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Why are there no seamless sandbox-ish MMORPG's anymore?
sidel
Member Posts: 16
This isn't a post about what you don't mind or what the majority of people want. I don't really care what most other people want. I know what is fun and what keeps people playing mmorpg's.
So why are there no seamless/semi-instanced open world sandboxish MMORPG's that are fantasy based? I'm talking Eve Online meets EQ meets World of Warcraft meets Shadowbane.
Google those titles if you don't know what they are.
Why haven't companies seen the success of Eve Online and followed suit? WoW is NOT the same game it was 10 years ago, it was a hardcore game back then, atleast the end game. Vanilla is what kept people playing and what paved the way for the 10 million subscribers. down to 9.6 mil now. Eve Online has risen to 500,000 subscribers up 100,000 subscribers from 2012.
So people like to sit and say there isn't a market for these types of MMO's yet, to the contrary, I find there are TONS of people interested. I'm not going to give a "back in the old days it was 5 miles to school up hill both ways" speech, but the panzy ass, easy mode, give out gear like candy shit has to go. These crappy zoned, instanced, theme-park, train-rail MMO's with invisi-barriers and that big mountain or hill to stop you from going off the beaten path. I'm getting tired, sick and tired, of these crap mmo's. People think because a game has awesome graphics now that its an amazing game.
MMO's today are nothing like they were 10-15 years ago when they were being released. People then had huge worlds you can run from one end of the world to the other with no load screens and a million different ways to get there. Epic raids, dungeons and content that when you accomplished something, it felt rewarding and you felt you had conquered something. I mean, for any vanilla players or BC players, was the first time you downed Ragnaros or Nefarian, strike that, Onyxia or Lucifron the same as when you downed Lich King? You'd be lying if you said it felt the same and you know it.
So what happen to the balls these companies use to have? They've catered to people complaining about not getting to engage in end-game content because they don't want to put in time and effort, instead they want to login for an hour or 2 a night and get their purps, raise their ilvls and go to sleep.
It's no longer about the social interactions or the adventure anymore.
When WoW released bg's, it killed world PVP for the most part. Not all of it, but most. LFR/LFD tool killed the world. Now all people do is sit in SW/ORG and q-up for dungeons. Instead of making a game challenging with quality content, they have went the Ford Motor route instead of the Toyota route. Toyota: Quality before quantity, Ford: quantity before quality.
So what does Blizzard do now? Pumps out shit content every year and ahalf that is so stupid easy my 2 year old niece could raid and be good at it. What the hell happened to these games? and why the hell has EVERY mmorpg that has come out since been the same cookie-cutter crap we see from everyone else. SWTOR, AION, AoC, CoH, GW2, and all the other fail shit MMO's that have come out since. Notice anything those mmo's have in common? Most of them? There isn't a single one that is seamless or open world. They are all instanced and zoned beyond belief. Do you really think SWTOR was a bad game because the classes sucked and the content sucked? Fuck no, it sucked because you had a load screen every 5 minutes from one place to another. Your own instancing of quests, i mean wtf? Aion failed for the same reasons, AOC failed because of the learning curve, bugs and the damn train-rail crap it made you do by following the same path. GW2 is such crap compared to Guild Wars 1, it's only Guild Wars by title only.
Why can the MMO developers not look at games like Eve Online and follow them? Why do they insist on copying what WoWis in its current state? They don't copy vanilla WoW, no they copy the same shit every other game company does, except they instance and zone everything and kill the world, then they add "battlegrounds" and destroy world pvp. If you're a care bear and can't deal with getting ganked or griefed, go the fuck home. You're damn right I want to kill lowbies and grief them, I then want your guild mates to come and destroy my ass for ganking you. Player policed servers are the best IMO.
Ask any Eve player here about the griefing and ganking that goes on in Eve...go complain in Eve about ganking. lol..
So why are there no MMO's like this? Why are there no awesome graphic, seamless, sandbox mmorpg's with theme park elements? SWTOR spent half a billion dollars in making that abortion of a game, and they couldnt even make a seamless world? what? $500 million dollars and SWTOR is what we got.
Thats sad, truly sad...
Comments
Age of Wushu is garbage and it isn't seamless. its instanced-zoned i call it.
and Archeage hasn't been released yet and the jury is still out on it.
Mortal Online and Dark Fall doesn't count. We all know those are stupid. Who the fuck wants to run around in a fantasy MMORPG in first person mode? wth?
Because people investing money into company's that make games want what wow has, mass amounts of money coming in.
how did wow do it? By doing what it did. So if you want the investors to cough up cash, you kind of have to stick to the same style with your own twist. Not to mention players want things handed to them, they don't want to grind for it, or spend hours camping it anymore.
its going to take an independent company to make a smash hit from a "sandbox" game in order to shift investors that direction.
then we can bitch about how we get cookie cutter sandbox games.
