Half of the reason is because people are tired of the same thing over and over again. The new popular thing seems to be empty sandbox worlds where players get to make their own stories - Landmark, DayZ, Rust, 7DtD, H1Z1, and then there's the games that attempt to merge the old and the new.
The other half of the failure is actually a valid concern: The advanced versions of the old game recipe leave very little choice for the players. Compare your traditional themepark MMO to a game like dark souls. Combat requires very little skill, all items you receive are level gated and will be trash after you out-level them, zones expand vertically instead of horizontally, and the early zones are faceroll for endgame players, there are no hidden discoverable secrets, such as 'spend 100k at this vendor and he will get a new special item for sale', or finding a locked door in one place, and the key to unlock it will be in a completely different area, without an arrow pointing to it. There is no mystery in modern MMOs, everything is presented in a linear way and devs try very hard to avoid confusing the players. This also removes most of the learning curve from these games, and means most people will quit them within a month or 2 of reaching endgame.
There's quite a few of them. I'd love to trust you but data shows otherwise.
Everything ends eventually. Ending is not a sign of failure if the goals of the developers were met. Those goals are profit. If you expect things to go on forever, you have unrealistic expectations.
I have to agree with one of the above posters who said, "choices are great". I absolutely agree and support this idea, however people have to remember that there are people who don't like the same type of games that are out now.
I think the market needs to get a bit more niche so that developers can try and do new things or different combinations of systems. Personally I think they need to make some more options for the people, like myself, that are more group centric games. Games more like EQ which seems to be the one game everyone goes back too. I know that's why I play P1999 as my main MMO these days.
I also think that it wasn't that eq had more freedom or anything like that. It was that it didn't give you to many tools to know exactly what to do. Hell you didn't have maps till players created them. You had skills that you had to use to figure out where you were going, such as which direction you were facing or what location in the zone you were at. These things made the "game" feel like a real world, which was the original draw.
Then you also had the socialization which I think is the worst thing about MMO's these days, is that they have completely moved away from a social world. People have been posting, "EQ wasn't a very free game, all you did was sit and kill", however the main thing they forgot or didn't realize was that the entire time you were killing stuff, you were talking to your group and making friends and relationships with the people you were playing with. These relationships are typically the driving force that kept people playing the game, next to progression. The social aspect was a huge part of the game and in today's industry it is all but taken out..
Hell, the other part of the social aspect was for the most part you had to rely on people to get things done. Now most people of todays industry find this annoying, well yea it is a bit annoying however it also required a player to PLAY WELL WITH OTHERS WHETHER THEY LIKED THE PLAYER OR NOT, so when a player was a jerk, the name was remembered and that player had a harder time playing cause they were a jerk. The community literally was self-regulating, almost, and people couldn't be the jerks they are in today's games cause they wouldn't get anywhere....
I think some of the systems they replaced or "improved" weren't necessarily improved but made the games more solo centric. So to finish his rant, the more choices the better, but I think some of us are still waiting for a Dev to take a good hard look in the past and realize that some of the "annoying" aspects of those games weren't necessarily bad but were there to provide specific benefits, even if some of the player base didn't get it or like it.
Originally posted by Horusra Firefly...nough said about ending and not a failure.
So many people talk about this show.......I saw a blurb from it and was not impressed at all...guess I will have to try and find it and give it a shot. Although if I've barely heard about it, I don't think it was that successful, but MO
You were talking by choice. You did it because you wanted to. That exact same choice still exists in every singly modern game.
No one had taken that choice away from me. When I want to talk and be social I do with the thousand of other people on the game that want to.
People were just ad big jerks in eq as today. Evidenced by the implementing of a play nice policy after launch. They still managed to get groups and epics and everything else.
It did not selfregulate at all.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is bad.
There's quite a few of them. I'd love to trust you but data shows otherwise.
How many well-know, mass-market MMOs are on that list? How many poorly made F2P asian cash-grabs, pay-to-win games are on the list? Where is your data showing that these games failed because they did not cater to gamer demands and not because their were cheaply/badly made?
Yes, there are games that die because developers fail to read it's player base (SWG case in point), but some fail because they have a great idea that appeals to a certain gamer type but are poorly executed (Vanguard case in point).
Also illustrates what a poor grasp most people have on data, statistics and root cause analysis.
A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true...
Originally posted by Horusra Firefly...nough said about ending and not a failure.
