Betting it is because...judging from your profile..being 46...it is because it allows instant gratification so you feel you have accomplished something in the limited time you have.
What has this got anythign to do with age? i am 32 and i believe MMOS are getting better not the other way around. GW2, TSW, AA..future looks gerat to me.
I'm simply saying there seems to be 2 types that enjoy the instant gratification, fast paced race to cap MMO's of today.
- Young people who started with WoW.
- Older players with limited time who don't mind the change to rat race MMO's to accomodate their busy schedules.
I am old school...and have limited time too....but I still would like to see an MMORPG that didn't allow me to get to cap to sit bored because I blinked. Just soem liek me that find accomplishment and gratification getting half a level and a quest or two done in a day...and then there are those that need more.
You are confusing the desire for a meaningful experience or gain in a smaller time window with a desire for instant gratification. Either that or you are intentionally using a belittling term which really isn't constructive.
IDK about you...but to me wanting a meaningful experience or gain in a smaller time frame in a genre that originally was meant for longer adventures and questing with a multitude of people....hence, what set it apart as a different genre from say...console gaming..which is what modern MMO's have evolved into for the most part...IS instant gratification. Especially when you can reach cap, see all the sites and have most of the best gear in a month or two.
'The Rise & Fall, and Rise again of the MMORPG genre'.
With themparkers and hybrid sandparkers alike have plenty of reason to think this genre is about to undergo a rebirth.
The fat lady 'aint singing just yet.
That may very well be the case but right now, at this moment, it is not. There has not been an innovative big budget MMORPG released since WoW and after that an endless stream of WoW like ThemeParks with SW:TOR being the latest one which is WoW+Bioware single player stories and voice acting.
GW 2 might be radically different and in some cases it seems to be but fundamentally it is yet another ThemePark. ArcheAge seems to be the only big budget MMORPG that really is trying something different but it is still far from release. The Secret World is another one but it is even farther even from being released and no real info has been released either.
So there is some hope but with SW:TOR replacing SWG, it is not looking good.
I am an Assistant Manager at a major retail store (nothing fancy but I do get paid 50k+ and being single that is plenty)
I work 48 hours a week every week.
I work 3 days on (12 hour shifts)
I get 3 days off.
I workout every single day using, P90x, P90x2, P90xplus and eat extremely healthy, do my own shopping and cooking. (Been like this for 2 years)
I have a Jeep Wrangler and once a week go up to different locations and go off roading, which leads to hiking and spend all day gone.
I still have enough time to have 3 level 50's in SWTOR and 1 Battlemaster. I am BORED. I used to play MMO's all the time like SWG. I wish there was a game out that I could not acomplish everything in one week of vacation.
-Waiting on Archeage, going to play GW2. Resubbing to Rift.
And no I don't want a fucking cookie, or anything like that.
IDK about you...but to me wanting a meaningful experience or gain in a smaller time frame in a genre that originally was meant for longer adventures and questing with a multitude of people....hence, what set it apart as a different genre from say...console gaming..which is what modern MMO's have evolved into for the most part...IS instant gratification. Especially when you can reach cap, see all the sites and have most of the best gear in a month or two.
With keywords such as "console gaming" the way you use it and "instant gratification" your argument cannot be taken seriously.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
You don't see massive leaps of evolution in other genres why would you expect it in this one?
People need to chill out and stop expecting MMOs to evolve into something entirely different than they are.
Maybe you guys shouldn't play mmo for thousands of hours a year?
MMOs turned out to be yet another video game genre but if you read interviews of Richard Garriot this was NOT the case. They were supposed to be radically different in the sense that you, the player, is NOT the center of the universe, You are one among many and you need to create your own story, with or against other people, and not be force fed with scripted content.
You don't see massive leaps of evolution in other genres why would you expect it in this one?
People need to chill out and stop expecting MMOs to evolve into something entirely different than they are.
Maybe you guys shouldn't play mmo for thousands of hours a year?
MMOs turned out to be yet another video game genre but if you read interviews of Richard Garriot this was NOT the case. They were supposed to be radically different in the sense that you, the player, is NOT the center of the universe, You are one among many and you need to create your own story, with or against other people, and not be force fed with scripted content.
So, the guy who creates the first MMO gets to decide the direction of the genre? He's the only one who knows what's "best" for the genre. As I recall, that was the last thing he did successfully, besides return from space in one piece.
If every game were a UO clone, the arguments on this site would still be the same.
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
You don't see massive leaps of evolution in other genres why would you expect it in this one?
People need to chill out and stop expecting MMOs to evolve into something entirely different than they are.
Maybe you guys shouldn't play mmo for thousands of hours a year?
MMOs turned out to be yet another video game genre but if you read interviews of Richard Garriot this was NOT the case. They were supposed to be radically different in the sense that you, the player, is NOT the center of the universe, You are one among many and you need to create your own story, with or against other people, and not be force fed with scripted content.
