OMG, MMOs are still moving backwards....

Miffy

I thought has tech got better, MMOs would keep getting bigger and more realistic. Instead they're becoming a frigging joke and more like Single Player games with online components. 

 

Frigging now SWTOR is going to treat space like a railed shooter mini game... This frigging kills the game and any hope for a good MMO in the genre for the next few years. Frigging been waiting since 2005 for something good to come out and looks like the wait continues. 

Frigging railed shooter? Come on SWG had seamless planets with seamless player housing and cities. It had a full space game where you could craft your ships, have full free flight and and explore each section fully. It had true character customization and there were no linear paths on planets or levels. 

Yet 6 years later from JTLS and 100 million+ being spent on SWTOR, we get space as an afterthought to a frigging STAR WARS MMO! Like I thought they would have learnt from SWG and I thought they would understand that Star Wars is set mostly in space. Well the frigging original trilogy was, not the shitty new movies.

 

Humph, what next? Everquest Next will probably be instanced and zoned to hell. 

 

/spit at this shitty failing genre.

andorov

You have a skewed idea of what technology has actually done to video games.

Lets take a simple example from the original Everquest. In order to draw a simple object like a tree on to the screen, a picture of a tree was drawn on to a board and simply drawn into the game world at the proper size and scale. Many of these bad boys could be drawn with relatively low effort and designer (both programmer and artist) time. The tree would look laughable by todays standards but back then, it could be a big feature. Infact, I believe Everquest was the first game ever to actually require a dedicated video card.

Take the same example and move it forward in time by 10 years. How hard is it to get a tree into a game now? Well, for starters, a tree takes ages longer to make. It could have thousands of polygons, huge texture maps that an artist has to draw and other technical data like normal maps that can take a few minutes to generate by CPU. The tree might even have animations of swaying in the wind, which would have to be made by an animator. Then to render these new fangled creations, immense time has to be spent optimizing the engine. Sometimes the act of rendering simple trees is so time consuming that third party software (speedtree.com) has to be purchased.

And thats just for trees.

The cost to develop "next-gen" content has soared. Thats why huge, lively worlds like GTAs now can cost up to $100mil. And those worlds still pale in comparison to what is required of MMOs today.

Pilnkplonk

Hmm.. don't panic.

I thought pretty much the same until several months ago but then found out there are nice things on the horizon (finally). Imo if you are looking only at SWTOR then you might get this impression because frankly it is bringing nothing new to the genre except bloated budget and production and some "secretly wish we were single player so we could tell a proper story" gimmicks.

Check out GW2 and Rift on this site, they seem to be bringing quite a few "true" mmo innovations to the genre. It seems that finally big shot producers got it in their thick skulls that copying WoW/EQ does NOT automatically translate into success, quite the opposite. Bioware is pretty much an anomaly here but I have a feeling that they think they can afford it because hey it's frigging Bioware and hey its frigging Star Wars. It's basically your standard Hollywood blockbuster production philosophy at work. If we can dump enough cash and bang into the thing it's bound to pay off. Personally I think they're in for a nasty surprise unless their business plan relies heavily on box sales rather than subs.

fnorgby

OP I feel your pain.  The technology exists for games to be much much cooler than they seem to be now.

But it's market forces, not technology, that are driving the genre. 

There is a technological issue, which is that the "average" PC from three years ago can still perform any business-software related task, and can surf the web just as well as a new puter can.  Since MMO's have to bite off a huge chunk of the internet community to be successful, they can't go for technology as a market driver.

Still though, simple UI, simple gameplay mechanics and easy/frequent rewards for playing are what's controlling the games at this time. Appealing to the lowest common denominator.

I'm convinced that the "next big thing" in online gaming will come from an unexpected place and will look very much different from what we're doing now.

edit: Plink, i'm not following GW2 or rift all that much, but from what I've seen the "big news" jsut amounts to a different way of doing the same things we've always done.  The dynamic content of GW2 is probably a great invention, but (yes I'm coming from ignorance here) I don't see how it will avoid being just another grindy quest source.  .  LIke people said about Allods that the ships were something totally new and groundbreaking.  They said it about Aion's flight/pvp system.  They said it about Conan's attack/block system.  But at the core, they were just new ways of doing the old stuff.  What's so different about GW2?

