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Casual killed the MMO game
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Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
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This is it in a nutshell i USE to be a hardcore raider but dont have the time or interest put that much time in anymore.
I have gone casual its the way life goes and most people here have already gone there or they will go there someday.
Lets say you have a reasturant you really like. It's a very particular cuisine, they use lots of spices and flavor that may not be for everyone....but you like it.
6 months later, a big chain reasturant moves in next door that has a lot more food options and is generally designed to appeal to all tastes. The food is neither too spicy or too bland. The small reasturant you liked can't compete with the larger chain place and shuts its doors. Your left to dine at the chain establishment where you now have more food options....but because its cooked to be acceptable by all, it just doesn't satisfy that craving.
It's not about "Vet MMO Gamers" being "smarter" than the new crowd. It's about a group of old gamers thats seen it done a different way and know that, despite the many faults of old MMO gamers, there was a lot of really good experiences to be had from rulesets and mechanics that have pretty much been abandoned for the easier, more convienent, and accessable route.
I don't expect anyone who started MMO gaming with World of Warcraft to understand that a FFA, full loot upon death, sandbox game can work. I don't expect anyone that started with WOW to understand that a world without instances and quest driven content can be successful and rewarding.
Oh boy another EQ was the second coming post. MMOs are in the state they are because of 2 things.
People hate grind with good reason. No one in their right mind likes doing the same thing over and over again without periodic rewards.
The reason why grinding is/was even an issues is because everyone keeps following the dumbed down EQ model of mmo design, which is basically take a single player rpg and make it a multi-player game. The holy trinity, static group sizes, classes with set roles, one all mighty level and boss mobs are just a few things that have brought mmos to the state they are in now, which was made popular by EQ.
UO was by far a better design philosophy, but that would take some actual thought on how you wanted to play vs having the developer tell you how to play.
I absolutely disagree with the title.. IMO.. Rush to launch is what is killing MMO's with the fact that devs anymore are clueless how to make a good MMO anymore. There are maybe 6 developers out there that have the imagination and intel to actually come up with and design a decent MMO, however they all work at different companies, and don't have the power to make final decisions.
From where I sit, I see a "good ole boys" network of developers of 1/2 assed mediocre people. Many of whom play musical chairs from one company to another. IMO.. The MMO industry needs new blood in creativity.. Personally, I would love for an organization such as G4 TV to host and co-sponsor a competition for the NEXT MMO DESIGN.. It would be like a MMO survivor reality show.. Each week, each team would focus on a different aspect of the game such as crafting, PvP, PvE, hobbys, etc etc.. Each week one team gets cut until you are left with a winner.. HMMMM
If people are so obsessed with older mmos....go play them. I enjoy the older ones so thats what I play.There is no need to complain about what other people enjoy in a casual game experience when there are still many old school mmos that apparently cater to your needs. It is sad that any new game coming out will most likely be focused towards casuals, that I do agree on.However a mmo vet complaining non stop about an age that is dead is more annoying than the kiddies saying every new mmo is a wow clone because it was their first mmo.
Lineage 2 is many years old and i play that BECAUSE of it's age and because of the big rewards with hard work. imo it has even better graphics than aion and imo its the hardest mmo ever to play legit, there are many people who have been playing since beta over 5 years ago and have no max level toonz. it really is a big grind fest...but i prefer grinding endlessly to ever doing a damn *kill 10 rat quest* that other more casual games are based around.
It's 1 thing to notice that new games are not contributing to a nostalgia factor you are searching for within the mmo community and its another to fill mmo forums with complaining like an old woman at a hair salon.I honestly think your attitude is doing more harm to the community than games being catered to a more casual player.
Play what you enjoy and let others enjoy games that cater to them.
I find it quite funny that not so long ago, there was a post about "Farmville" killing the MMOs.
Both the Developers and especially Investors just don't want to "risk money" by making non WoW-like games. WoW has proven to be a very succesfull formula, heck people still play these games. Following this logic, Investors are right.
We're just a minority looking for something close to what we used to enjoy in our MMOs which has long disappeared to let Mommy, Daddy, and my neighbours have access to a whole "new world" that they can enjoy without having to think too much. Because let's face it, life is harsh enough that people want easy stuff and instant gratification nowadays.
This is just my opinion though, but if sheeps would finally stop buying into the hype, giving TONS of money to a company who released a game extremely similar to what these sheeps/gamers hate *cough cough* WAR and Aion *cough cough*, then perhaps the market would evolve, because companies would realise that the money is not there anymore.
And yes, I just called people sheeps, sue me.
