I think you hit that nail pretty much on the head. I'm completely tired of the rat race to push MMOs (among other games) out into the open market to learn all the hype was just a fat guy dancing in a tube top. Something, somewhere along the line has to change if us gamers are going to play anything worth a second of our time (or $60 + sub). If only gamers going into development could somehow remember all the times they shouted and slammed their keyboards for playing a game littered with mundane, bloody filth then, maybe then, could they insert sanity into meaningful, long-lasting projects.
Most forums related to MMOs these days contain thread after thread about the disappointments many gamers experience when it comes to new and upcoming MMOs. Taking a break from his usual Friday TERA column, MMORPG.com Industry Relations Manager Garrett Fuller asks our readers, "Where do MMOs go wrong?" Read Garrett's thoughts and then answer the question in the comments below as it pertains to you.
I am taking a break from my TERA column this week to ask readers and users a simple question: Where do MMOs go wrong for you? There is a method to this article that I think will help all of us as players get the word out to developers as to why certain things in games work and fail. The market has been flooded with MMOs lately and there are many more on the way, the industry thinks players are becoming more picky. Well maybe it is because we have a lot to pick from. In an age with tons of free to play games, more AAA titles coming this year, and the general shift to games in the online space, it’s about time we reopened the case file on why games can fail.
When I see that the developers put very little effort into the project, yet attempted to market it as something ground breaking. After Dark Age of Camelot, for example, how many fantasy mmorpgs have you all seen that have 24 character classes and as many races? Three separate realms alone made them ahead of the genre - that's 3 factions at war. And finally, where is the meaningful pvp that Dark Age had?
Companies eye candy us with graphics or endless fat dungeons and gear sets. They leave out player housing, a sense of purpose in player conflict, and any sense of reality such as siege warfare and territorial aquisition.
Looking on the horizon but I don't see a single 3 faction mmorpg with completely separate cultures and handfuls of culturally relevant class choices.
why the hell would i pay a monthly subscription then pay again for the "cool" stuff. prime example for me was fallen earth, a game i really liked.... but not enough to see where it was headed once the "fluff" in the cash shop was added. cash shop went in to the game, cancelled my sub the next day and uninstalled.
IF THE ONLY DEFENCE FOR CRITICISM OF A GAME IS CALLING SOMEONE A TROLL OR HATER, THAT SAYS A LOT ABOUT THE QUALITY OF THE GAME
How to prevent 99.9% of all new mmos end up being junk? Simple, STOP MAKING THEM FOR MONEY! Easy enough?
Stop buying them would be best. If just once people didnt buy a game that wasnt ready to launch and actually was different than their previous games it might wake them up.
But people still buy and they make money and they laugh all the way to the bank while they decide their next game..thats just like the last..except it has elf's that fly or something.
For me, I need the thrill of either losing my things or hunting someone down, winning the battle, and then searching their corpse to see what kind of goodies I have earned. Make no mistake, its not just getting full loot right's on the fallen, it is knowing that if I lose this fight, they get my stuff. There is no other feeling I have had in a game than in full loot mmo's, it is like an electric buzz running through your body.
I too have felt the pain of losing something I spent hours or even days crafting, and I could see putting in an insurance system so that you could spend a little coin and not lose your most valuable items. The cost of the insurance would even help the economy being an additional gold sink.
In addition to this, I want housing, not instanced housing, but a plot of land that I can build and show off to other players. I want crafting that is not just grinding but is challenging and rewarding.
What current mmo's are missing is the thrill, and the social aspect that can only come from sitting in a friends Virtual Castle Living Room training skills or planning the next raid....
Thats easy. MMOs are being made first and foremost as combat/action games. The virtual world and everything else in it is an afterthought. Thats where MMOs go wrong these days.
This above is why I feel these games indeed fail for me, I love games but alway's thought MMORPG go beyond that what we can find in single/multiplayer games. When I want to play a combat/action game I take my pick from all the single/multiplayer games that do offer this in a great way, when I want to play a MMORPG I want it to feel like a world where everything is possible and not geared towards combat only, while combat should be a part of a MMORPG both pve and pvp-wise, there should also be the same amount of none combat activities that prolong our stay in that virtual world. Actually make a virtual living in a MMORPG, instead of playing it like regular multiplayer games with a sub.
They are all the same in one way shape or form. They are all cookie cutter clones of the basic Everquest/Asherons Call model, yes even WoW.
99% of the MMORPGs out there, are not MMORPGs, they are MMOThemeParks.
There is NO end game for most of them, no risk vs reward. Not like the pen & paper roleplaying games, where you spent months if not years building up a character with a party of friends adventuring through what ever game world you played in.
Death was a BIG part of life in those times and games, if your character died, it was GONE, you erased the character sheet and started over. Currently I cant think of ONE MMO that has that feature, a real perma-death that is VERY real and can happen.
Sure there are a few token attempts, like in Face of Mankind, where if you run out of money and clones you perma-die, but it doesnt hurt you, you dont lose any skills or anything, because there are no skills, levels, or attributes. Everyone is the same in that game. But if you played Face of Mankind for more than a month you will have so much money you wont ever have to worry about perma-death.
Star Wars Galaxys had perma-death for one class, but removed it because a small vocal minority cried loud enough to have it removed. So the game became Jedi vs Bounty online.
Star Trek Online, went from having multiple people crew a massive starship, to a cheap bad knock off of Eve Online.
From my point of view, a person who has been playing online games since the days of Kesmai's Multi-player Battletech:Solaris VII (aka VGA Battletech). And later into Ultima Online. There hasnt been a game like either of those.
