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"It's not that our games aren't fun, it's that X and Y aren't viable in the current market."
sludgebeard
Member RarePosts: 788
How many times have we seen developers spouting this template?
"Our games are fun", they say. "We did internal testing and everyone loved it, unfortunately the market just doesn't have a place for a game with...."
Que the list!
- Sandbox Elements
- FFA PVP
- Harsh Death penalties
- An Original IP
- Raiding (Wildstar)
I emphasized that last one because what did people say when Wildstar flopped - "No one wants to raid anymore".
But what were people most excited about in Wildstar? Raiding!
And the crazy thing is, Wildstar did a good job of raiding, it was engaging, difficult, and stayed true to their goals. Except you know what ruins that? The core game isn't actually fun.
Honestly I've never been more bored with a combat system that Wildstar, and it's one of the main things an MMO needs to get right to stay consistent to players.
And Wildstar isn't the only game, most new MMOs just do not have good combat and for that matter good core mechanics that make a game "fun". Minimalist UI's are great at attracting new players but is that always the right answer to make thing a "fun" game?
In an MMO especially, you need a bit more on the screen or else it gets boring really fast. It doesn't need to be vanilla WoW with 18 hot bars on screen at once, but a little complexity isn't going to shatter your core market.
MMO gamers and gamers in general aren't not as fragile or as timid as companies make them out to be. We don't need a simpler game 98% of the time, in fact we need just the opposite.
If developers dropped these negative development ideas of minimilzing everyone core system, the game would have the chance to grow and to be fun. A game doesn't need to have complete player run content, but when the rules of an MMO are too rigid (like any game) and loses the fun value and blame gets put on something else entirely.
Companies would rather blame their one "out-there"'idea or feature as the reason for a games demise, and in majority the cases it's the opposite. The core game just isn't fun, there's not enough meat there to get a full meal.
I for one would love to see game developers take responsibility for there failures, rather than blaming the market or a games original features. What do you all think? Could developers learn a bit of humility and take responsibility for their games failings? Or is it truely the Market which dictates a games success?
Comments
Developing one great game is one thing, managing it, keeping it secure is another. I know not few but a lot of great products that today if reborn and executed properly I would be playing them. Star Wars Galaxies and Ultima Online are best examples, but greed, inexperience and so forth is the price we all have to pay and why today we have what we have.
World of Warcraft has also been through it's holy grail in it's first few years, but far from it now. Too many great games delivered out there that simply lost their shine due to mismanagement. It's sad reality we all have to live in.
I think it's a bit of both.
Here's the main problem though. Developers are making the game and are attempting to promote it. They allow alpha/beta access and they also do research and try to get what the community in general wants. I'm sure Carbine went out and saw what other developers have done and wanted to incorporate experiences with their own flavor. Unfortunately, very vocal minorities can and do influence development.
Carbine wanted to bring back 40 man raiding and bring back a level of difficulty to the mmo genre. They also saw the more or less positive reception of GW2 and most likely felt that more action oriented combat with a minimalist UI was the wave of the future. Both influences could be considered to come from indirect and some direct feedback from the community as a whole. Carbine made a gamble and lost.
40 man raiding in an instanced environment should have never been attempted. If the massive population of WoW couldn't readily support 40 man raiding, and 40 mans were killed off with the first expansion during WoW's growth period, I'm not sure why Carbine could think that their game could support it. Sure you might have some bleeding edge groups who can get together to do it, but to make content exclusively for the bleeding edge is asking for failure in this day and age.
Wildstar's combat is also not even remotely better than GW2. The system feels very clunky and the animations are mostly horrible. There's also entirely too much ground targeting within the game. ANet made their combat system well, and it works well for the way the game is played. Carbine did not do a good job developing their action combat and probably would've been more successful with a hidden dice roll, turn based system like most mmos.
The community, in general, is responsible for constantly sending out mixed messages to developers. You will have one group scream and yell for X features and as soon as they are developed, those same people will find other flaws within the game and not play. MMO fans have also seemingly lost any and all patience with games in general, which is understandable considering the heap of crap we've been served.