So, the guy who creates the first MMO gets to decide the direction of the genre? He's the only one who knows what's "best" for the genre. As I recall, that was the last thing he did successfully, besides return from space in one piece.
If every game were a UO clone, the arguments on this site would still be the same.
The people who created the genre, and this is not confined to Garriot, but also bartle and koster, and many many others, namely, huge nerds, designed MMOs to not be the same as other games. It was supposed to be a virtual world.
Then the mainstream colonized MMOs and made them into something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FROM MMOS.
So its disingenuous to refer to games like SWTOR as MMOs.
Hard Sci Fi is not a book about some kids flying in space and playing with adorable cartoon aliens. Calling something like that Hard Sci Fi is wrong. That is Sci Fi, just as SWTOR is a role playing game, nevertheless that is not HARD Sci Fi and SWTOR is NOT an MMORPG.
So, the guy who creates the first MMO gets to decide the direction of the genre? He's the only one who knows what's "best" for the genre. As I recall, that was the last thing he did successfully, besides return from space in one piece.
If every game were a UO clone, the arguments on this site would still be the same.
He didn't create the genre (technically the graphical MMORPG genre was created in 1991 by Neverwinter Nights on AOL, not to be confused with the BioWare remake of the same name)
But he did coin the term MMORPG, He created the term that defined the genre, but it wouldn't be fair to say that MMORPG's have changed but it would be fair to say they have changed into something else and are no longer MMORPGs..
It has enterd browsers, consoles and mobile devices.
It has expanded its audience to include a braoder range of ages.
It has seems a great reduction in the imbalance between male and female players among its ranks
It has spawned a broader MMO market, opening the doors for the MMOFPS, MMORTS, ActionARPG, MOBAs to gain wider acceptance.
In 10 years, the number of MMORPGs has risen from less than a dozen to several hundred.
It has brought millions of new players into online gaming.
It's hard to define the state of MMORPGs as decline.
He is saying the experience has declined, not the market.
That is subjective.
MY experience of MMO has improved, not declined.
Betting it is because...judging from your profile..being 46...it is because it allows instant gratification so you feel you have accomplished something in the limited time you have.
That would be accurate. Plus, i have OTHER hobbies than MMOs. I really do not want to play a game like work. I use to raid with a pretty advance group (done some hard mode raids in WOTLK) .. that is too much time commitment.
I really don't want to spend hours every week in wiping. There are MUCH better things to do.
WOW is MUCH better with LFR. I can group with some friends on a raid ANYTIME .. and even just with strangers if i want a raid fix.
I will ONLY pay & play games that fit MY schedule, my life, NOT the other way around.
That last line seems to resonate with a lot of people lately, and I'm very happy about that. I just wish more people would take that route, effectively speaking with their wallets, rather than the norm right now which is a stagnation-fueling mix of hope and compalcency.
There were never mmos who would chain you to your chair or make you pay cash for every hour not spent ingame.
Is this some strange variation to the young mother conundrum? Do you want to know how to make your toddler eat later so you can raid?
Why should i be HAPPY with the prospect that i potentially play with a growing number of ADULTS that cannot make simple meaningless decisions about their free time?
I mean, our main tank on firefighter had two girlfriends at once and a job, top that
I feel that the sand-box MMO crowd is a very small part of the overall market for games in general. While I really like the open world idea, I don’t like the PvP aspects of an truly open world.
I would love an open world with realistic skill sets, realistic methods to acquire skills all set in a realistic and consistent world. A world where getting wounded means spending weeks or maybe months recovering before you are able to bet back into the game itself, that alone would pretty much kill PvP on an individual basis.
All of that needs to be done with realistic graphics; I know I don’t want cartoons running around pretending to represent people.
IDK about you...but to me wanting a meaningful experience or gain in a smaller time frame in a genre that originally was meant for longer adventures and questing with a multitude of people....hence, what set it apart as a different genre from say...console gaming..which is what modern MMO's have evolved into for the most part...IS instant gratification. Especially when you can reach cap, see all the sites and have most of the best gear in a month or two.
With keywords such as "console gaming" the way you use it and "instant gratification" your argument cannot be taken seriously.
Whatever you say buddy.
Either you take offense for some self induced reason, or the truth hurts. But if you can't see through playing most modern MMO's (And/or not having played the early ones) that they are more like console games (Linear, instant rewards, stat boards, battlegrounds, void of community, solo heavy, make the player a hero instead of the player that makes something of themselves in a world, instance heavy (loading screens), etc etc...IDK what to tell you.
But to someone like myself that enjoyed an open world where I wasn't funneled on a pre-determined path and could go and do as I wished when I wished...and enjoyed soloing...but also grouping with others, sitting and having breaks to chat with others (med breaks) and make friends (Which even 10+ years later stay in contact with them)...the above described is the terms I said. They aren't meant to belittle people here.