Except it was by every demonstrable metric. Having a tiny group of fanatical fans is not success.
Correct but was that because the show was poorly made/executed or was it because the studio didn't support it and did everything possible for it to fail (like showing the episodes in the wrong order). Also remember that by that standard, the original Star Trek was a complete failure (cancelled after 3 seasons of poor ratings) yet would we call that franchise a failure?
A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true...
There's quite a few of them. I'd love to trust you but data shows otherwise.
How many well-know, mass-market MMOs are on that list? How many poorly made F2P asian cash-grabs, pay-to-win games are on the list? Where is your data showing that these games failed because they did not cater to gamer demands and not because their were cheaply/badly made?
Yes, there are games that die because developers fail to read it's player base (SWG case in point), but some fail because they have a great idea that appeals to a certain gamer type but are poorly executed (Vanguard case in point).
Also illustrates what a poor grasp most people have on data, statistics and root cause analysis.
I am familiar with some of the games in that list, and they were very sandbox style games that allowed or were going to allow a great deal of player freedom and ability to make changes to the world.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
There's quite a few of them. I'd love to trust you but data shows otherwise.
How many well-know, mass-market MMOs are on that list? How many poorly made F2P asian cash-grabs, pay-to-win games are on the list? Where is your data showing that these games failed because they did not cater to gamer demands and not because their were cheaply/badly made?
Yes, there are games that die because developers fail to read it's player base (SWG case in point), but some fail because they have a great idea that appeals to a certain gamer type but are poorly executed (Vanguard case in point).
Also illustrates what a poor grasp most people have on data, statistics and root cause analysis.
I am familiar with some of the games in that list, and they were very sandbox style games that allowed or were going to allow a great deal of player freedom and ability to make changes to the world.
Where they well made though? How was the actual execution? You can't blindly say freedom and sandbox = success and not mention the actual execution. Case in point, Mortal Online. On paper this game should have been a huge hit and what the sandbox crowd has been wanting all this years. The problem? Well just go to the forums and see for yourself...
Again, no one is stating no game had failed due to a dev misreading the target player base. All I am saying it is ridiculous to say all MMO are failures because they don't cater to a particular playstyle like some one here seem to constantly preach. Real life is rarely so absolute or easy...
A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true...
I had an idea of a game that was a virtual world, where every player had the chance to do anything they wanted to do. I played runescape and everquest and I loved it... the freedom to do anything, to get stronger and try to see new areas and explore new things, are what really drew me in and made me want to play. The worlds were dangerous also, if you made mistakes you could die and it sort of felt like the world didn't care about your existence.
You see, the thing is, there are a LOT of playerswho don't share your ideas on what an mmo should be and who would never play the game you describe.
That is why games are where they are now. Because the majority of players seem to want "a game". One where they can spend some time and then move on to the next "game".
Not a virtual world, not a virtual "home".
That is why they "fail" (if they can be said to truly fail. Quite frankly, if a game stays in business then that seems like a success to me). Because players don't want to stay in these games and want to move on.
Heck, there are a plethora of players on this site who approach games like this.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
Kids no longer need to spend their time on a few things or find ways to spend their free time. They are always busy with new entertainment coming out or commitments in real life. No longer do parents let kids rule themselves (even if kids may think they rule themselves). When I was young parents worked and left you home. You policed yourself and did what you wanted to do. Now parents fill their kids days up with a lot of different tasks. This is not worse, but all of this entertainment, technology, and responsibility has led to a very different form of mass appeal entertainment that has all but destroyed the concept of having people dedicate their time to something like a fantasy world heavily.
This is something I fight for with my kids. My daycare people get really confused when I say "no, let them be bored." I love seeing what their imaginations create. It's also a reason why I love letting them play things like Minecraft (in creative mode) where they can explore and experiment.
It's interesting though to see what they come up with when they're given complete freedom inside a world. Kids never have a problem with a blank piece of paper, but at the same time putting them inside a defined environment like Minecraft means amazing experimentation. I guess I always hope it makes them consider alternate application of real-world objects and rules.
I know we're all a little past the age where MMOs could be considered character-developing tools, but I can see the same mindset a lot in the way I play. I love games that let me take advantage of that.
I believe Minecraft is one of the few games these days that lets kids play and create. It's also one of the few games that seems to keep kids playing for a long time.