Developers though are responsible for attempting to make games to cater to all groups, which doesn't work. WoW does a pretty ok job of it, but WoW is an outlier and not a norm. Developers need to pin down exactly what they want their game to do and then develop the crap out of it. We're starting to see indie developers do this, but it'll take awhile for the next batch of games to come out.
Honestly, if I was a developer who wanted to make an mmo that was a virtual world, I'd ditch the mmo part. I would concentrate on great single player and multiplayer experiences and then sell server hosting services along side of developing the game. I don't feel virtual worlds can exist as true mmos anymore, there's too many constraints in general. Allow people to run their own servers with their own rulesets and give them some small ability to create content.
You forgot about item decay.
It's 2015 and what is item decay?
You know what really made MMOs great? They were virtual worlds. A place you WANTED to be. The endgame wasn't THAT important. The combat was utter shit. The grind was fucking real. But the world that was created was amazing. It was somewhere you and your friends who you either went in with, or met while out and about, couldn't wait to login to.
Everyone is always so focused on features features features. But no amount of features will make an MMORPG fun. Convenience and quality of life improvements will only get a game so far. But eventually the novelty of party finders, and easy questing will get old. Because of all the focus on mashing a bunch of features into a game, the world of the game takes a backseat. We get small, instanced, bland, and quite frankly uninspired "zones" to quest through in a linear fashion.
Everything has become a guided tour with features galore to rush to max level and become a loot whore.
That is what developer's don't get anymore. It's not all on the Dev's though. We as players have come to expect all these features. All we ever talk about is what features we want to see when we talk about MMORPGs. "We want a sandbox/themepark/pvp/pve/ blah blah blah" How about we ask for what made this genre so amazing in the first place. Create a world. Create amazing lore than will actually captivate our imaginations. Make vast continents for us to explore. Fill in the features where they fit within that world.
Let's worry about leveling pace, pvp, raids, etc... after a truly open world has been created.
Lets pretend some random subjective opinion is fact. Then lets form some more subjective opinions based on that "fact". Now we have a case. Next, apply this case to a sweeping generalization and somehow form it into a question.
yay internet forums.
QFT - that's some of the realest shit I ever read on this site.
Most of the comments I have read about Wildstar from players/guilds that spent a lot of time all stated that raiding was broken and there was no fix in the near future, which led them to leaving the game.
I don't think I've ever seen an MMO dev say that. Can you link to some examples?
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Bottom line is the publishers' lack of respect towards consumers' intelligence. This explains why we don't have cool features in our games, they consider that we are so dumb and resourceless that we need to have everything in pellet format, so we don't choke. Depressingly enough, many players validate this, very especially with regard to mainstream products.
As one famous writer put it: No american business man has ruined himself for understimating people's intelligence.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
Suits become suits because they're not smart enough to become scientists.
Stupid suits assume everyone else is stupid because Dunning-Kreuger.
Game fails, suit gets fired by a higher suit and replaced by another suit. Nothing changes.
Last I checked, video games are an entertainment product. If it entertains, that seems to be good enough for most people.
I watched 'The Fast and the Furious 7' which is a summer pop-corn movie and thought I got my money's worth.
Not sure where this 'Grrr!! Mainstream!' thought is coming from.
Don't you grow out of the 'Lets hate what is popular!' after high school?
It shows what PvP games are really all about, and no, it's not about more realism and immersion. It's about cowards hiding behind a screen to they can bully other defenseless players without any risk of direct retaliation like there would be if they acted like asshats in "real life". -Jean-Luc_Picard
Life itself is a game. So why shouldn't your game be ruined? - justmemyselfandi
STOP thinking mmorpgs needs millions of players to be a success, they dont and they are making money, a living.
I play those openworld sandbox full loot open pvp mmorpgs and I love playing them, I can play them, I have players around me ingame to play it with and the devs are able to keep creating content and comminicate with their community = successfull game.