Karesh

Your post wasn't really as much about mmorpgs in general as it was about ToR. It's true that ToR seems to be moving backwards...but if you look at a lot of the other mmo's in development it doesn't seem like they're still moving backwards. Take Guild Wars 2 for instance, GW2 seems like it's bringing a lot to the table. In terms of new content, as well as old content upgraded. With the WvWvW, the event system replacing quests, and just all the info overall, it sounds like it's going to be pretty great. 

Warband

Originally posted by fnorgby

OP I feel your pain.  The technology exists for games to be much much cooler than they seem to be now.

But it's market forces, not technology, that are driving the genre. 

There is a technological issue, which is that the "average" PC from three years ago can still perform any business-software related task, and can surf the web just as well as a new puter can.  Since MMO's have to bite off a huge chunk of the internet community to be successful, they can't go for technology as a market driver.

Still though, simple UI, simple gameplay mechanics and easy/frequent rewards for playing are what's controlling the games at this time. Appealing to the lowest common denominator.

I'm convinced that the "next big thing" in online gaming will come from an unexpected place and will look very much different from what we're doing now.

edit: Plink, i'm not following GW2 or rift all that much, but from what I've seen the "big news" jsut amounts to a different way of doing the same things we've always done.  The dynamic content of GW2 is probably a great invention, but (yes I'm coming from ignorance here) I don't see how it will avoid being just another grindy quest source.  .  LIke people said about Allods that the ships were something totally new and groundbreaking.  They said it about Aion's flight/pvp system.  They said it about Conan's attack/block system.  But at the core, they were just new ways of doing the old stuff.  What's so different about GW2?

Enlighten yourself.

http://guildwars2.com/en/

http://www.arena.net/

Martinmas

  While I share the same view that MMOGs are moving backwards instead of pushing forward I can understand the decision they made for space travel. I do not think the majority of players nor the investors in the game would be happy for the game to be pushed back six months to a year to make the space portion of the game fully open. Especially since more than likely only a small percentage of the players would even appreciate it. Most of the people will more than likely be looking for a MMORPG set in the Star Wars universe instead of looking for a space sim set in said universe.



  I know I would not be happy if they announced that the game is now being pushed to spring 2012 for a part that I more than likely would not even play very often at the beginning. They can flesh out that portion of the game in future updates and expansions when people have already experienced most of what the game will already ship with instead.

SEANMCAD

Friggin.....

 

yes, progress has basically stopped and now the consumer market will try to convince us that we all just need a friggin 3d tv

eburn

I don't mind the rail shooting idea.

It's been a video game staple for a long time and guess what.. MMOs are video games. They're not Jedi training simulators.

So it'll be more Star Fox 64 than XWing vs TIE Fighter ; disappointing, but I won't judge it until I try it.

Torgrim

I feel your pain man, my last hope for MMOs lies in Rift and Archage( if it go live on western market).

twstdstrange

It's not always about the technology.

It's also about the time and money and deadlines the developers have, which, more often than not, always limits what they can and can't do.

With the exception of Blizzard.

Blizzard's just lazy... Well, with BC and WotLK.

Cataclysm will hopefully be more than just new areas with reskinned models, and recycled quests.

Anyway; Time and money. Very important.

Palebane

Originally posted by Robokapp

I'd imagine spending money for an extra year and collecting subscriptions for extra 10 years is more important...MMOs that take 4 years to develop and 4 months to die are not exactly good for people rushing deadlines either.

I'd imagine they could copy Pacman and have enough pre orders to break even. 

Orthelian

I would much prefer a rail shooter over a dogfighter. Not only because dogfights in space are incredibly stupid, but because you're just one person—one person who is not a fighter pilot—but the commander of a group of travelling people, therefore travelling in a freighter. I'd cringe to see these vessels given the EVE Online or Star Trek Online treatment of 'being your ship.' Fuck that.

UOlover

Not this particular issue but backwards would be good right now.

J0K3R_3D

Dont let those idiots at Bioware discourage you. They really have no idea how to make MMO's. All they know is RPG and even that  was probably because they lucked out with their whole "choice + companions" formula. Theyve been making the same game since. Notice how other than the same b/s theyve been making in every single player game they have since KotOR, everything else about TOR is straight out of WoW (or whatever MMO WoW copied). It even somewhat looks like WoW graphics-wise.