I have watched monster companies like EA, come out with great concepts only to can them before they are released. Like Motor City Online, or Multi-player Battletech:3025. Or that sham of a Shadowrun game, that came out a while back.
I was actually thinking about this today. I cut hair at a Great Clips, and I meet a lot of people... Roughly 20 a day. As an avid MMO player, I am always trying to get every nerdy-looking would-be MMO player to divulge the information to me that they do play an MMO of some sort. Nine times out of ten, they play WoW. There is nothing wrong with that. They feel they have found the best game for them. The important part of this story is that when they ask me if I play WoW, I have to say, "No." Often times they want a reason.
Every time I am asked why I don't play WoW, which is a lot, I find myself scrambling through all of my thoughts so I can find a way to say it without making them feel put down for the game they've chosen and not letting myself just get too nostalgiac over the one or two games I've played that have pretty much shaped all of my expectations for what every other MMO should be. (i.e. Asheron's Call) Today was important, though. Today I thought of why I can't stand the MMO market right now. It's the term "endgame."
"Endgame," has, in my eyes, ruined the entire market. "Endgame," means carbon-copy classes, weapons, monsters, and entire gaming experiences. This term is litterally something I believe should not make its way into a "fantastical" setting. In the early years of MMOs there was no such concept, at least not initially.
When MMOs were new, there were not people who were so used to playing these types of games that they just simply found a way to farm gold, hit max level, get "great gear," etc. etc. etc. In this day and age there are those people. I am even one of those people from time to time, depending on the game. This has become the market though. As I read from game to game on these forums, the common denominator amongst all thing is, "How long to hit endgame?" Within a few weeks of a game being released, many people are readily available to answer that with much accuracy. This is not fun. This is robotic. This is the same every time.
Now, I digress to how an MMO could go right: bring back the excitement of adventure, mystery, and discovery. Take out level caps, stat caps, classes, and most importantly take out big glowing quest icons with glowing trails of light that lead you to the next big glowing icon. You may say this has been done in "this or that" game, and these things have been done to an extent, but clearly not well enough to appeal to the massive community.
You may believe that having a capless system would bring a great imbalance to a game; but how? The difference in power between a level 39 compared to a level 41 in the WoW nichè is immense. It would be no less fair in PvP or PvE if you had a level 1076 with insane strength killing a level 1. It would feel pretty close to the same as that 2 or 3 level difference in most games.
Classes are an ever-so-important aspect in MMOs... apparently. I think more of a sandbox feeling for this could REALLY thrive if done correctly, though. Let players build their own characters. We are all smart people.
Make a mostly seamless world. It connects us all. Let someone else walk into a dungeon we happen to be killing in. The greatest challenge in these games could be our fellow players. That's an entire other amount of content that does not have to be created simply because players would become more immersed in a game through vying for a piece of property. This encourages guilds, grouping, arguing, and PvP. It makes players feel entitled to something.
Make gear with more random statistics and appearances. I don't want to know that when I kill X-monster I will recieve X-gear. That is uninventive and boring.
Actually my list could go on much further than anyone cares to read, and you may have stopped caring by this point. The major idea here is: I want a game that FEELS limitless. I don't want to imagine myself 40 hours of gameplay later doing the same thing I could have been doing in the "last" game I quit to play "this one." I want to have no idea what I will be doing.
The biggest reason for games failing for me is that they are just too easy. It takes you weeks or max couple of months to see everything in the game and get to teh top level (if it has levels). Then it's just the same old boring stuff.
My first game was Everquest and in that game it took you forever to get to the max level and see all the zones and places, I loved that exploration even if it was boring grind from time to time.
Also the lack of events from developers and GM's is a show of no interest towards the current gaming population. You can only make so many alts until you get tired of the same old quests and missions.
There seem to be only be two real causes of MMORPGs going wrong:
(1) Games are underdeveloped/unfinished because of development team issues (poor design, missing features) or production company issues (pushed out too soon, insufficient funding given, interference with development);
(2) Games have poor support because staff (GM, Tech, QA, et cetera) are overworked or lazy, the production company refuses to fund quality support or lacks funding for quality support, or the production company is inappropriately (broadly speaking) utilising funds;
There is, however, a potential third cause where MMORPGs can be considered to go wrong:
(3) Players refuse to acknowledge that the MMORPG genre is a sub-genre of the RPG genre, wherein there is an ongoing narrative that the player participates in but in no real way controls (cf. manipulate v. control), and complain about various mechanisms of the game which look like problems but are not problems (or are significantly smaller problems than they are being made out to be).
In respect to #3, the MMORPG genre needs to stop being shortened to 'MMO' because of the misunderstanding that has become standard. MMORPG stands for Massive(ly) Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, to use only the first three letters is to say that something is either (a) a Massive Multiplayer Online, which makes no sense, or (b) that the genre the game functions in has a multiplayer setting that is Massively Multiplayer and Online, which makes a hell of a lot of sense.
Anyone that continues to substitute 'MMO' for 'MMORPG' is willfully passing on that misunderstanding and only serving to entrench it further. It's a small wonder that so many MMORPG players reject story: they want an action MMO, not a MMORPG. There's nothing wrong with wanting an action MMO, but there is everything wrong with complaining of various RPG conventions and mechanics because one does not understand the genre. I'm sure that quite a few of the people complaining inapppropriately are doing so out of sheer ignorance, they're naive, and they can't be blamed overly much because gross laziness has set the standard and changed the meaning of an acronym-come-definition. That said, it's still a problem and, Mr. Fuller, you are part of the problem.