I prefer having devs doing what they love and being able to keep doing it as a job than the companies trowing millions back and forth spouting out crap, your sense of a success or a failure is a failure by itself as is with most of the community here.
Straw man argument followed by personal attack. Nice...
When I was a child, some dudes at my village considered that squeezing tadpoles was a valid form of entertainment. I thought, and still think, that it was stupid, boring and rather cruel.
In another order of things, some people consider that following a gps and being assisted and hand-holded in everything, with no sense of risk/reward, almost no interaction with the virtual world or the other players, no sense of strategy or politics, no player driven narratives, very poor functionality, etc is the pinnacle of MMORPG gaming. For me, it's more an interactive movie than proper social RPG gaming and, consequently, boring.
What I trying to say is that entertainment doesn't imply silly. I'm not against mainstream products per se, but experience's taught me that in the videogame sector mainstream MMORPGs tend to try to attrack as many players as possible, and that includes a retarded hillbilly that enjoys squeezing tadpoles.
I'm not a particularly intelligent guy, I assure you. But the point is that I wouldn't like to be in the same gaming arena as the retarded hillbilly for the same reasons I don't like to have children in my guilds or in my online games: Because we play in different leagues, and what they consider entertaining, I think it's a bore.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
Does this read like a troll post?
Not once did I say anything I talked about was "Fact", this is simply my interpretation of how MMO developers seem to misconstrue why their games suck, blaming everything but the game itself.
Again, Im saying this is a "Template", obviously no developer would outright say "Our game isnt fun", but they will instead go, "F2P was our only option because "X" just doesnt work out".
Just to reiterate because apparently people thinking im stating "Facts", Im not. Im stating my opinion, and I am very confident in my opinion.
From the first line forward in you op, I don't see any examples of evidence that any of it actually occurs. Sure, if like to discuss MMOs with you but that's really not what's happening here from the start.
You still haven't answered the question. I'm curious where you feel developers are taking that stance.
Can you link to examples of where you think you see this happening?
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I was about to elaborate on this, writing the usual stuff about how themeparks are not worlds, but after a few sentences I decided I had nothing important to add..
^ This is as straight and true as it comes ^
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
Originally posted by Dr_Shivinski
+ over 9000
We've gotten so used to conveniences and never really thought about how it effects the overall experience.
People have numerous times commented about a game calling it a "lobby game, not an mmo" when let's be honest...they ALL are compared to before.
You know what damn near every mmo's endgame boils down to? Waiting in a queue. How is that not a lobby game if you sit in one spot and wait to be ushered into an instance that only exists in that instance, hate to tell you but that is a lobby game. This is why I am cautiously optimistic about games like EQN and Pantheon. They most likely won't deliver, but I'd rather be optimistic than to just give up entirely since I love this genre of games so much.
Agree with the agreement. Actually, I feel like developer accountability is at an all-time high. Some may get hung out to dry or nailed to the cross, but people will demand accountability, and with how transparent the development process is coming, there's very little magic left. Won't be long before the community is telling the developers which line their bug is on.
Crazkanuk
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Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
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Yes, i thought about how conveniences affect the overall experiences ..... conveniences make the experiences way better for me. I don't have to chat with anyone if i don't want to. I don't have to waste a min and can jump into the action.
The play session is now short enough so i can do a dungeon here and there if i want to.
And yes, they all are lobby games ... to my delight. And for those who are not ... I don't have to waste a second on them.
One of the most popular WoW Private servers has 6000+ concurrent players, the trick is that it is the most accurate and functional blizz-like vanilla server in existence.
Wildstar flopped because it has terribly boring combat, with an extremely misguided hold your hand approach to the leveling process that leaves players feeling as if they're simply preparing to have fun. Top that with a gaping lack of diverse playstyle and you realize that most of your match-ups will be mirror matches.
I bet it is just the boring combat.
All action RPGs have simple leveling process going back to the first Diablo .... many games are not about anything but fun combat. And if you have that .. it is much easier to get people to show up.