has been corrupted. There are people who will say "I love WoW, and GW2 is just like Wow so I will love it."

Then there are others who will say they hate WoW but GW2 is so much better, "it is nothing like WoW". And to them I say wtf crack are you smoking, GW2 is WoW. It is the same damn game. I'm just sick of the entirety of it. I dont want to collect wolf pelts in a game with no political intrigue. Shadowbane was the model of mmorpgs. You were free to roam around the world killing noobs as they leveled up, but then if you did it wearing your guild's tags they could zerg the crap out of you and even destroy your city that took months to farm up and build. So you had to play politics and form allegiances if you wanted to have name recognition. Or you could just run around ganking people anonymously. The depth of the politics was amazing.

All the crap regurgitated garbage games that keep coming down the pipe are jsut the same thing, they just rename the wolf pelts to something new and call it a new game when its really not. Its so stupid. I dont understand why people play them. What is the point. Havent you done enough quests by the year 2013? Why not just play LoL if you want meaningless pvp?

 

[diesbudt]

Oh, cool. If that's the new thing with MMOs then I gladly applaud the fact that it is a dying genre. WoW made MMOs attractive to those who don't even play games. Soccer moms. Teenage girls. Great, good for blizzard.

But as a game, eff that, it's not what I want. What some 30 year old mother who plays 30 minutes a day wants in a game isn't what *I* want in a game. Thank GOODNESS mmo's are dying, lol. Didn't blizzard lose nearly 2 million subscriptions in their past earnings call? Good riddance. If this is the future of MMOs, I happily accept the death of the genre - and the fact that every P2P MMO has outright failed.

"To those that don't even play games" So are you saying people cant choose to play games or not. You have to be a "game person" to play a game? because horrible marketing strategy. If I make a game I want as many people to be interested to try and play it as possible. Not a niche' portion in the market now.

MMOs are not dying. They cannot (barring the fact the internet dies). They are just becoming more focused, and less big. Like 1 MMO may be an RPG about unicorns. 1 may be an MMO about zombies and a zombie outbreak. 1 MMP may be about fantasy and magic. 1 MMO may be about space. 1 MMO may be in a new genre (MMO-TCG, MMO-Racing, MMO-Shooter, MMO-etc.).

However games will never be that time consuming or difficult to be again, when found that life-simple tools, had a much larger positive impact than negative. Especially since people have died playing games too much more recently in the past decade.

WoW is still over 8million. Easily 4x any near competitor if not more. It has for 7 years. EQ and AC still talked about were P2P also. So to claim P2P they all failed, is ignorant. The facts are staring you right in the face. They still succeed just fine. However the product has to be worth it, and the fact 8mil+ people still find $15/mo worth it, shows it isn't dying for years yet.

 

[diesbudt]

The entire genre has been corrupted. There are people who will say "I love WoW, and GW2 is just like Wow so I will love it."

Then there are others who will say they hate WoW but GW2 is so much better, "it is nothing like WoW". And to them I say wtf crack are you smoking, GW2 is WoW. It is the same damn game. I'm just sick of the entirety of it. I dont want to collect wolf pelts in a game with no political intrigue. Shadowbane was the model of mmorpgs. You were free to roam around the world killing noobs as they leveled up, but then if you did it wearing your guild's tags they could zerg the crap out of you and even destroy your city that took months to farm up and build. So you had to play politics and form allegiances if you wanted to have name recognition. Or you could just run around ganking people anonymously. The depth of the politics was amazing.

All the crap regurgitated garbage games that keep coming down the pipe are jsut the same thing, they just rename the wolf pelts to something new and call it a new game when its really not. Its so stupid. I dont understand why people play them. What is the point. Havent you done enough quests by the year 2013? Why not just play LoL if you want meaningless pvp?

No tank/heal/dps build.
Events that take place and scale.
No raids, just dungeons for smaller groups.
Active dodge system with the dodge button.
WvWvW server battles.


Did not know Wow didn't follow the tank / heal / dps set-up anymore. Wow times must have changed.

So playing a game for the story is meaningless... when an RPG game was inspired by fantasy stories. Wow... my whole prospective... it has been shattered.

 

[JeffMD]

yea... gw2 is pretty different from wow. Traveling system, trade skills and gathering system that does node sharing, active level scaling for players, personal story quest instances.