(1)TL:DR must be your way of saying that thinking hurts. Then again, this may explain why it looks like you responded to the post without using your brain. (2) It's not about community, is it? You just have nothing better to do.
It is really simple and it is amazing how almsot every poster is posting the same few things and yet for like almost 7 years not a single developer has taken note.
The world and gameplay is utter snooze fests. Reguritating everything we have already done. Give me a dark evil mean looking world and monsters i am the hero i must save this world. Give me intersting well desgined dungeons screw all this big open forests they are boring. Get rid of pvp or build seperate pvp skills and areas. PVe and pvp are not compatable. You just nd up making every combat skill and item bland and boring to balance pvp and then the PVE is terrible. Give me wildly powerful pve skills now you can make wildly powerful interesting and tactical PVE encounters....
Yes I said it encounters....enough with the mindnombing boring solo tank spank content. give me big cool phat loot laiden dungeon and areas, give me tough, scarey make me think DESIGNED ENCOUNTERS and wildly powerful tool to allow me to succeed.
I do not need to kill little rats, snakes, or dogs, 1 by 1 with a copper dagger or a wand, I do not need to go on errand boy runs killing ten water bettles, and collecting 15 pig snouts.
Oh yeah also get smart, CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT, there is not reason you should not be adding 1-2 new content each month, design a proper engine to allow new content to be redily created, not cut and copy crap original new fresh fun diverse content. I want to exlpore, find treasure kill big nasty baddies that have all kinda crazy henchmen with a small team of players I want to see if i can overcome the odds,
I want to be challenged, THEN rewarded properly, I want to try to kill some uber con things and if i do i want 1/3 a level xp , I want to be scared to die so I goto play smart or suffer.
Can agree with both argument from original article, but " Level one means you are fighting goblins or imps, or something easy. Basically, you enter the game with the point of view that, you are a noob and can only fight things that suck as well. This method is fail numero uno for MMOs.". Actually, this is only way. Start killing rats or goblins. And learn this way. Or is author expecting to start dungeons after first login?
oh my giddy aunt!!! where do you start the list from ?? you have sure opened a can of worms here.
i have a huge amount of greivances with modern mmo's
i think first of all is how they are classed and put into their diffrent genres, for example mmorpg,mmog,mmo,mmorts,mmofps.
then you have mmobroswer.
then youva free 2 play and subscriptions.
i would like to get started on subscriptions and stores.
while i dont mind either, im utterly in conflict with games that try both, so far i know of only one that i play thats startrek online. they have there c-store and they have the games subscription too and to top it off you have to buy the game aswell before you can even play it.
so in total you are paying for the same game 3 times the first payment is a single payment to aquire access. but the access is only dependent on your subscription plan, once it ends you cant play the game you paid for. in my case i paid 35 pounds for sto. and now they want a further 8.99 a month. ok thats fine i can stomache that and watch the game progress and maybe improve. at present the game isnt worth the money
but they didnt stop there, no no they have that rediculous c-store which they claimed would only be fluff items. what an uter lie.
there c-store has unique items with uniquye stats that you can aquire in game as they claim you would be able to. so it there for forces you in a round about way to spend yet even more money on a game that doesnt warrant the subscription in the first place.
thats my first problem with mmo's
my second -
companions/npc team mates.
it seems mmo's are takeing this road alot just lately. they are adding npc companions for players to use in their groups, i know this takes the mmo part away from the mmo and leaves just a single player expeirience. comapanions in mmo's are really really bad things. it is destroying the whole point of playing an mmo.
the idea of an mmo is to be in a community of players from all over the world and interact with each other and mingle and make new friends and socialise. comapanions remove this from the mmo games.
heres an example, m,y first mmo i played was guildwars. i started just after closed beta. about week after. in that game its highly instanced based which was ok as it was my first online experience with mmo's it had no companions and i utterly enjoyed the game because you could not complete it or progress unless you formed teams with oter players. it really was a massively multiplayer online game. you could not play the game and comeplete it unless you joined player teams. and the game was also fashioned towards team/guild warfare. that means you have to have teams of real people learning to work side by side as a team to overcome their opponents. it was fantastic. i really enjoyed the game.
but now they have companions, you can actually play the game from start to finish with out the help of a real person. its sad and it isnt an mmo. i know they had the bots in the first place but they was just npc's to fill spaces humand couldnt fill or wasnt available to fill.
but today you have the companions which you can equip and train and skill up and they are better than human players and they allow you to play guild wars like its a single player title.
companions are bad for mmo's and take a way the mmo part of the game meaning its just another single player game but online that you have to pay for.
third is the linear feel -
too many games are in the mind of copy paste antics for the missions and quest lines, there is no real inovation of imagination. its just the same quest/mission thats been edited to change out the conversaion and the creatures you have to kill.
there are 3 types of these quests. one is the collection quest where you have to collect items meet the goals. an other is the one where you kill a set number of bad guys to meet the goal and the last is the one where you have to either pass on messages or deliver items from one location to another. THEY ARE BOREING AND DULL
What makes me dissapointed in MMOs is that so many of them are focusing on the single player and not the group. It's supposed to be a massive MULTIPLAYER online game, so why keep all the focus on the individuals? I want it to be more focused on group efforts.