I don't think you need a lot of tools necessarily to experience this. I believe you just need a game where you aren't directed down a certain path and told this is the right way to do something. You just go, experiment, and see what happens.
I had an idea of a game that was a virtual world, where every player had the chance to do anything they wanted to do. I played runescape and everquest and I loved it... the freedom to do anything, to get stronger and try to see new areas and explore new things, are what really drew me in and made me want to play. The worlds were dangerous also, if you made mistakes you could die and it sort of felt like the world didn't care about your existence.
You see, the thing is, there are a LOT of playerswho don't share your ideas on what an mmo should be and who would never play the game you describe.
That is why games are where they are now. Because the majority of players seem to want "a game". One where they can spend some time and then move on to the next "game".
Not a virtual world, not a virtual "home".
That is why they "fail" (if they can be said to truly fail. Quite frankly, if a game stays in business then that seems like a success to me). Because players don't want to stay in these games and want to move on.
Heck, there are a plethora of players on this site who approach games like this.
I would say that if it weren't for the nerdy and fanatical players of the past that we wouldn't see the mass market MMOs of today. It was the most nerdy and fanatical ones that got into creating games and eventually creating MMOs. I think a lot of those people are now being filtered out or controlled by corporations. The big thing these days is how to design a game to maximize profit. In the beginning of MMOs it was wow maybe we can bring some of these awesome worlds that we love to real life and live in them! It's a very different mentality by the creators of the games.
Comments
Half of the reason is because people are tired of the same thing over and over again. The new popular thing seems to be empty sandbox worlds where players get to make their own stories - Landmark, DayZ, Rust, 7DtD, H1Z1, and then there's the games that attempt to merge the old and the new.
The other half of the failure is actually a valid concern: The advanced versions of the old game recipe leave very little choice for the players. Compare your traditional themepark MMO to a game like dark souls. Combat requires very little skill, all items you receive are level gated and will be trash after you out-level them, zones expand vertically instead of horizontally, and the early zones are faceroll for endgame players, there are no hidden discoverable secrets, such as 'spend 100k at this vendor and he will get a new special item for sale', or finding a locked door in one place, and the key to unlock it will be in a completely different area, without an arrow pointing to it. There is no mystery in modern MMOs, everything is presented in a linear way and devs try very hard to avoid confusing the players. This also removes most of the learning curve from these games, and means most people will quit them within a month or 2 of reaching endgame.
Nope, you are misplacing the blame.
The blame is yours.
You keep buying the crap.
When you stop buying the crap, they will stop making the crap.
Supply reacts to demand.
Yep...
What is true is true
It looks like interdependency, the key is to trick players into doing what they want but also depending on each other at the same time
Any mmo worth its salt should be like a good prostitute when it comes to its game world- One hell of a faker, and a damn good shaker!
Everything ends eventually. Ending is not a sign of failure if the goals of the developers were met. Those goals are profit. If you expect things to go on forever, you have unrealistic expectations.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
Except it was by every demonstrable metric. Having a tiny group of fanatical fans is not success.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
I have to agree with one of the above posters who said, "choices are great". I absolutely agree and support this idea, however people have to remember that there are people who don't like the same type of games that are out now.
I think the market needs to get a bit more niche so that developers can try and do new things or different combinations of systems. Personally I think they need to make some more options for the people, like myself, that are more group centric games. Games more like EQ which seems to be the one game everyone goes back too. I know that's why I play P1999 as my main MMO these days.
I also think that it wasn't that eq had more freedom or anything like that. It was that it didn't give you to many tools to know exactly what to do. Hell you didn't have maps till players created them. You had skills that you had to use to figure out where you were going, such as which direction you were facing or what location in the zone you were at. These things made the "game" feel like a real world, which was the original draw.
Then you also had the socialization which I think is the worst thing about MMO's these days, is that they have completely moved away from a social world. People have been posting, "EQ wasn't a very free game, all you did was sit and kill", however the main thing they forgot or didn't realize was that the entire time you were killing stuff, you were talking to your group and making friends and relationships with the people you were playing with. These relationships are typically the driving force that kept people playing the game, next to progression. The social aspect was a huge part of the game and in today's industry it is all but taken out..