 

[blackened23]

WoW is still over 8million. Easily 4x any near competitor if not more. It has for 7 years. EQ and AC still talked about were P2P also. So to claim P2P they all failed, is ignorant. The facts are staring you right in the face. They still succeed just fine. However the product has to be worth it, and the fact 8mil+ people still find $15/mo worth it, shows it isn't dying for years yet.

Being popular doesn't mean it's good. Do you listen to Justin Bieber by chance? I hear he's popular. But you won't catch me listening to that garbage. Besides which, there's little doubt that WoW's subs are dwindling by the millions continually - by the next earnings announcement, you will see it dwindle yet again. Watch and see, it will happen.

As i've mentioned before I only care about what is fun, not who's outselling what. WoW is increasingly catering the a core audience of non gamers who can only play 30 minutes a day and those who have the attention span of a flea. Great, it sells a gabillion copies, soccer moms eat that stuff up. After all they've never played any other game in their life most likely. That doesn't make the direction of WoW good. MMOs are dying, and I gladly look forward to it. It's about time someone put the RPG and JOURNEY back into MMOs instead of basing the entire game into making it completely based on convenience. I dont' want a game that caters to whiners and folks that play 30 minutes a day and demand purples for their 30 minutes. That's what blizzard caters to.

 

[JeffMD]

Good is subjective, I don't chastise my old guild just because they still find the game fun and raid, to many wow is still fun. Some of us just crave something more, or different.

 

[RPD]

Being popular doesn't mean it's good. Do you listen to Justin Bieber by chance? I hear he's popular. But you won't catch me listening to that garbage. Besides which, there's little doubt that WoW's subs are dwindling by the millions continually - by the next earnings announcement, you will see it dwindle yet again. Watch and see, it will happen.

As i've mentioned before I only care about what is fun, not who's outselling what. WoW is increasingly catering the a core audience of non gamers who can only play 30 minutes a day and those who have the attention span of a flea. Great, it sells a gabillion copies, soccer moms eat that stuff up. After all they've never played any other game in their life most likely. That doesn't make the direction of WoW good. MMOs are dying, and I gladly look forward to it. It's about time someone put the RPG and JOURNEY back into MMOs instead of basing the entire game into making it completely based on convenience. I dont' want a game that caters to whiners and folks that play 30 minutes a day and demand purples for their 30 minutes. That's what blizzard caters to.

He said successful, not good from a game quality or whatever your high horse of gaming standard is. WoW is and has been successful. To say otherwise is just blind hate to the game.

 

[Craig234]

WoW is very good quality. It's not for everyone's taste.

 

[JDNIGHT]

Also, game difficulty has come down, and player ability as a whole has come up. So games that before seemed long, and hard are no longer hard. Just long. And long games get boring fast. So the design a lot of MMOs are going to is shorter challenges but trying to increase the difficulty to make it more engaging and fun vs the long and now only mediocre difficult games.

Player ability has gone up? I don't think so.

I agree, older mmos were much longer. But they were also much harder. They required social skills, map making skills, a sense of direction (literally and figuratively), an ability to remember odd things, and whole host of other non-combat oriented skills, from the player!

The problem is people who compare modern MMORPGs to older ones are still comparing them in the same context. A next gen mmorpg will (or should) change many things.

A next gen mmo could easily disrupt this applecart and show many of these less-skilled players just how skilled they really are. What if a new mmo came along, that had high penalties for death, that did not involve a huge time sink? Or travel that was fairly quick, but dangerous. Incentives for people to work together to overcome significant difficulties. Standard encounters that were lethal if executed poorly or hastily. New types of difficulties that weren't 'long' in terms of time, just incredibly hard to overcome alone.

Then again, I suppose a lot depends on what you play an mmorpg for. If it truly is just combat against raid bosses, well then WoW is the best deal around. Especially if you do not want to interact with anyone else, aside from showing off and strutting around.

 

[KMFJD]

The entire genre has been corrupted. There are people who will say "I love WoW, and GW2 is just like Wow so I will love it."

Then there are others who will say they hate WoW but GW2 is so much better, "it is nothing like WoW". And to them I say wtf crack are you smoking, GW2 is WoW. It is the same damn game. I'm just sick of the entirety of it. I dont want to collect wolf pelts in a game with no political intrigue. Shadowbane was the model of mmorpgs. You were free to roam around the world killing noobs as they leveled up, but then if you did it wearing your guild's tags they could zerg the crap out of you and even destroy your city that took months to farm up and build. So you had to play politics and form allegiances if you wanted to have name recognition. Or you could just run around ganking people anonymously. The depth of the politics was amazing.