There seem to be only be two real causes of MMORPGs going wrong:
(1) Games are underdeveloped/unfinished because of development team issues (poor design, missing features) or production company issues (pushed out too soon, insufficient funding given, interference with development);
(2) Games have poor support because staff (GM, Tech, QA, et cetera) are overworked or lazy, the production company refuses to fund quality support or lacks funding for quality support, or the production company is inappropriately (broadly speaking) utilising funds;
There is, however, a potential third cause where MMORPGs can be considered to go wrong:
(3) Players refuse to acknowledge that the MMORPG genre is a sub-genre of the RPG genre, wherein there is an ongoing narrative that the player participates in but in no real way controls (cf. manipulate v. control), and complain about various mechanisms of the game which look like problems but are not problems (or are significantly smaller problems than they are being made out to be).
In respect to #3, the MMORPG genre needs to stop being shortened to 'MMO' because of the misunderstanding that has become standard. MMORPG stands for Massive(ly) Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, to use only the first three letters is to say that something is either (a) a Massive Multiplayer Online, which makes no sense, or (b) that the genre the game functions in has a multiplayer setting that is Massively Multiplayer and Online, which makes a hell of a lot of sense.
Anyone that continues to substitute 'MMO' for 'MMORPG' is willfully passing on that misunderstanding and only serving to entrench it further. It's a small wonder that so many MMORPG players reject story: they want an action MMO, not a MMORPG. There's nothing wrong with wanting an action MMO, but there is everything wrong with complaining of various RPG conventions and mechanics because one does not understand the genre. I'm sure that quite a few of the people complaining inapppropriately are doing so out of sheer ignorance, they're naive, and they can't be blamed overly much because gross laziness has set the standard and changed the meaning of an acronym-come-definition. That said, it's still a problem and, Mr. Fuller, you are part of the problem.
your sort of correct, but ifear you still miss some of the mroe improtant points of why mmo's and mmorpg's are not actually mmog's at all.
there is definately a misconception about them going on and its not due to lack of understanding but more rather lack of knowing.
most of the gamers today hail from consoles and single player titles. they are so used to playing rpg's like icewind dale, baldurs gate startrek bridge commander ,overlord , kotor and many many more games of the same genre. the problem their in lies with the sudden influx of noob mmog players missunderstanding what an mmog is. so when they log on to say oo eve-online for instance. i think we can both agree thats going to be a gameing culture shock for these kinds of players. they have never ever experienced anything like it in their entire gaming lives. that is unless ofcourse they played elite about 20 years ago. which thay havnt. the people that played elite are few and far between a dieing breed. these people used to dream of elite being an online massive multiplayer game. and thats precisely what eve is. its elite online and its bloody hardcore as far as other mmog's go.
the misconception is with modern gamers simply not knowing what an mmog is or supposed to be or where it derived from.
mmorpg's are not subsidaries of the single player rpg games at all. they came from the vr exeperience idea which cropped up about oo 20 years ago!! it was a bit more sci-fi back then.
i remember trying one of these vr thing sout as a kid. i had this huge helmet on and this dodgy looking suit with wires up and down the sleeves and legs and iw as stood in front of cameras whcih clocked my movement. in the head set it was wide screen and it was a simulation of handglideing. the idea was to place the pleyer in the world as literally as posisble sp th eplayer could feel like he/she was actually there!!!!
now having that stupid hat on and all those wires in that special suit standing in a studio sized arenas with cameras simply wasnt workable for a home entertainment system. it just took up too much space.
so what we have now is online games where the players have more control over what they are supposed be or do in these fantasy virtual reality worlds. players can be who they want to be be called what they want to be called and do anything their mind can imagine. well atleast thats what eve allows you to do!!
and that is the misconception thats is going around. people simply dont know what an mmog is supposed to be or was meant to be. and we are getting a tiny tiny tiny portion of it as a result.
game developers are rubbing their hands together because the effort is minuscule for the rewards they reap from their creations. which is why all games seem the same. they are copying each other because they know todays players havnt a clue what to expect from a true mmog. they are cahsing in on their lack of understanding. they are conning us lol short changing and providing shoddy goods!!!
The main reason for epic fail in the industry (in my opinion) is the slash and burn approach many studios/publishers have today. Rather than making a product that they will invest in over the years they make something that they expect to sell quick initialy then die off within 8 months. By which time they have recouped the initial investment and made a tidy profit to put towards the next "great MMORPG".
If studios and publishers refuse to put a significant investment of time and money into an MMO after launch then they should not expect their customers to do the same.
Look at all the examples sitting on the MMORPG trash heap that were the meant to be the dogs bollocks just before launch, AoC, WAR, Vanguard, D&L, APB, Aion the list goes on and will get larger this year. Aslong as it's being run by bean counters that only think of diminishing returns over time the industry will remain the same.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"
It is really simple and it is amazing how almsot every poster is posting the same few things and yet for like almost 7 years not a single developer has taken note.
Are. You. Freaking. Serious.
Every poster is not posting the same few things. Take another look through this thread, but with your eyes wide open. People are calling for: more complex and challenging PvE content; a major focus on hardcore PvP; fewer restrictions and more freedom to try anything; gameplay that differs greatly from existing MMOs. These four requests are so incompatible that they are virtually at opposite corners. It is not possible to create a game that does all of these things.
For example, there's Dredphyre's post about player agency; he wants players to have much more control over how they develop their characters and what they can do with their abilities. This is incompatible with a request for complex and challenging PvE content; developers need to have a tight control over characters' power levels because if there is a creative combination of skills that makes the fight into a cakewalk, the content will be perceived as much too easy and boring. This is incompatible with a focus on PvP; if you allow players to develop characters however they want, all notions of balanced classes with built-in strengths and weaknesses gets completely thrown out the window. This is incompatible with wildly different gameplay, because if players are left to create their experience from scratch, they're going to fall back on the same tried-and-true PvE strats like tank-and-spank and kiting.