First off, this is a disucssion forum. People create topics for discussion.....I don't see whats wrong with MMORPG gamers (new and old) debating game theology, mechanics, and motivators.
Secondly, while it might seem fine to say "go play the old games you always talk about " in theory......in reality its not really a fair argument.
Lineage 2, for example, has population in decline for the Western Market, heavy botting & gold farming, and cheating running rampant make it a poor alternative. A very good FFA system and a shining example of meaningful non instanced PvP, but all the other signs point to low sustainability.
No one wants to play a game thats not going to be around in a year or two.
I'll just counter with my own title:
Hardcore stifled the mmo game.
I won't bother explaining it. Just stating to illustrate that this topic is opinion and not fact.
I could counter with another opinion title as well:
Pigdeon holing your game into either hardcore or casual destroys player freedom and choice to do what they want, when they want to.
These are all valid opinions.
Perhaps the hardcore audience has suffered more than the two opposing opinions, but that's capitalism. The game that makes the most money gets the most funding and support.
Bottom line, your real gripe is that hardcore gaming hasn't yet provided the revenue to make it the industry standard. So, blame capitalism for your problems.
The market IS evolving.....
Just as Blizzard pulled in non-traditional MMO gamers into the MMO market by watering down all the stuff that made traditional MMOs special; Farmville, Mafia Wars, Words with Friends, and the like are aiming at non-traditional gamers market by watering down all the stuff that makes current MMOs special.
NO, WOW players aren't going to abandon WOW for "Fishville", but game development companies will move money out of the MMO industry and into social network gaming for a TON of good business reasons.
Either MMOs will capitulate to the masses and take even MORE steps to increase the casual game play so that the masses will buy in, or MMO gaming will have a chance to return to the niche markets now that the "big boys" of the industry have sailed ship for higher profits.
Good point, but I don't think its fair to paint capitialisim as the enemy of traditional MMO gaming. LOL
After all, in the wake of all the big game publishers & developers moving on to greener pastures, there may be some opprotunity for independent game companies to capitalize on the market of MMO gamers left standing. We may be thanking capatilisim after its all said and done.
I am an old school mmo vet (1997ish) and i abhor how mmo's used to be. They were like the first free hit of crack to get you hooked and then you are sucked in for life.
The majority of mmo players are those who have jobs and familys and commitments. They do not have unlimited time. Therefore that majority appreciates how mmo developers have eliminated some of the outright wastes of their collective times.
Some changes are as follows-----
-Sitting 5-10 minutes between every fight are gone
-forcing people to find groups for the majority of the content is gone.
-travelling doesn't take hours if wanted.
-corpse runs, especially naked ones.
I could go on and on...
None of the above things makes a person a better gamer. Even if it did, who gives a flying rats butt? It is video gaming. You can try to put mmo gaming on a pedestal all you want, it is still just a game. Games are meant to be entertaining, not a substitute for the sufferages of real life.
So in closing, i hope that all mmo's continue to do things that promote fun and do away with things that promote tedium.
If this upsets the hardcore.....good.
Pfft, silliness.
Casual is the MMO game.
Playing: EVE, Final Fantasy 13, Uncharted 2, Need for Speed: Shift
Is it just me, but can't help to think about the song "Video Killed The Radio Star" reading the title of this thread.
I deeply hate Darkfall by principle. It is a wrong game. A game that someone thought up without caring at all if the final game is any fun to play.
I cant say I hate WoW by principle. I only hate it because everyone talks about it and that gets on my nerves. Otherwise it failed because I am not fond of the comic style graphics, I dislike the instancing, and the game lacks the challenge I want and lacks special features which makes it fun.
The MMOs I played are Lineage 2, Guild Wars, and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.
L2 has a very strong community. Thats because you really need grouping. In retrospection, I really hated how much my Shillien Elder depended on having a group, though. Everyone else could play solo. Even Bishops and Elven Elders could at least kill undead solo. My Shillien Elder however, in the end, got slaughtered by everything, even by gray mobs which wouldnt have given any xp anyway. With a group I was a god, without a group I was completely helpless.
GW, man this game was boring. Yeah it has Mesmers which was a fun concept. But crafting was horribly trivial, and PvE turned out to be draining. All in all I completely lost interest in GW after a week.
Vanguard, well I loved this game, but it simply didnt had enough players. The dev team was also laughable, but I could still have stayed if I could only get groups for my lowlevel characters, for there was so much content I had not seen yet.
The MMO I am curious about is SW:TOR. Maybe that one will actually give me some joy again. It is extremely casual, though.
Ok, now about the question itself.