And I played console games HEAVILY as well up until a year ago when I sold my XBox 360 because I was only using it to watch DvD movies.
Look a Skyrim. That, but with other player within the world...and without the loading screens for the dungeons, etc...would make a great MMO IMO. Sad that it isn't...but seems more like one than ones passing themselves off as MMO's today.
My conscious is clear ive so far not supported all those themeparks, i can't say that about majority here on forum who all play games like WoW its your own fault your the ones who are guilty of decline MMOs.
Year in year out i see people complain about WoW or similar games but they still play those games themselfs lol
I come here and have good time with all this viscious betrayal and misery that you themepark players coused haha.
Dont forget people there worse things in life then your prescious games.
Enjoy have fun or do something else help the weak in world instead waste your time with pixels on your screen:P
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77 CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now)) MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB PSU:Corsair AX1200i OS:Windows 10 64bit
IDK about you...but to me wanting a meaningful experience or gain in a smaller time frame in a genre that originally was meant for longer adventures and questing with a multitude of people....hence, what set it apart as a different genre from say...console gaming..which is what modern MMO's have evolved into for the most part...IS instant gratification. Especially when you can reach cap, see all the sites and have most of the best gear in a month or two.
A month or two is NOT instant. In video game term, that is an eternity. A singple player campaign of a FPS can often be done in 1-2 weeks.
Plus, in WHAT game you can level to cap *and* get the best gear in 1-2 months?
It took me from last Nov to now (3.5 months) to gear up my already level cap mage in WOW and I am one slot away from all the LFR and VP gear I can use. Now you say i am slow, but by the playerscore add-on (which has a database of roughly 300-400 toons), i am with the top 10% in terms of gear.
So i think it is reasonable (though NOT scientific) to say it takes 3-4 months to gear up for a tier of gear. That is pretty slow.
The people who created the genre, and this is not confined to Garriot, but also bartle and koster, and many many others, namely, huge nerds, designed MMOs to not be the same as other games. It was supposed to be a virtual world.
Then the mainstream colonized MMOs and made them into something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FROM MMOS.
So? The creators are all out of touch with today's games. Do you go back and ask the guy who created PONG how to develop modern video games?
Garriot has no recent success. His last attempt, Tabula Rasa, is a HUGE failure. And BTW, that was a themepark game. So he does not even practice what he preachers. What is Koster's latest success? None.
At least Bioware is selling 2M boxes for TOR, and that is more than these "creators" have ever seen in their games.
IDK about you...but to me wanting a meaningful experience or gain in a smaller time frame in a genre that originally was meant for longer adventures and questing with a multitude of people....hence, what set it apart as a different genre from say...console gaming..which is what modern MMO's have evolved into for the most part...IS instant gratification. Especially when you can reach cap, see all the sites and have most of the best gear in a month or two.
A month or two is NOT instant. In video game term, that is an eternity. A singple player campaign of a FPS can often be done in 1-2 weeks.
Plus, in WHAT game you can level to cap *and* get the best gear in 1-2 months?
It took me from last Nov to now (3.5 months) to gear up my already level cap mage in WOW and I am one slot away from all the LFR and VP gear I can use. Now you say i am slow, but by the playerscore add-on (which has a database of roughly 300-400 toons), i am with the top 10% in terms of gear.
So i think it is reasonable (though NOT scientific) to say it takes 3-4 months to gear up for a tier of gear. That is pretty slow.
Compared to the year it took me playing religiously in EQ....that is instant. And I STILL had plenty to do at cap than just sit in a capital city spamming for raid groups.
Either you take offense for some self induced reason, or the truth hurts. But if you can't see through playing most modern MMO's (And/or not having played the early ones) that they are more like console games (Linear, instant rewards, stat boards, battlegrounds, void of community, solo heavy, make the player a hero instead of the player that makes something of themselves in a world, instance heavy (loading screens), etc etc...IDK what to tell you.
But to someone like myself that enjoyed an open world where I wasn't funneled on a pre-determined path and could go and do as I wished when I wished...and enjoyed soloing...but also grouping with others, sitting and having breaks to chat with others (med breaks) and make friends (Which even 10+ years later stay in contact with them)...the above described is the terms I said. They aren't meant to belittle people here.
And I played console games HEAVILY as well up until a year ago when I sold my XBox 360 because I was only using it to watch DvD movies.
That's your argument? Attack me, belittle the views of millions of gamers and present your own as something universally better?
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
Not a bad read and I agree with most of your points. You put the blame on EQ lite I mean WoW which is the popular knee jerk response.
I think if we really want to try to grow beyond where we are know we need to try to correct the core problem. To me the core problem is mmos became really popular by mimicing single player rpgs and almost everyone has copied EQs success in various ways. You and your little party going from point a to b to c to d, kill a boss at e on to f, g, h, i, kill a boss at j.......