If Dredphyre's ideal game was made, 95% of you would point to it and say "Epic fail, boycott this company, this game is proof that they never listen to anyone." You all need to accept the fact that the overwhelming majority of MMO players would consider your dream MMO absolute trash. We are not all asking for the same thing.
I'm calling for a return to the original concept of MMO's. The first MMO's of the late 90's, early 2000. These are the games (Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online) that i played for YEARS, not weeks or months. Devs these days only want to make a quick buck and jump into the WOW bandwagon. They seems to think that if we make games like WOW it will succeed. Peoples are bored with these games. Just look at Rift ! It's a prime example of a game that's gonna endup like Warhammer Online. It's too similar to WOW. Why play a clone when you can play the original ?
Devs should look back at what made MMO's a success before WOW and come up with something difference for once. For me
Comments
I think you hit that nail pretty much on the head. I'm completely tired of the rat race to push MMOs (among other games) out into the open market to learn all the hype was just a fat guy dancing in a tube top. Something, somewhere along the line has to change if us gamers are going to play anything worth a second of our time (or $60 + sub). If only gamers going into development could somehow remember all the times they shouted and slammed their keyboards for playing a game littered with mundane, bloody filth then, maybe then, could they insert sanity into meaningful, long-lasting projects.
How to prevent 99.9% of all new mmos end up being junk? Simple, STOP MAKING THEM FOR MONEY! Easy enough?
When I see that the developers put very little effort into the project, yet attempted to market it as something ground breaking. After Dark Age of Camelot, for example, how many fantasy mmorpgs have you all seen that have 24 character classes and as many races? Three separate realms alone made them ahead of the genre - that's 3 factions at war. And finally, where is the meaningful pvp that Dark Age had?
Companies eye candy us with graphics or endless fat dungeons and gear sets. They leave out player housing, a sense of purpose in player conflict, and any sense of reality such as siege warfare and territorial aquisition.
Looking on the horizon but I don't see a single 3 faction mmorpg with completely separate cultures and handfuls of culturally relevant class choices.
MEGA SIGH
my 2 cents.
WoW clones will all fail.
hey devs! IF PEOPLE WANT WOW THEY WILL PLAY WOW! Try to actually INNOVATE something.
Wait....what? The music industry died?
When did that happen? WTF is on my MP3 player then?
big fail IMO - CASH SHOP in a p2p game
why the hell would i pay a monthly subscription then pay again for the "cool" stuff. prime example for me was fallen earth, a game i really liked.... but not enough to see where it was headed once the "fluff" in the cash shop was added. cash shop went in to the game, cancelled my sub the next day and uninstalled.
IF THE ONLY DEFENCE FOR CRITICISM OF A GAME IS CALLING SOMEONE A TROLL OR HATER, THAT SAYS A LOT ABOUT THE QUALITY OF THE GAME
Stop buying them would be best. If just once people didnt buy a game that wasnt ready to launch and actually was different than their previous games it might wake them up.
But people still buy and they make money and they laugh all the way to the bank while they decide their next game..thats just like the last..except it has elf's that fly or something.
For me, I need the thrill of either losing my things or hunting someone down, winning the battle, and then searching their corpse to see what kind of goodies I have earned. Make no mistake, its not just getting full loot right's on the fallen, it is knowing that if I lose this fight, they get my stuff. There is no other feeling I have had in a game than in full loot mmo's, it is like an electric buzz running through your body.
I too have felt the pain of losing something I spent hours or even days crafting, and I could see putting in an insurance system so that you could spend a little coin and not lose your most valuable items. The cost of the insurance would even help the economy being an additional gold sink.
In addition to this, I want housing, not instanced housing, but a plot of land that I can build and show off to other players. I want crafting that is not just grinding but is challenging and rewarding.
What current mmo's are missing is the thrill, and the social aspect that can only come from sitting in a friends Virtual Castle Living Room training skills or planning the next raid....
My 2 cents
This above is why I feel these games indeed fail for me, I love games but alway's thought MMORPG go beyond that what we can find in single/multiplayer games. When I want to play a combat/action game I take my pick from all the single/multiplayer games that do offer this in a great way, when I want to play a MMORPG I want it to feel like a world where everything is possible and not geared towards combat only, while combat should be a part of a MMORPG both pve and pvp-wise, there should also be the same amount of none combat activities that prolong our stay in that virtual world. Actually make a virtual living in a MMORPG, instead of playing it like regular multiplayer games with a sub.
To sum it up on most MMOs.
There is no challange.
They are all the same in one way shape or form. They are all cookie cutter clones of the basic Everquest/Asherons Call model, yes even WoW.
99% of the MMORPGs out there, are not MMORPGs, they are MMOThemeParks.
There is NO end game for most of them, no risk vs reward. Not like the pen & paper roleplaying games, where you spent months if not years building up a character with a party of friends adventuring through what ever game world you played in.
Death was a BIG part of life in those times and games, if your character died, it was GONE, you erased the character sheet and started over. Currently I cant think of ONE MMO that has that feature, a real perma-death that is VERY real and can happen.
Sure there are a few token attempts, like in Face of Mankind, where if you run out of money and clones you perma-die, but it doesnt hurt you, you dont lose any skills or anything, because there are no skills, levels, or attributes. Everyone is the same in that game. But if you played Face of Mankind for more than a month you will have so much money you wont ever have to worry about perma-death.
Star Wars Galaxys had perma-death for one class, but removed it because a small vocal minority cried loud enough to have it removed. So the game became Jedi vs Bounty online.