I definitely view long travel times as an annoyance, not as a challenge. A challenge is something you have to try again and again until you get it right, and/or where you have to think to succeed, or if you have to find obscure information. Patience might be an element too as a challenge, but not for something repetitive like traveling to another city. I have no complaints against having to kill 1000 mobs to get a rare ingredient for my sword of uberness, as long as the opponents are not too dull and the final item is worth it. But I dont want to spend 1/2 h for something as ordinary as traveling to another city.
PvP is a good thing, but it should be in some form regulated. Unlimited PvP is nothing but a major suckage. PvP should be about real things, such as control over a resource in the game world.
Challenge is good. Definitely. Having goals you havent reached yet keeps you motivated.
Immersion is a no-word to me. I stricly avoid using it. What matters is if a game is fun. If a game works, it is not a question of "realism" or "immersion" or any other of these essential meaningfree and completely open-to-interpretation buzzwords - it is simply the question if you have fun. To have fun, you need a challenge and a chance to manage the challenge. You also need other elements though. For example, social interaction helps a lot for having fun. Or having a beautiful character. I absolutely loved my female highelf paladin in Vanguard, she was the most beautiful character I ever had in a game so far.
I believe that Vanguard had a good balance between casual, group and raid content. The ultimate equipment was definitely from raids. Groups where possible too. Casual was not that effective, but still possible, especially if you already had highlevel characters and could afford to buy equipment.
Sitting 10 minutes & forcing people to find groups wasn't all bad. Allowing players to solo their way through the majority of the game (like in WOW) do a few things....
- Attracts gamers who prefer solo console like experiences
- Fails to socialize players
- Creates a situation where they don't know how to play their toon in a group setting
So end result is a community of players that either do not understand or just do not care to treat other players with respect. These solo players either struggle or refuse to group for higher level endgame rewards. Complain to the game company that they don't have access to the same stuff groups do and its not fair that their playstyle is being punished. Game company gives in and dumbs down the content to retain the masses that came from other game genere's.
If we are talking about corpse runs in terms of a death penalty, those weren't all that bad either. Allowing players to hurl their toon at everything and anything with wreckless regard like in WOW fails to promote critical thought about what you did wrong to cause death, or about what you should do next time.
The end result is a community of players that are not conditioned to play better and play smarter because.....no harm no foul right?
As much crap as UO and L2 got for the community being a bunch of grieffing a-holes, I never seen the amount of blind and blatent disrespect people have for eachother like in WOW. While coming up in UO was fairly hard knocks, it bred a smarter playerbase. I can't tell you how much more enjoyable playing with other people is when they aren't a bunch of idiots. Log into WOW and jump in a random Battleground to see how incapable people are to work together and be civil to eachother.
Point being....alot of these "improvements" (or as I like to call them, shortcuts) that are made in the name of creating a "funner" experience have very real consequences on the community. When the community is complete crap....then whats the difference between playing a MMO where you can avoid everyone and some single player RPG?
I never said that the market is not evolving. What I said is that because people keep on buying into the hype, they are the ones who make the market evolve in such way, and then they go back on forum and complain about the lack of originality and how WAR and Aion are fails, etc. (Ok, WAR and AoC had more reasons behind it as to why it wasn't succesfull but WAR did sell 1 million copies I think....)
As for the Farmville part, it was just an observation since "Hardcore" claims that Casual killed the MMO and then a new thread appeared called Farmville killed the MMO. There was no specific reason in this other than a simple observation, which I find quite funny.
I question how much players are "buying into the hype" as I so often hear it said or if as I suspect the new school mmo player much like myself sees mmo's no different than any video game, in that they cost the same as any other type of game and offer the same or often times longer gameplay than offline games and we simply move on once we are done.
I have played many mmo's and don't really feel that I've ever allowed myself to be ripped off so most of my criticism has actually been about games I refused to play and not those I just grew tired of.
In regards to the complaints I here I tend to attribute that to the oldschool mmo player more than the casual fan, casual fans are not the majority of forum posters so I think that really makes your point invalid most of the complainers have no use for casual games to begin with and this is my experience with mmo's, lot's of complaints on forums are made by people with no use for casual games anyway so it isn't a far stretch for them to continue to bash the games post launch.