All the crap regurgitated garbage games that keep coming down the pipe are jsut the same thing, they just rename the wolf pelts to something new and call it a new game when its really not. Its so stupid. I dont understand why people play them. What is the point. Havent you done enough quests by the year 2013? Why not just play LoL if you want meaningless pvp?

Shadowbane was fun for a while, once you reached a certain level there were only so many spawns that could level you, and they were always being fought over, this always added an element of fear while trying to lvl. I think our guild was one of the first to be seiged and lost our city, weeks of work destroyed by a zerg in a matter of hours...the clan backstabbing...etc, the only game to come close since is Darkfall

 

[Tweak155]

WoW sucked a lot of life out of me (but most of it was work from home ) and was a blast for a long time. But, the game gets repetitive. You can't really blame them - if you find a successful formula you should stick to it. It's not their fault I played all my time in a short period of time - I bet plenty of players get the same game time in over many more months or even years than I did.

In all, WoW is an excellent game. It's just had its time in the sun and people move on.

 

[railven]

Seems appropriate for this thread:

 

[tential]

In a nutshell, World of Warcraft happened. All original MMOs were stymied or tried to emulate WoW.

Second Wow came out MMOs just died. WoW was PERFECT for people who aren't good at MMOs. Instances allowed people to farm without me being able to kill them. Different races means I can't walk up to you and just talk shiit. No real clan/war system.

Compared to Lineage 2, WoW is a joke. I remember fighting for hours on a server over a boss in Lineage 2. A 3 way+ war at a chance at raid boss jewelry (rare drop). WoW has instances so that they can eliminate that a lot of the time. Hell, you fought over farming areas. Want the best place to drop a certain material? It's not free, better be ready to fight/lock it down.

WoW appealed to casual players, and thus got the largest following, and thus ruined MMOs.

The entire genre has been corrupted. There are people who will say "I love WoW, and GW2 is just like Wow so I will love it."

Then there are others who will say they hate WoW but GW2 is so much better, "it is nothing like WoW". And to them I say wtf crack are you smoking, GW2 is WoW. It is the same damn game. I'm just sick of the entirety of it. I dont want to collect wolf pelts in a game with no political intrigue. Shadowbane was the model of mmorpgs. You were free to roam around the world killing noobs as they leveled up, but then if you did it wearing your guild's tags they could zerg the crap out of you and even destroy your city that took months to farm up and build. So you had to play politics and form allegiances if you wanted to have name recognition. Or you could just run around ganking people anonymously. The depth of the politics was amazing.

All the crap regurgitated garbage games that keep coming down the pipe are jsut the same thing, they just rename the wolf pelts to something new and call it a new game when its really not. Its so stupid. I dont understand why people play them. What is the point. Havent you done enough quests by the year 2013? Why not just play LoL if you want meaningless pvp?

Ha "political intrigue" and the guild ganking, etc. You summed up the REASON I played Lineage 2. I had more fun posting on Lineage 2 forums than I did on WoW. My clan had ZERO alliances, had war on every single person. Hell, we pretty much declared war on the damn server, there was no love for us, every day there was a post saying how we "ruined the game". We took the game extremely seriously, talking about waking up 3 AM middle of the night to ensure raid bosses were downed and drops were ours, and destroyed every aspect of the game.
NO MMOS HAVE THIS ANYMORE. There is no politics, nothing. I remember forming an alliance with the ONE other English speaking clan on a server, then betraying them mid fight to take "what was rightfully ours". It was war, politics was played, alliances were made and broken, it was amazing. No MMO can really match up to MMOs of the past. Ragnarok Online started me, Lineage 2 really got it going for me, then WoW became popular and now I have a life again.

 

[natto fire]

Most in-depth, immersion prone, tedious, MMORPG I have played is easily A Tale in the Desert. Very small but helpful community. Totally player driven economy, law system. Perfect dose of camaraderie and isolation from a game. I haven't played since tale 3, but I remember it well.

 

[Craig234]

Most in-depth, immersion prone, tedious, MMORPG I have played is easily A Tale in the Desert. Very small but helpful community. Totally player driven economy, law system. Perfect dose of camaraderie and isolation from a game. I haven't played since tale 3, but I remember it well.

Ya, I've mentioned that one here from time to time - one of the few if not the only non-violent MMO's, one guy designs it, with a lot of neat ideas.

One of my favorites - there's a question to demonstrate you have good judgement in people.