Star Trek Online, went from having multiple people crew a massive starship, to a cheap bad knock off of Eve Online.
From my point of view, a person who has been playing online games since the days of Kesmai's Multi-player Battletech:Solaris VII (aka VGA Battletech). And later into Ultima Online. There hasnt been a game like either of those.
I have watched monster companies like EA, come out with great concepts only to can them before they are released. Like Motor City Online, or Multi-player Battletech:3025. Or that sham of a Shadowrun game, that came out a while back.
Need I meantion Matrix Online... oh god.
So much crap, so little quality.
I was actually thinking about this today. I cut hair at a Great Clips, and I meet a lot of people... Roughly 20 a day. As an avid MMO player, I am always trying to get every nerdy-looking would-be MMO player to divulge the information to me that they do play an MMO of some sort. Nine times out of ten, they play WoW. There is nothing wrong with that. They feel they have found the best game for them. The important part of this story is that when they ask me if I play WoW, I have to say, "No." Often times they want a reason.
Every time I am asked why I don't play WoW, which is a lot, I find myself scrambling through all of my thoughts so I can find a way to say it without making them feel put down for the game they've chosen and not letting myself just get too nostalgiac over the one or two games I've played that have pretty much shaped all of my expectations for what every other MMO should be. (i.e. Asheron's Call) Today was important, though. Today I thought of why I can't stand the MMO market right now. It's the term "endgame."
"Endgame," has, in my eyes, ruined the entire market. "Endgame," means carbon-copy classes, weapons, monsters, and entire gaming experiences. This term is litterally something I believe should not make its way into a "fantastical" setting. In the early years of MMOs there was no such concept, at least not initially.
When MMOs were new, there were not people who were so used to playing these types of games that they just simply found a way to farm gold, hit max level, get "great gear," etc. etc. etc. In this day and age there are those people. I am even one of those people from time to time, depending on the game. This has become the market though. As I read from game to game on these forums, the common denominator amongst all thing is, "How long to hit endgame?" Within a few weeks of a game being released, many people are readily available to answer that with much accuracy. This is not fun. This is robotic. This is the same every time.
Now, I digress to how an MMO could go right: bring back the excitement of adventure, mystery, and discovery. Take out level caps, stat caps, classes, and most importantly take out big glowing quest icons with glowing trails of light that lead you to the next big glowing icon. You may say this has been done in "this or that" game, and these things have been done to an extent, but clearly not well enough to appeal to the massive community.
You may believe that having a capless system would bring a great imbalance to a game; but how? The difference in power between a level 39 compared to a level 41 in the WoW nichè is immense. It would be no less fair in PvP or PvE if you had a level 1076 with insane strength killing a level 1. It would feel pretty close to the same as that 2 or 3 level difference in most games.
Classes are an ever-so-important aspect in MMOs... apparently. I think more of a sandbox feeling for this could REALLY thrive if done correctly, though. Let players build their own characters. We are all smart people.
Make a mostly seamless world. It connects us all. Let someone else walk into a dungeon we happen to be killing in. The greatest challenge in these games could be our fellow players. That's an entire other amount of content that does not have to be created simply because players would become more immersed in a game through vying for a piece of property. This encourages guilds, grouping, arguing, and PvP. It makes players feel entitled to something.
Make gear with more random statistics and appearances. I don't want to know that when I kill X-monster I will recieve X-gear. That is uninventive and boring.
Actually my list could go on much further than anyone cares to read, and you may have stopped caring by this point. The major idea here is: I want a game that FEELS limitless. I don't want to imagine myself 40 hours of gameplay later doing the same thing I could have been doing in the "last" game I quit to play "this one." I want to have no idea what I will be doing.
Alot of mmo's just take the same concept of past fail mmo's and just duplicate it.
Some stuff is diffrent but the fail remains...
The biggest reason for games failing for me is that they are just too easy. It takes you weeks or max couple of months to see everything in the game and get to teh top level (if it has levels). Then it's just the same old boring stuff.
My first game was Everquest and in that game it took you forever to get to the max level and see all the zones and places, I loved that exploration even if it was boring grind from time to time.
Also the lack of events from developers and GM's is a show of no interest towards the current gaming population. You can only make so many alts until you get tired of the same old quests and missions.
Just my 1.31415 cents of ideas
There seem to be only be two real causes of MMORPGs going wrong:
(1) Games are underdeveloped/unfinished because of development team issues (poor design, missing features) or production company issues (pushed out too soon, insufficient funding given, interference with development);
(2) Games have poor support because staff (GM, Tech, QA, et cetera) are overworked or lazy, the production company refuses to fund quality support or lacks funding for quality support, or the production company is inappropriately (broadly speaking) utilising funds;
There is, however, a potential third cause where MMORPGs can be considered to go wrong:
(3) Players refuse to acknowledge that the MMORPG genre is a sub-genre of the RPG genre, wherein there is an ongoing narrative that the player participates in but in no real way controls (cf. manipulate v. control), and complain about various mechanisms of the game which look like problems but are not problems (or are significantly smaller problems than they are being made out to be).
In respect to #3, the MMORPG genre needs to stop being shortened to 'MMO' because of the misunderstanding that has become standard. MMORPG stands for Massive(ly) Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, to use only the first three letters is to say that something is either (a) a Massive Multiplayer Online, which makes no sense, or (b) that the genre the game functions in has a multiplayer setting that is Massively Multiplayer and Online, which makes a hell of a lot of sense.