"habitant in a living, breathing world"
To me this is what EQ took away mmo genre. Gone were the days of being just a fisherman. Everyone had to be a adventurer.
They have fishing games you can get, or better yet, you can go out and fish for real-you know, Outside. I don't think most people want to dot hings in games that they can do in real life-at least people that play MMORPG's. Most people want to adventure-fight with sword/spells, fly through space, etc-fun type things that you can't do in real life. Unless maybe if you were an Astronaut. The problem is the retreading of ideas making the genre stagnant. Many are tired of playing the same games with new skins. And the few that do try new things usually are low-budget or bad company, so they fail and others are scared to try something new and possibly fail.
Oh, and you could fish in EQ.
I disagree, the ability to do things like a real world is what set UO apart from everything else. Single player RPGs are nothing more then retreading ideas over and over again and they are not hurting for paying customers. That is really the issue that I see. MMO developers and single player rpg developers are creating almost carbon copies of each other. MMOs should be different from single player rpgs and replacing the ai with da (dumb asses) isn't enough IMHO.
Just because you can do something doesn't mean that is who you are. I've had many characters in various mmos that could fish, my fisherman in UO was just that a fisherman.
The people who created the genre, and this is not confined to Garriot, but also bartle and koster, and many many others, namely, huge nerds, designed MMOs to not be the same as other games. It was supposed to be a virtual world.
Then the mainstream colonized MMOs and made them into something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FROM MMOS.
So? The creators are all out of touch with today's games. Do you go back and ask the guy who created PONG how to develop modern video games?
Garriot has no recent success. His last attempt, Tabula Rasa, is a HUGE failure. And BTW, that was a themepark game. So he does not even practice what he preachers. What is Koster's latest success? None.
At least Bioware is selling 2M boxes for TOR, and that is more than these "creators" have ever seen in their games.
No the Star Wars IP sold those boxes for Tor... BioWare as it used to be does not exist, just like Origin, Westwood, Bullfrog, Mythic etc.
And im pretty sure that Richard Garriot has seen more than 2M box sales for his games over the years...
Difficult to write a pithy reply to a topic that is actually rather complicated...much like saying that the USA used to be a greater country before all this entitlement and corruption started to permeate our political system. No such thing as a silver bullet that will fix it.
Video games are at their highest point in history and yet are still growing. People are playing not just on computers, but a myriad form of portable and non-portable electronics, with a very broad range of topics for single and even multi play format. The MMO genre was different in the beginning in that it took a world and put you in it with others to explore and build in, Ultima Online and Asheron's Call were fantastic games, so why did EQ and WoW so dominate the market? The logistics of console games.
Console gamers, which had a much broader audience than computer games eventually grew up and could afford computers to explore their hobby with. The thing is console games were "theme park" from the word go, and they had a very attractive profit model, product is produced, consumed, and a sequel is eagerly awaited. Replay value was limited except for making it more difficult or perhaps nostalgia, but it meant that the production company had a treadmill of production and profit cycles in play. Good studios became genuine product powerhouses and producing video games was every bit as profitable and respectable a profession as being a stock broker. ID's success is plenty example of that.
WoW's success is both a reaction to the console game and EQ style MMO space coming together, it scaled things down to more bite sized parts and has been doing that since its release in '04 and has done so remarkably well. Though competitors have tried to imitate its success, they fail largely due to thinking it’s an 'easy thing to do', when in fact it’s not. WoW's success isn't just its theme park formula; it’s the polish and evolution it has gone through.
New titles have to perform on people's system now, tolerance for buggy game play or ill-conceived character progression is low, people's attention span is short by necessity, and if they sense there isn't long term content they will wonder why they should bother just for a different shade of cherry ice cream. All the claims of a game being "different" is marketing hype, and if a corporation doesn't financially back the title with the resources to really have that polish and depth from the word go, they're dooming it on opening day. A perfect (IMHO) of this is DCUO. It had tremendous potential and was truly different, but in typical SOE short-sightedness, they didn’t commit to putting money into the title. All those pretty TV commercials couldn't change the fact that the game was bug ridden and plagued with shallow content.
A sandbox game in contrast is a more difficult model for a corporation to support, because you have to set up the structures of the world so that what a player does is the majority of the content. Consider this for a moment; a sandbox has to build a structure that accommodates not just the Good Samaritan, but the low life Cretan playing side by side, doing their thing, and everything in between. It has to code concrete rewards and consequences, and give the players of both extremes all the tools necessary to do what they want to do, up to and including shutting the other down. It’s a fact of life, people do not play nicely with each other; if they did there wouldn't be the need for law enforcement and a judicial system. Ultimately, that's what corporations look at, logistics of creating theme park or virtual world, and investment risks. A virtual world is a much greater investment risk than a theme park, players have limited ways to screw up theme park designs, and thus the risk profile is far more attractive. When you factor in the general conditioning the population has as part of their collective culture of console style play, the outcome is pretty much a given.