I can attest to there being a much larger audience of casuals enjoying STO than I could ever imagine because I have seen many of them in game and in the STO forums but if you went by this forum you'd think not a single person cares for the game so *shrugs*.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
i dont see any type of discussion really when people are just complaining because they arent happy and expect everything to be done their way in a new game ....its just sulking and a bad attitude to have.
every mmo has bots and cheating...please show me 1 that doesnt.
people have been saying lineage 2 will die soon for years. they were all wrong.
wow what a thread.. Casual here. and for me that = life, job happens. I bought Dragon age for the wife to heal her EQ II fallout ,good pill for the immersion loss. It seems to be a huge thing , can casuals and hardcores ever find a happy medium ? and do the big 5 or 6 even care ? my ignorant view is that the new players ver 5.0 are speed demons or crack heads as I like to call them (not be neg) its fast and furious for them now days (get there now !) hell a dungeon run anymore is more like the indy 500 hard for me to keep up lol. I agree with the imersion concept but with a hardcore work schedule its rough to run the race track mmo's of today vrs a long drawn out very deep and long term mmo, reminds of the old dice and paper days. Travel time even sucked back then.
Amen brother!! I think you hit the nail in the head. I am not against casual MMOs being developed but I am nostalgic and hopefull that more Hardcore MMOs hit the market in the futue. A lot of improvements to games and life in general are a double edge sword. Let me just start by saying I LOVE STAIRS...No no I am not crazy I do have a point and its rather simple. Whenever I take the Train I have the choice to go down the stairs or take the escalator and while the escalator is a nice invension and for some a lifesaver it does not mean that EVERYONE has to take them nor that it should be the norm and replace the stairs.
We as a society are generation after generation becoming lazier dumber and more reliant on machine, gadgets, technology and addons and MMOs are not imune to it. While not all of it is bad a lot of this reliance does come with a cost. That is the trend I see in almost any MMO that has come out in the last few years. No longer do these games connect people, create strong bonds and a community. While to most a 20 min run from one point to next in an MMO is a pointless timesink, I beg to differ. To me that 20 min in a game like FFXI (the last of the hardcore games) is an adventure:
On my way I see a Whitemage being chased by an Orc, at very low HP the Whitemage would be dead in a swing or two. As a brave Paladin I can not turn a blind eye to someone in distress so I run and provoke the Orc to only have it turn on me, meanwhile the WHM has disapeared beyound my field of vission and I am left trading blows with an enemy much stronger then myself. I think to myself: "This is it, here goes 1 hour of leveling but at least I saved someone that fate". I feel rather good about myself. (maybe that was just me in the heat of the moment thinking I am a Paladin lol ) Meanwhile the Orc is pounding on me but I still have a tricks up my sleave and keep doing what I can to avoid death, running is not an option for me, at this point I am commited, running would only mean certain death from a blow from behind and Paladins do not run! As a last resort I use my 2 hour cooldown "Invincible" and last a while longer and just when I expect the Orc to finish me a heal comes out of nowhere!!!! The Whitemage is back and healing and chearing me on. A few minutes later the Orc is dead and the WHM and I are running together. We became friends after that and I still keep in touch with her even years after I have stoped playing FFXI. The moral of the storry is that sometimes the journey is just as much fun as the destination, and it is always the journey that has the twists and unpredictability to make the game that much more enjoyable FAR beyound what a developer could program into a Boss Fight!
Bingo. Skill is a non-issue in MMOs. The genre is pretty much about wasting time. The people who have the better stuff just means they spent more time on their butts in front of the computer screen. It's kinda funny how so many manbabies pine about the return for archaic gameplay elements, but the reality of it is that we considered those things fun because we didn't know any better and we had a lot more free time. Now, most of us are adults and our tastes have matured and been effected by real-life obligations like jobs, families, socialization in real life...emphasis on the real life, and so on. Unless you're filthy rich or still living with your parents at 30 and jobless these are real factors that makes those old "hardcore" MMO elements a drag.
The only thing that's changed in the MMO space is that instead of being forced to spend a gigantic amount of time in one sitting it accomplish anything, you can now spend smaller amounts of time and spread out that time. Speaking as somebody who comes home from work in the evening, I appreciate being able to log in and play for an hour or so and feel like I've done something and not having to sacrifice much needed sleep for a random chance to get a piece of "phat lootz." Does that make me casual? I don't know, but if you measure a player's hardcore status by time played and not knowledge of the game, then I guess not.
Most people here wouldn't know what you're talking about or were even alive when that video premiered on MTV=)
No the game is about pretending you are someone else in another world. Just likes its been for the last 30 years. Just because a couple of games came along and tried to make it about skill doesn't change the fundamental way the game works.
Its not supposed to be about how much skill the player has, thats why its a RPG game. To the extent the older games depended on player skill is the extent they lost their way.
To a certain extent, sure, but at the same time not really. If that's the kind of escapism you really want, play Dungeons and Dragons or other pen and paper RPGs that are all about that. All MMOs have elements that break that illusion in some big way. UO had players pickpocketing and PKing each other left and right, Everquest had camp checks and mob trains, etc.