Anyone that continues to substitute 'MMO' for 'MMORPG' is willfully passing on that misunderstanding and only serving to entrench it further. It's a small wonder that so many MMORPG players reject story: they want an action MMO, not a MMORPG. There's nothing wrong with wanting an action MMO, but there is everything wrong with complaining of various RPG conventions and mechanics because one does not understand the genre. I'm sure that quite a few of the people complaining inapppropriately are doing so out of sheer ignorance, they're naive, and they can't be blamed overly much because gross laziness has set the standard and changed the meaning of an acronym-come-definition. That said, it's still a problem and, Mr. Fuller, you are part of the problem.
(1)TL:DR must be your way of saying that thinking hurts. Then again, this may explain why it looks like you responded to the post without using your brain.
(2) It's not about community, is it? You just have nothing better to do.
It is really simple and it is amazing how almsot every poster is posting the same few things and yet for like almost 7 years not a single developer has taken note.
The world and gameplay is utter snooze fests. Reguritating everything we have already done. Give me a dark evil mean looking world and monsters i am the hero i must save this world. Give me intersting well desgined dungeons screw all this big open forests they are boring. Get rid of pvp or build seperate pvp skills and areas. PVe and pvp are not compatable. You just nd up making every combat skill and item bland and boring to balance pvp and then the PVE is terrible. Give me wildly powerful pve skills now you can make wildly powerful interesting and tactical PVE encounters....
Yes I said it encounters....enough with the mindnombing boring solo tank spank content. give me big cool phat loot laiden dungeon and areas, give me tough, scarey make me think DESIGNED ENCOUNTERS and wildly powerful tool to allow me to succeed.
I do not need to kill little rats, snakes, or dogs, 1 by 1 with a copper dagger or a wand, I do not need to go on errand boy runs killing ten water bettles, and collecting 15 pig snouts.
Oh yeah also get smart, CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT, there is not reason you should not be adding 1-2 new content each month, design a proper engine to allow new content to be redily created, not cut and copy crap original new fresh fun diverse content. I want to exlpore, find treasure kill big nasty baddies that have all kinda crazy henchmen with a small team of players I want to see if i can overcome the odds,
I want to be challenged, THEN rewarded properly, I want to try to kill some uber con things and if i do i want 1/3 a level xp , I want to be scared to die so I goto play smart or suffer.
Can agree with both argument from original article, but " Level one means you are fighting goblins or imps, or something easy. Basically, you enter the game with the point of view that, you are a noob and can only fight things that suck as well. This method is fail numero uno for MMOs.". Actually, this is only way. Start killing rats or goblins. And learn this way. Or is author expecting to start dungeons after first login?
Reading the 3 reasons you think most recent mmo's fail makes me wonder if you even play mmo's.
Recent releases have bombed because:
1. They get pushed out the door in terrible shape and expect the consumer to pay while it gets brought up to minimal standards.
2. They get hyped to hell and back and then fail to deliver even a fraction of what they "promised".
3. Instead of being inspired by passion to make a buck they just get made to make a buck. This leads to uninspired,more of the same, bland mush.
oh my giddy aunt!!! where do you start the list from ?? you have sure opened a can of worms here.
i have a huge amount of greivances with modern mmo's
i think first of all is how they are classed and put into their diffrent genres, for example mmorpg,mmog,mmo,mmorts,mmofps.
then you have mmobroswer.
then youva free 2 play and subscriptions.
i would like to get started on subscriptions and stores.
while i dont mind either, im utterly in conflict with games that try both, so far i know of only one that i play thats startrek online. they have there c-store and they have the games subscription too and to top it off you have to buy the game aswell before you can even play it.
so in total you are paying for the same game 3 times the first payment is a single payment to aquire access. but the access is only dependent on your subscription plan, once it ends you cant play the game you paid for. in my case i paid 35 pounds for sto. and now they want a further 8.99 a month. ok thats fine i can stomache that and watch the game progress and maybe improve. at present the game isnt worth the money
but they didnt stop there, no no they have that rediculous c-store which they claimed would only be fluff items. what an uter lie.
there c-store has unique items with uniquye stats that you can aquire in game as they claim you would be able to. so it there for forces you in a round about way to spend yet even more money on a game that doesnt warrant the subscription in the first place.
thats my first problem with mmo's
my second -
companions/npc team mates.
it seems mmo's are takeing this road alot just lately. they are adding npc companions for players to use in their groups, i know this takes the mmo part away from the mmo and leaves just a single player expeirience. comapanions in mmo's are really really bad things. it is destroying the whole point of playing an mmo.
the idea of an mmo is to be in a community of players from all over the world and interact with each other and mingle and make new friends and socialise. comapanions remove this from the mmo games.
heres an example, m,y first mmo i played was guildwars. i started just after closed beta. about week after. in that game its highly instanced based which was ok as it was my first online experience with mmo's it had no companions and i utterly enjoyed the game because you could not complete it or progress unless you formed teams with oter players. it really was a massively multiplayer online game. you could not play the game and comeplete it unless you joined player teams. and the game was also fashioned towards team/guild warfare. that means you have to have teams of real people learning to work side by side as a team to overcome their opponents. it was fantastic. i really enjoyed the game.
but now they have companions, you can actually play the game from start to finish with out the help of a real person. its sad and it isnt an mmo. i know they had the bots in the first place but they was just npc's to fill spaces humand couldnt fill or wasnt available to fill.
but today you have the companions which you can equip and train and skill up and they are better than human players and they allow you to play guild wars like its a single player title.
companions are bad for mmo's and take a way the mmo part of the game meaning its just another single player game but online that you have to pay for.