It’s not so much a decline of the MMO genre as it is an evolution based upon what's going on in the world around the corporations, consumers, and yes ultimately, money. The problem however, and this is where I agree with the gist of the original author's point is, corporations are dumbing these theme parks down too much. They're going for fast profits because they in general, disdainfully think their client base are idiots who will mindlessly consume whatever they churn out. Love or hate Blizzard, you have to give them credit where it’s due, they keep their finger on the pulse of their community, and they constantly evaluate the reception of their content, the trends it promotes, and what they can do to retain long term consumption. Most other corps don't do that, they adopt a model of flinging mud on the wall, if there's enough mud that will stick they produce it, if not they don't. Mud in this case being initial box sales to make a certain profit percentage.
So what's the solution? Basically committment to excellence by a production studio with the financial means to do so. An example of what I think would be a knockout success is, being a old school pen and paper gamer, I have often thought that if a corp with the chops and commitment to excell were to create the AD&D gameworld of the Forgotten Realms, code in AD&D's 3.5 edition rules and partition the world between parts that are themepark core areas (i.e. cities like Waterdeep, Baldur's Gate, etc and instanced 'core' dungeons like Undermountain, etc) and FFA frontier like zones, and commit to providing layer upon layer of content in the themepark areas and plenty of player given tools in the frontier zone, a robust "GM staff" to do random events with and a mega server structure, you'd have the WoW killer. The irony of that is the profit potential for such a structure is enormous, at least on par with what WoW yanks in every year, but you have to put a large sum of development money upfront and accept that there are no shortcuts and yes profit will have to be shared for the IP. No studio wants to take that chance nor put in that much effort prior to reaping returns. The mentality of cheap easy money permeates the world and thus mediocrity is its reward.
Even peace may be purchased at too high a price, and the only time you are completely safe is when you lie in the grave.
Look a Skyrim. That, but with other player within the world...and without the loading screens for the dungeons, etc...would make a great MMO IMO. Sad that it isn't...but seems more like one than ones passing themselves off as MMO's today.
Skyrim would never work as an MMO as stated by numerous posters in numerous other threads. You'd see that if you took a more practical approach to it. Even the lead designer had no intention of making an Elder Scrolls MMO IIRC.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
IDK about you...but to me wanting a meaningful experience or gain in a smaller time frame in a genre that originally was meant for longer adventures and questing with a multitude of people....hence, what set it apart as a different genre from say...console gaming..which is what modern MMO's have evolved into for the most part...IS instant gratification. Especially when you can reach cap, see all the sites and have most of the best gear in a month or two.
A month or two is NOT instant. In video game term, that is an eternity. A singple player campaign of a FPS can often be done in 1-2 weeks.
Plus, in WHAT game you can level to cap *and* get the best gear in 1-2 months?
It took me from last Nov to now (3.5 months) to gear up my already level cap mage in WOW and I am one slot away from all the LFR and VP gear I can use. Now you say i am slow, but by the playerscore add-on (which has a database of roughly 300-400 toons), i am with the top 10% in terms of gear.
So i think it is reasonable (though NOT scientific) to say it takes 3-4 months to gear up for a tier of gear. That is pretty slow.
Compared to the year it took me playing religiously in EQ....that is instant. And I STILL had plenty to do at cap than just sit in a capital city spamming for raid groups.
Not even mentioning that "best gear" in this argument often means "gear required to enter and beat highest content" or "highest tier gear", not BAiS, best available (to me) in slot, what narius probably meant.
To illustrate loosely, a ilevel789 crafted pvp ring will offer slightly less dps than a ilevel789 bis pve ring but still does not prevent one from completing said tier (probably even hardmodes), and is still top tier gear available as soon as the content patch hits.
Well technically out of all the players who play mmorpgs only a small number, relatively, are saying these things
And that is why they are garbage. Too many new school players that have never tried, or never got the chance to experience what made them great and a different genre from...well, any other gaming genre. Nor do they seem to care to.
Back in my day we had to walk to school in the snow, up hill both ways!
Now all these young whippersnapper with their Elvis and greaser hair cuts... why, these kids are ruining everything!
*yes, I'm refering to your argument as the - old-man who can't understand change "back in my day" argument
Well technically out of all the players who play mmorpgs only a small number, relatively, are saying these things
And that is why they are garbage. Too many new school players that have never tried, or never got the chance to experience what made them great and a different genre from...well, any other gaming genre. Nor do they seem to care to.
Back in my day we had to walk to school in the snow, up hill both ways!
Now all these young whippersnapper with their Elvis and greaser hair cuts... why, these kids are ruining everything!