Hell, the other part of the social aspect was for the most part you had to rely on people to get things done. Now most people of todays industry find this annoying, well yea it is a bit annoying however it also required a player to PLAY WELL WITH OTHERS WHETHER THEY LIKED THE PLAYER OR NOT, so when a player was a jerk, the name was remembered and that player had a harder time playing cause they were a jerk. The community literally was self-regulating, almost, and people couldn't be the jerks they are in today's games cause they wouldn't get anywhere....
I think some of the systems they replaced or "improved" weren't necessarily improved but made the games more solo centric. So to finish his rant, the more choices the better, but I think some of us are still waiting for a Dev to take a good hard look in the past and realize that some of the "annoying" aspects of those games weren't necessarily bad but were there to provide specific benefits, even if some of the player base didn't get it or like it.
So many people talk about this show.......I saw a blurb from it and was not impressed at all...guess I will have to try and find it and give it a shot. Although if I've barely heard about it, I don't think it was that successful, but MO
No one had taken that choice away from me. When I want to talk and be social I do with the thousand of other people on the game that want to.
People were just ad big jerks in eq as today. Evidenced by the implementing of a play nice policy after launch. They still managed to get groups and epics and everything else.
It did not selfregulate at all.
How many well-know, mass-market MMOs are on that list? How many poorly made F2P asian cash-grabs, pay-to-win games are on the list? Where is your data showing that these games failed because they did not cater to gamer demands and not because their were cheaply/badly made?
Yes, there are games that die because developers fail to read it's player base (SWG case in point), but some fail because they have a great idea that appeals to a certain gamer type but are poorly executed (Vanguard case in point).
Also illustrates what a poor grasp most people have on data, statistics and root cause analysis.
A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true...
Correct but was that because the show was poorly made/executed or was it because the studio didn't support it and did everything possible for it to fail (like showing the episodes in the wrong order). Also remember that by that standard, the original Star Trek was a complete failure (cancelled after 3 seasons of poor ratings) yet would we call that franchise a failure?
A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true...
Once you get to it, you see that what is being made are single player games that are played on-line.
Illusions of MMORPG's (since they change the definition of what a MMORPG is as they go)
Things cost so much to make now, that it is the only way to get funding. Follow along, trying to be everything to everyone,
What you see is proof of that. The games are treated just like single player games by the vast majority.
They buy it play it for maybe the "free" month, and then are done and waiting on next game.
Gamers are being trained to do this so hoping for a change is just that, hope. Not likely to change any time soon.
Before you start denying...just think about how many games each of you have "played" You are pretty well trained by now as well
I am familiar with some of the games in that list, and they were very sandbox style games that allowed or were going to allow a great deal of player freedom and ability to make changes to the world.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Firefly showed my wife that science fiction didn't have to be stupid. That's a success in my book.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Where they well made though? How was the actual execution? You can't blindly say freedom and sandbox = success and not mention the actual execution. Case in point, Mortal Online. On paper this game should have been a huge hit and what the sandbox crowd has been wanting all this years. The problem? Well just go to the forums and see for yourself...
Again, no one is stating no game had failed due to a dev misreading the target player base. All I am saying it is ridiculous to say all MMO are failures because they don't cater to a particular playstyle like some one here seem to constantly preach. Real life is rarely so absolute or easy...
A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true...
You see, the thing is, there are a LOT of playerswho don't share your ideas on what an mmo should be and who would never play the game you describe.
That is why games are where they are now. Because the majority of players seem to want "a game". One where they can spend some time and then move on to the next "game".
Not a virtual world, not a virtual "home".
That is why they "fail" (if they can be said to truly fail. Quite frankly, if a game stays in business then that seems like a success to me). Because players don't want to stay in these games and want to move on.
Heck, there are a plethora of players on this site who approach games like this.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
I believe Minecraft is one of the few games these days that lets kids play and create. It's also one of the few games that seems to keep kids playing for a long time.
I don't think you need a lot of tools necessarily to experience this. I believe you just need a game where you aren't directed down a certain path and told this is the right way to do something. You just go, experiment, and see what happens.
I would say that if it weren't for the nerdy and fanatical players of the past that we wouldn't see the mass market MMOs of today. It was the most nerdy and fanatical ones that got into creating games and eventually creating MMOs. I think a lot of those people are now being filtered out or controlled by corporations. The big thing these days is how to design a game to maximize profit. In the beginning of MMOs it was wow maybe we can bring some of these awesome worlds that we love to real life and live in them! It's a very different mentality by the creators of the games.