70 monk eq1
80 bruiser eq2
43 druid wow
Currently playing : rift
I'd have to agree with OP comments, last game I played in a sandbox style was Vanguard, why developers can see that people sign up for all the betas, play thru the content, get some loot get bored and leave is beyond me
TSW is beautiful graphical, but sitting in Agatha looking for dungeon grps with elitest requirements is pointless
Rift was relatively seamless, but just didn't feel big enough and instanced dungeons seemed not worth doing for anything other the "Accomplishments"
Classless systems too only encourage cookie cutter builds and eliteism. I have to say there is more merit in just have good classes.
What people want and what people need, are completely different.
Would I have LOVED epic loot handed out to me back in Vanilla? hell yea, but then eventually once everyone was equally geared, I'd have realized what a shit system that is.
Shenanigans on the entire string.
And this is why you guys dont have any games.
Even when you do get a sandbox it 'doesn't count' because you don't like it.
Sandboxes are out there, they exist, but in order for a game to be a sandbox it generally has to sacrifice in other areas. I.E. latency, graphics, even certain types of content. There's also certain mechanics that generally don't work well with sandbox-type games. Sandboxes, by their nature, are essentially blank slates. You can't have an epic blank slate, it needs to be built on.
If what you people truly want is a sandbox game, then you'll need to stop being so picky about every little thing. Hell minecraft looks like crap, but that doesn't stop it from being a good game. If you legitimately care about playing a sandbox mechanic, then play one and stop bitching that the ones that exist aren't catered specifically to you.
Yes, it sucks that the majority of gamers aren't as passionate as you guys about sandboxes, but that's the downside of being a niche market. There are pleanty of games / mechanics I'd love to see either make a comeback or be adopted into an MMO, but I'm not going to complain every time a designer makes a game without them.
Age Of Wushu is a very good mmo once you get your head round it. Then you have ArcheAge which is out in Korea, you can play there which many westerners are doing.
Both games are Hybrids.
If anything we have EQNext coming which is a AAA title and sandbox.
Quite a few people actually..
BTW Darkfall is not only first person, it also has 3rd person for ranged combat and normal walking around..
So them we have Mortal Online, Darkfall:Unholy Wars, Xsyon (recently got a really nice update). There are at least 5 or so Open world sandbox games that have recently been funded on kickstarter as well so expect at least one of those to actually be good.
We also have the repopulation coming this year, Everquest Next is going to be an open world sandbox game as well ,archeage should make it at the start of next year.. Hopefully more big publishers will realise we dont want any more wow clones and start making some better games..
Thinking about it this could not be a better time for people who love sandbox games.
Also @OP I am not sure why you keep mentioning eve when your talking about seamless open world sandbox MMOs.. eve uses zones and is not open world. each section of space is a separate zone, each space station is a separate zone, each mission you run is basically a separate zone..
I will be sincerely surprised if Next really comes out as a sandbox. I don't think those dudes know how to do sandboxes to be honest. EQ1 was only a sandbox because they hadn't figured out what a theme park was yet, and the game was too complicated to release instructions with, and with both of those things they got really, really lucky. EQ2, linear. As linear as it gets. Vanguard, again linear. Several lines of linear in each case but still, their reach exceeded their grasp.
Sandbox can not have levels. As long as their are levels to attain people will set their goals to attaining them and that will force the game in a linear direction. Add equipment that steps in power to that equation and the focus becomes even more narrow. I don't know if there was ever anything more annoying to the fun aspects of these games as the piece of shite powerleveller who decided that it was worthless to waste their time going after lower level gear, no matter how interesting that journey might be, in lieu of just getting the higher level stuff and racing towards the level of their incompetency.
In that guys defense though, back then they were charging us monthly and putting a lot of purposeful time wasters in the games. But still
Man I am all over the place tonight. (med check!) Oh wait! I don't take meds.
Guessing you forgot about SWG then.. I have a feeling you will be very surprised. After following the development of PS2 into a great game i know these guys have changed their attitude towards game design. Still we do have to wait and see.
Do you actually know what you are talking about?
if you think 2015 is soon, lol
Really lol, we are half way through 2013 already.
I think most sandbox fans dont want themepark featers in there game implemented most are immersive breakers and lame, like instance who in my view don't belong in sandbox.
I rather see more mmo's made in style of DayZ pure survival in open world ala skyrim-DayZ-Darkfall 1
EVE - 10 years for me today. Created my main 14. May 2003.
Some DO stick with them...
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How are ppl playing ArcheAge without a korean SSN?
I was talking about the open pvp and player run servers, the crafting, etc. i know its zoned...