*yes, I'm refering to your argument as the - old-man who can't understand change "back in my day" argument
Exactly.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
Look a Skyrim. That, but with other player within the world...and without the loading screens for the dungeons, etc...would make a great MMO IMO. Sad that it isn't...but seems more like one than ones passing themselves off as MMO's today.
Skyrim would never work as an MMO as stated by numerous posters in numerous other threads. You'd see that if you took a more practical approach to it. Even the lead designer had no intention of making an Elder Scrolls MMO IIRC.
Nothing ruins my sandbox faster than some dopey kid coming over, stealing my toys, and trying to add a moat to my sand castle. It doesn't need a moat kid, I would have built one if it needed it. Now stop stealing my shovel!
Sandbox games don't work for the majority of people because... well, most other people are idiots (from our perspective of course, we're probably idiots from their perspective too)
Comments
MMOs are just a video game genre.
No better or worse than any other gaming genre.
You don't see massive leaps of evolution in other genres why would you expect it in this one?
People need to chill out and stop expecting MMOs to evolve into something entirely different than they are.
Maybe you guys shouldn't play mmo for thousands of hours a year?
Playing: Nothing
Looking forward to: Nothing
IDK about you...but to me wanting a meaningful experience or gain in a smaller time frame in a genre that originally was meant for longer adventures and questing with a multitude of people....hence, what set it apart as a different genre from say...console gaming..which is what modern MMO's have evolved into for the most part...IS instant gratification. Especially when you can reach cap, see all the sites and have most of the best gear in a month or two.
That may very well be the case but right now, at this moment, it is not. There has not been an innovative big budget MMORPG released since WoW and after that an endless stream of WoW like ThemeParks with SW:TOR being the latest one which is WoW+Bioware single player stories and voice acting.
GW 2 might be radically different and in some cases it seems to be but fundamentally it is yet another ThemePark. ArcheAge seems to be the only big budget MMORPG that really is trying something different but it is still far from release. The Secret World is another one but it is even farther even from being released and no real info has been released either.
So there is some hope but with SW:TOR replacing SWG, it is not looking good.
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I work 3 days on (12 hour shifts)
I get 3 days off.
I workout every single day using, P90x, P90x2, P90xplus and eat extremely healthy, do my own shopping and cooking. (Been like this for 2 years)
I have a Jeep Wrangler and once a week go up to different locations and go off roading, which leads to hiking and spend all day gone.
I still have enough time to have 3 level 50's in SWTOR and 1 Battlemaster. I am BORED. I used to play MMO's all the time like SWG. I wish there was a game out that I could not acomplish everything in one week of vacation.
-Waiting on Archeage, going to play GW2. Resubbing to Rift.
And no I don't want a fucking cookie, or anything like that.
(-_-)
With keywords such as "console gaming" the way you use it and "instant gratification" your argument cannot be taken seriously.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
MMOs turned out to be yet another video game genre but if you read interviews of Richard Garriot this was NOT the case. They were supposed to be radically different in the sense that you, the player, is NOT the center of the universe, You are one among many and you need to create your own story, with or against other people, and not be force fed with scripted content.
My gaming blog
So, the guy who creates the first MMO gets to decide the direction of the genre? He's the only one who knows what's "best" for the genre. As I recall, that was the last thing he did successfully, besides return from space in one piece.
If every game were a UO clone, the arguments on this site would still be the same.
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
The people who created the genre, and this is not confined to Garriot, but also bartle and koster, and many many others, namely, huge nerds, designed MMOs to not be the same as other games. It was supposed to be a virtual world.
Then the mainstream colonized MMOs and made them into something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FROM MMOS.
So its disingenuous to refer to games like SWTOR as MMOs.
Hard Sci Fi is not a book about some kids flying in space and playing with adorable cartoon aliens. Calling something like that Hard Sci Fi is wrong. That is Sci Fi, just as SWTOR is a role playing game, nevertheless that is not HARD Sci Fi and SWTOR is NOT an MMORPG.
He didn't create the genre (technically the graphical MMORPG genre was created in 1991 by Neverwinter Nights on AOL, not to be confused with the BioWare remake of the same name)
But he did coin the term MMORPG, He created the term that defined the genre, but it wouldn't be fair to say that MMORPG's have changed but it would be fair to say they have changed into something else and are no longer MMORPGs..
There were never mmos who would chain you to your chair or make you pay cash for every hour not spent ingame.
Is this some strange variation to the young mother conundrum? Do you want to know how to make your toddler eat later so you can raid?
Why should i be HAPPY with the prospect that i potentially play with a growing number of ADULTS that cannot make simple meaningless decisions about their free time?
I mean, our main tank on firefighter had two girlfriends at once and a job, top that
Flame on!
I feel that the sand-box MMO crowd is a very small part of the overall market for games in general. While I really like the open world idea, I don’t like the PvP aspects of an truly open world.