You have to collect a big fortune, and put it in a locked container, and give keys to multiple people, and they have to not take it for 24 hours or so.

 

[Veliko]

Second Wow came out MMOs just died. WoW was PERFECT for people who aren't good at MMOs. Instances allowed people to farm without me being able to kill them. Different races means I can't walk up to you and just talk shiit. No real clan/war system.

Right, because anyone who doesn't want to put up with insecure teenagers "aren't good at MMOs".

Ha "political intrigue" and the guild ganking, etc. You summed up the REASON I played Lineage 2. I had more fun posting on Lineage 2 forums than I did on WoW. My clan had ZERO alliances, had war on every single person. Hell, we pretty much declared war on the damn server, there was no love for us, every day there was a post saying how we "ruined the game". We took the game extremely seriously, talking about waking up 3 AM middle of the night to ensure raid bosses were downed and drops were ours, and destroyed every aspect of the game.
NO MMOS HAVE THIS ANYMORE. There is no politics, nothing. I remember forming an alliance with the ONE other English speaking clan on a server, then betraying them mid fight to take "what was rightfully ours". It was war, politics was played, alliances were made and broken, it was amazing. No MMO can really match up to MMOs of the past. Ragnarok Online started me, Lineage 2 really got it going for me, then WoW became popular and now I have a life again.

EVE Online has all that in spades.

 

[Tweak155]

Second Wow came out MMOs just died. WoW was PERFECT for people who aren't good at MMOs. Instances allowed people to farm without me being able to kill them. Different races means I can't walk up to you and just talk shiit. No real clan/war system.

Compared to Lineage 2, WoW is a joke. I remember fighting for hours on a server over a boss in Lineage 2. A 3 way+ war at a chance at raid boss jewelry (rare drop). WoW has instances so that they can eliminate that a lot of the time. Hell, you fought over farming areas. Want the best place to drop a certain material? It's not free, better be ready to fight/lock it down.

WoW appealed to casual players, and thus got the largest following, and thus ruined MMOs.

Ha "political intrigue" and the guild ganking, etc. You summed up the REASON I played Lineage 2. I had more fun posting on Lineage 2 forums than I did on WoW. My clan had ZERO alliances, had war on every single person. Hell, we pretty much declared war on the damn server, there was no love for us, every day there was a post saying how we "ruined the game". We took the game extremely seriously, talking about waking up 3 AM middle of the night to ensure raid bosses were downed and drops were ours, and destroyed every aspect of the game.
NO MMOS HAVE THIS ANYMORE. There is no politics, nothing. I remember forming an alliance with the ONE other English speaking clan on a server, then betraying them mid fight to take "what was rightfully ours". It was war, politics was played, alliances were made and broken, it was amazing. No MMO can really match up to MMOs of the past. Ragnarok Online started me, Lineage 2 really got it going for me, then WoW became popular and now I have a life again.

Sounds like all your "likes" for a game are pretty childish, actually. I didn't care too much for instancing but now I really appreciate it.

I came from FFXI where certain mobs were harvested for their drops. Problem was you were in competition with gil sellers, not people just playing the game. Was a pain in the neck to fight with someone (you couldn't just PvP them) when they just wanted to make money and not progress. The best you could do was get them aggro'ed but then they fixed that too.

 

[NikolaeVarius]

Right, because anyone who doesn't want to put up with insecure teenagers "aren't good at MMOs".



EVE Online has all that in spades.

Seriously. People keep complaining there are no MMO's with all these hardcore aspects, and they never consider just playing Eve.

I don't "love" those 16 hour sessions where we are rage-roll wormholes looking for a target system where we siege.

I definitely don't "love" those week long sieges where we HAVE to get on at midnight and get off at 7am because we are trying to exploit time zone differences during these sieges.

I also hate the fact that I can lose 3 billion isk (about...120 dollars) in a single night by accidentally warping to an enemy POS when in a sleep deprived delirium.

I also "love" the massive lines of infrastructure and supply lines I have to upkeep somehow and spend an entire day or two every month keeping supplies ready for battle at tip top shape, and have to haul 500 million isk worth of supplies through enemy space where i can lose it all in a flash easily with no real way of fighting back.

I also love the political aspects where in one night, we lost half of our fighting strength (a couple of hundred players) including our military backbone and paved the way for other alliances to attempt to take our space in a moment of weakness.

Seriously, just Play Eve. It has all the "hardcore" aspects and much much more.