 

IMO there is still hope for a good MMO. Its called TERA.

 

GW2 can also be great. If those fail ... then yeah its over.There are others, like Rift, but IMO chances are slim.

 

(P.S: Before any ignorant braindead morons try any "lawl TERA korean grinder, derp" replies. Read up on the game.)

Pilnkplonk

Originally posted by fnorgby

edit: Plink, i'm not following GW2 or rift all that much, but from what I've seen the "big news" jsut amounts to a different way of doing the same things we've always done.  The dynamic content of GW2 is probably a great invention, but (yes I'm coming from ignorance here) I don't see how it will avoid being just another grindy quest source.  .  LIke people said about Allods that the ships were something totally new and groundbreaking.  They said it about Aion's flight/pvp system.  They said it about Conan's attack/block system.  But at the core, they were just new ways of doing the old stuff.  What's so different about GW2?

Well...

I was never hyped about any of the games you mentioned precisely because they were "gimmick" innovations.

The only mmo I did get hyped about in the last 5 years was WAR because it WAS truly innovative at that time. If you remember it was the horrible days of  "PvP is EVIL!!!!" age. WAR proved that yes, you can have PvP-centered game and no, it won't turn the playerbase into slobering werewolf griefer ganker psychos. In fact,quite the opposite happened and actually I can see much more firendly relations between members of opposed factions in an intriniscally PvP game than between "allies" in a badly designed competetive raiding PvE crap that is WoW.

Amongst many other things, GW2 basically promises to do away with levels - yes, do away with levels you heard me correctly. It is not subscription based and so they don't give a sh*** about carrots and sticks and hamster treadmills whatever. If you buy the box it's fine by their financial model.

The 80 levels they got in there is, as their lead designer explicitly said, a concession to the MMO traditions. Initially they wanted to do away with levels completely (a natural progression from their GW1 system)  but decided that they already have too many "revolutionary" features in there - such as no quests, I said NO quests. None. Nada. No yellow question marks and "do this for x XP" thing. None. NO QUESTS. Revolutionary for ANY RPG, not just MMORPGs don't you think? - so they decided to keep this dinging mechanic so WoW players (and that's most of us) can have at least SOMETHING familiar to hang on to. The conforting "ding!" which means "I'm doing something right".

However even this venerable mechanic is being almost completely anulled within the new MMO paradigm with various buffs and debuffs which seriously demolish it. You will get debuffed if you get into a lower level PvE zone so you can still find it challenging. If you get into a open PvP zone you will get boosted so you don't get ganked as a newbie by some max level no-lifer. If you go into competetive PvP your level 1 elementalist will get to maxed out max level with ALL the skillls and ALL the GEAR available in the game to choose from. Yes. Imagine you're playing WoW and when you get into arena (and you can do it from level 1, no idiotic PvE grind just so you can try out a new class in PvP) you have ALL the GEAR in the game to choose from to dress up your character with. Dig?

Classes? They're still there but each one presented so far is so open to customization that actually there is no "role" for the class but more of a "style" that defines it. Warriors can spec out for ranged DPS roles with bow and guns and seem to be able to provide almost godlike "ressurecting" skills with their rallies. Elementalists (thats your "mage") can swithch through attunements that can give them dps, protection, support/healing roles etc. So there's your another mmo EQ-style staple down the drain as well.

They are going all out with this game and trying to redefine the genre and finally yank it out from its ancient and self-destructive single-player roots that stopped making sense in massive online environment a very very long time ago. We'll have to see how succesful this will turn out to be in the end but I must say I do respect the effort  and will support ($$) their courage.

fnorgby

Originally posted by Pilnkplonk

Originally posted by fnorgby

edit: Plink, i'm not following GW2 or rift all that much, but from what I've seen the "big news" jsut amounts to a different way of doing the same things we've always done.  The dynamic content of GW2 is probably a great invention, but (yes I'm coming from ignorance here) I don't see how it will avoid being just another grindy quest source.  .  LIke people said about Allods that the ships were something totally new and groundbreaking.  They said it about Aion's flight/pvp system.  They said it about Conan's attack/block system.  But at the core, they were just new ways of doing the old stuff.  What's so different about GW2?