third is the linear feel -
too many games are in the mind of copy paste antics for the missions and quest lines, there is no real inovation of imagination. its just the same quest/mission thats been edited to change out the conversaion and the creatures you have to kill.
there are 3 types of these quests. one is the collection quest where you have to collect items meet the goals. an other is the one where you kill a set number of bad guys to meet the goal and the last is the one where you have to either pass on messages or deliver items from one location to another. THEY ARE BOREING AND DULL
What makes me dissapointed in MMOs is that so many of them are focusing on the single player and not the group. It's supposed to be a massive MULTIPLAYER online game, so why keep all the focus on the individuals? I want it to be more focused on group efforts.
your sort of correct, but ifear you still miss some of the mroe improtant points of why mmo's and mmorpg's are not actually mmog's at all.
there is definately a misconception about them going on and its not due to lack of understanding but more rather lack of knowing.
most of the gamers today hail from consoles and single player titles. they are so used to playing rpg's like icewind dale, baldurs gate startrek bridge commander ,overlord , kotor and many many more games of the same genre. the problem their in lies with the sudden influx of noob mmog players missunderstanding what an mmog is. so when they log on to say oo eve-online for instance. i think we can both agree thats going to be a gameing culture shock for these kinds of players. they have never ever experienced anything like it in their entire gaming lives. that is unless ofcourse they played elite about 20 years ago. which thay havnt. the people that played elite are few and far between a dieing breed. these people used to dream of elite being an online massive multiplayer game. and thats precisely what eve is. its elite online and its bloody hardcore as far as other mmog's go.
the misconception is with modern gamers simply not knowing what an mmog is or supposed to be or where it derived from.
mmorpg's are not subsidaries of the single player rpg games at all. they came from the vr exeperience idea which cropped up about oo 20 years ago!! it was a bit more sci-fi back then.
i remember trying one of these vr thing sout as a kid. i had this huge helmet on and this dodgy looking suit with wires up and down the sleeves and legs and iw as stood in front of cameras whcih clocked my movement. in the head set it was wide screen and it was a simulation of handglideing. the idea was to place the pleyer in the world as literally as posisble sp th eplayer could feel like he/she was actually there!!!!
now having that stupid hat on and all those wires in that special suit standing in a studio sized arenas with cameras simply wasnt workable for a home entertainment system. it just took up too much space.
so what we have now is online games where the players have more control over what they are supposed be or do in these fantasy virtual reality worlds. players can be who they want to be be called what they want to be called and do anything their mind can imagine. well atleast thats what eve allows you to do!!
and that is the misconception thats is going around. people simply dont know what an mmog is supposed to be or was meant to be. and we are getting a tiny tiny tiny portion of it as a result.
game developers are rubbing their hands together because the effort is minuscule for the rewards they reap from their creations. which is why all games seem the same. they are copying each other because they know todays players havnt a clue what to expect from a true mmog. they are cahsing in on their lack of understanding. they are conning us lol short changing and providing shoddy goods!!!
and they do this by makeing it look nice!!!.
money for old rope
The main reason for epic fail in the industry (in my opinion) is the slash and burn approach many studios/publishers have today. Rather than making a product that they will invest in over the years they make something that they expect to sell quick initialy then die off within 8 months. By which time they have recouped the initial investment and made a tidy profit to put towards the next "great MMORPG".
If studios and publishers refuse to put a significant investment of time and money into an MMO after launch then they should not expect their customers to do the same.
Look at all the examples sitting on the MMORPG trash heap that were the meant to be the dogs bollocks just before launch, AoC, WAR, Vanguard, D&L, APB, Aion the list goes on and will get larger this year. Aslong as it's being run by bean counters that only think of diminishing returns over time the industry will remain the same.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"
CS Lewis
Are. You. Freaking. Serious.
Every poster is not posting the same few things. Take another look through this thread, but with your eyes wide open. People are calling for: more complex and challenging PvE content; a major focus on hardcore PvP; fewer restrictions and more freedom to try anything; gameplay that differs greatly from existing MMOs. These four requests are so incompatible that they are virtually at opposite corners. It is not possible to create a game that does all of these things.
For example, there's Dredphyre's post about player agency; he wants players to have much more control over how they develop their characters and what they can do with their abilities. This is incompatible with a request for complex and challenging PvE content; developers need to have a tight control over characters' power levels because if there is a creative combination of skills that makes the fight into a cakewalk, the content will be perceived as much too easy and boring. This is incompatible with a focus on PvP; if you allow players to develop characters however they want, all notions of balanced classes with built-in strengths and weaknesses gets completely thrown out the window. This is incompatible with wildly different gameplay, because if players are left to create their experience from scratch, they're going to fall back on the same tried-and-true PvE strats like tank-and-spank and kiting.
If Dredphyre's ideal game was made, 95% of you would point to it and say "Epic fail, boycott this company, this game is proof that they never listen to anyone." You all need to accept the fact that the overwhelming majority of MMO players would consider your dream MMO absolute trash. We are not all asking for the same thing.
I'm calling for a return to the original concept of MMO's. The first MMO's of the late 90's, early 2000. These are the games (Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online) that i played for YEARS, not weeks or months. Devs these days only want to make a quick buck and jump into the WOW bandwagon. They seems to think that if we make games like WOW it will succeed. Peoples are bored with these games. Just look at Rift ! It's a prime example of a game that's gonna endup like Warhammer Online. It's too similar to WOW. Why play a clone when you can play the original ?
Devs should look back at what made MMO's a success before WOW and come up with something difference for once. For me
Where Do MMOs Go Wrong?
Too many attempts at being a WOW clone.