I would love an open world with realistic skill sets, realistic methods to acquire skills all set in a realistic and consistent world. A world where getting wounded means spending weeks or maybe months recovering before you are able to bet back into the game itself, that alone would pretty much kill PvP on an individual basis.
All of that needs to be done with realistic graphics; I know I don’t want cartoons running around pretending to represent people.
Just my two cents.
Whatever you say buddy.
Either you take offense for some self induced reason, or the truth hurts. But if you can't see through playing most modern MMO's (And/or not having played the early ones) that they are more like console games (Linear, instant rewards, stat boards, battlegrounds, void of community, solo heavy, make the player a hero instead of the player that makes something of themselves in a world, instance heavy (loading screens), etc etc...IDK what to tell you.
But to someone like myself that enjoyed an open world where I wasn't funneled on a pre-determined path and could go and do as I wished when I wished...and enjoyed soloing...but also grouping with others, sitting and having breaks to chat with others (med breaks) and make friends (Which even 10+ years later stay in contact with them)...the above described is the terms I said. They aren't meant to belittle people here.
And I played console games HEAVILY as well up until a year ago when I sold my XBox 360 because I was only using it to watch DvD movies.
Look a Skyrim. That, but with other player within the world...and without the loading screens for the dungeons, etc...would make a great MMO IMO. Sad that it isn't...but seems more like one than ones passing themselves off as MMO's today.
My conscious is clear ive so far not supported all those themeparks, i can't say that about majority here on forum who all play games like WoW its your own fault your the ones who are guilty of decline MMOs.
Year in year out i see people complain about WoW or similar games but they still play those games themselfs lol
I come here and have good time with all this viscious betrayal and misery that you themepark players coused haha.
Dont forget people there worse things in life then your prescious games.
Enjoy have fun or do something else help the weak in world instead waste your time with pixels on your screen:P
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77
CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k
GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now))
MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB
PSU:Corsair AX1200i
OS:Windows 10 64bit
A month or two is NOT instant. In video game term, that is an eternity. A singple player campaign of a FPS can often be done in 1-2 weeks.
Plus, in WHAT game you can level to cap *and* get the best gear in 1-2 months?
It took me from last Nov to now (3.5 months) to gear up my already level cap mage in WOW and I am one slot away from all the LFR and VP gear I can use. Now you say i am slow, but by the playerscore add-on (which has a database of roughly 300-400 toons), i am with the top 10% in terms of gear.
So i think it is reasonable (though NOT scientific) to say it takes 3-4 months to gear up for a tier of gear. That is pretty slow.
So? The creators are all out of touch with today's games. Do you go back and ask the guy who created PONG how to develop modern video games?
Garriot has no recent success. His last attempt, Tabula Rasa, is a HUGE failure. And BTW, that was a themepark game. So he does not even practice what he preachers. What is Koster's latest success? None.
At least Bioware is selling 2M boxes for TOR, and that is more than these "creators" have ever seen in their games.
Compared to the year it took me playing religiously in EQ....that is instant. And I STILL had plenty to do at cap than just sit in a capital city spamming for raid groups.
That's your argument? Attack me, belittle the views of millions of gamers and present your own as something universally better?
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
I disagree, the ability to do things like a real world is what set UO apart from everything else. Single player RPGs are nothing more then retreading ideas over and over again and they are not hurting for paying customers. That is really the issue that I see. MMO developers and single player rpg developers are creating almost carbon copies of each other. MMOs should be different from single player rpgs and replacing the ai with da (dumb asses) isn't enough IMHO.
Just because you can do something doesn't mean that is who you are. I've had many characters in various mmos that could fish, my fisherman in UO was just that a fisherman.
No the Star Wars IP sold those boxes for Tor... BioWare as it used to be does not exist, just like Origin, Westwood, Bullfrog, Mythic etc.
And im pretty sure that Richard Garriot has seen more than 2M box sales for his games over the years...
Difficult to write a pithy reply to a topic that is actually rather complicated...much like saying that the USA used to be a greater country before all this entitlement and corruption started to permeate our political system. No such thing as a silver bullet that will fix it.
Video games are at their highest point in history and yet are still growing. People are playing not just on computers, but a myriad form of portable and non-portable electronics, with a very broad range of topics for single and even multi play format. The MMO genre was different in the beginning in that it took a world and put you in it with others to explore and build in, Ultima Online and Asheron's Call were fantastic games, so why did EQ and WoW so dominate the market? The logistics of console games.
Console gamers, which had a much broader audience than computer games eventually grew up and could afford computers to explore their hobby with. The thing is console games were "theme park" from the word go, and they had a very attractive profit model, product is produced, consumed, and a sequel is eagerly awaited. Replay value was limited except for making it more difficult or perhaps nostalgia, but it meant that the production company had a treadmill of production and profit cycles in play. Good studios became genuine product powerhouses and producing video games was every bit as profitable and respectable a profession as being a stock broker. ID's success is plenty example of that.