Well...

I was never hyped about any of the games you mentioned precisely because they were "gimmick" innovations.

Absolutely.  The difference between you and me I suppose is that I'd put the "innovations" of GW2 in the same category.  I know that people thought of GW1 as being a great game, so perfecting what GW1 did could make it better.  I'm one of the people who didn't like GW1 though.  To me it looks just like what I said -- new ways of doing the same old stuff.  And a lot of it isn't even new.

Amongst many other things, GW2 basically promises to do away with levels - yes, do away with levels you heard me correctly. It is not subscription based and so they don't give a sh*** about carrots and sticks and hamster treadmills whatever. If you buy the box it's fine by their financial model.

The 80 levels they got in there is, as their lead designer explicitly said, a concession to the MMO traditions.

So it has no levels "yes do away with levels you heard me correctly" -- except for these 80 levels right here.  I don't get it.  Anyway, I've played MMOs with no levels, so I'm not grasping the innovation here.

Initially they wanted to do away with levels completely (a natural progression from their GW1 system)  but decided that they already have too many "revolutionary" features in there - such as no quests, I said NO quests. None. Nada. No yellow question marks and "do this for x XP" thing. None. NO QUESTS. Revolutionary for ANY RPG, not just MMORPGs don't you think? 

"No quests" isn't innovation.  I've been around long enough to remember when the yellow ? was new.  I've played questless games.  There still has to be stuff to DO, reasons to do them and some reward associated with it.  That can be good or bad, regardless whether it's done through quests or something sandboxy "i'll find it on my own".

 

- so they decided to keep this dinging mechanic so WoW players (and that's most of us) can have at least SOMETHING familiar to hang on to. The conforting "ding!" which means "I'm doing something right".

Sounds pathological then. "Lets do this not because there is a natural organic reason for doing it but because its always been done this way."

However even this venerable mechanic is being almost completely anulled within the new MMO paradigm with various buffs and debuffs which seriously demolish it. You will get debuffed if you get into a lower level PvE zone so you can still find it challenging. If you get into a open PvP zone you will get boosted so you don't get ganked as a newbie by some max level no-lifer. If you go into competetive PvP your level 1 elementalist will get to maxed out max level with ALL the skillls and ALL the GEAR available in the game to choose from. Yes. Imagine you're playing WoW and when you get into arena (and you can do it from level 1, no idiotic PvE grind just so you can try out a new class in PvP) you have ALL the GEAR in the game to choose from to dress up your character with. Dig?

I "dig", but I do not see how this changes the nature of competitive play.  I'm not a Wow player (I quit about the time battlegrounds came out, partly because it ruined open-world PVP) so just because it's different from how WoW does it doesn't strike me as an innovation.  Arena pvp is still boring.

Classes? They're still there but each one presented so far is so open to customization that actually there is no "role" for the class but more of a "style" that defines it. Warriors can spec out for ranged DPS roles with bow and guns and seem to be able to provide almost godlike "ressurecting" skills with their rallies. Elementalists (thats your "mage") can swithch through attunements that can give them dps, protection, support/healing roles etc. So there's your another mmo EQ-style staple down the drain as well.

Class-based vs. classless isn't a distinction that matters to me.  I don't see how this will prevent "cookie cutter" builds or FOTM classes etc.  If I'm missing something, great.

They are going all out with this game and trying to redefine the genre and finally yank it out from its ancient and self-destructive single-player roots that stopped making sense in massive online environment a very very long time ago.

No offense, but that just sounds like marketing copy to me.  What do those words even mean?  Where does "all out" fall on the continuum of awesomeness?  Is it closer to eXXtreme! or is it more like "to the maxx!!111!" ?

I'm not saying GW2 won't be a good game.  I hope it is.  But at this point all of the talk is just talk.  Just words.  Maybe the changes will make me like it in spite of my disappointment with GW1.  But I won't believe it until I see it.  Same goes for any game these days.  I refuse to get hyped -- being hyped about a game won't make you like the game more than it deserves to be liked, but it will worsen the pain of disappointment when things turn out to suck after all.