WoW's success is both a reaction to the console game and EQ style MMO space coming together, it scaled things down to more bite sized parts and has been doing that since its release in '04 and has done so remarkably well. Though competitors have tried to imitate its success, they fail largely due to thinking it’s an 'easy thing to do', when in fact it’s not. WoW's success isn't just its theme park formula; it’s the polish and evolution it has gone through.
New titles have to perform on people's system now, tolerance for buggy game play or ill-conceived character progression is low, people's attention span is short by necessity, and if they sense there isn't long term content they will wonder why they should bother just for a different shade of cherry ice cream. All the claims of a game being "different" is marketing hype, and if a corporation doesn't financially back the title with the resources to really have that polish and depth from the word go, they're dooming it on opening day. A perfect (IMHO) of this is DCUO. It had tremendous potential and was truly different, but in typical SOE short-sightedness, they didn’t commit to putting money into the title. All those pretty TV commercials couldn't change the fact that the game was bug ridden and plagued with shallow content.
A sandbox game in contrast is a more difficult model for a corporation to support, because you have to set up the structures of the world so that what a player does is the majority of the content. Consider this for a moment; a sandbox has to build a structure that accommodates not just the Good Samaritan, but the low life Cretan playing side by side, doing their thing, and everything in between. It has to code concrete rewards and consequences, and give the players of both extremes all the tools necessary to do what they want to do, up to and including shutting the other down. It’s a fact of life, people do not play nicely with each other; if they did there wouldn't be the need for law enforcement and a judicial system. Ultimately, that's what corporations look at, logistics of creating theme park or virtual world, and investment risks. A virtual world is a much greater investment risk than a theme park, players have limited ways to screw up theme park designs, and thus the risk profile is far more attractive. When you factor in the general conditioning the population has as part of their collective culture of console style play, the outcome is pretty much a given.
It’s not so much a decline of the MMO genre as it is an evolution based upon what's going on in the world around the corporations, consumers, and yes ultimately, money. The problem however, and this is where I agree with the gist of the original author's point is, corporations are dumbing these theme parks down too much. They're going for fast profits because they in general, disdainfully think their client base are idiots who will mindlessly consume whatever they churn out. Love or hate Blizzard, you have to give them credit where it’s due, they keep their finger on the pulse of their community, and they constantly evaluate the reception of their content, the trends it promotes, and what they can do to retain long term consumption. Most other corps don't do that, they adopt a model of flinging mud on the wall, if there's enough mud that will stick they produce it, if not they don't. Mud in this case being initial box sales to make a certain profit percentage.
So what's the solution? Basically committment to excellence by a production studio with the financial means to do so. An example of what I think would be a knockout success is, being a old school pen and paper gamer, I have often thought that if a corp with the chops and commitment to excell were to create the AD&D gameworld of the Forgotten Realms, code in AD&D's 3.5 edition rules and partition the world between parts that are themepark core areas (i.e. cities like Waterdeep, Baldur's Gate, etc and instanced 'core' dungeons like Undermountain, etc) and FFA frontier like zones, and commit to providing layer upon layer of content in the themepark areas and plenty of player given tools in the frontier zone, a robust "GM staff" to do random events with and a mega server structure, you'd have the WoW killer. The irony of that is the profit potential for such a structure is enormous, at least on par with what WoW yanks in every year, but you have to put a large sum of development money upfront and accept that there are no shortcuts and yes profit will have to be shared for the IP. No studio wants to take that chance nor put in that much effort prior to reaping returns. The mentality of cheap easy money permeates the world and thus mediocrity is its reward.
Even peace may be purchased at too high a price, and the only time you are completely safe is when you lie in the grave.
Skyrim would never work as an MMO as stated by numerous posters in numerous other threads. You'd see that if you took a more practical approach to it. Even the lead designer had no intention of making an Elder Scrolls MMO IIRC.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Not even mentioning that "best gear" in this argument often means "gear required to enter and beat highest content" or "highest tier gear", not BAiS, best available (to me) in slot, what narius probably meant.
To illustrate loosely, a ilevel789 crafted pvp ring will offer slightly less dps than a ilevel789 bis pve ring but still does not prevent one from completing said tier (probably even hardmodes), and is still top tier gear available as soon as the content patch hits.
Flame on!
Back in my day we had to walk to school in the snow, up hill both ways!
Now all these young whippersnapper with their Elvis and greaser hair cuts... why, these kids are ruining everything!
*yes, I'm refering to your argument as the - old-man who can't understand change "back in my day" argument
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Nothing ruins my sandbox faster than some dopey kid coming over, stealing my toys, and trying to add a moat to my sand castle. It doesn't need a moat kid, I would have built one if it needed it. Now stop stealing my shovel!
Sandbox games don't work for the majority of people because... well, most other people are idiots (from our perspective of course, we're probably idiots from their perspective too)