Two Mobas have over 50million unique monthly players.
4-5 million is not a significant portion of the online market, and no mmorpg will have that again at any point other than WoW.
FF14 doesn't have anywhere near that and never will.
While I don't think FF14 will ever come close, claiming that no MMORPG will ever have 4-5 million players again is ridiculous. Soon as someone comes up with a good game offering something different than the status quo - with polish, it will pull millions again no problem. We haven't seen that in a decade so using recent history as your metric is like predicting it will never rain again during a drought.
Putting words in my mouth. Nice. Let me be blunt (if you can't understand this, then join the other WoWtards):
you said "Is chess a joke? It's so easy preteens can play it. They won't get far (just as they won't get far in WOW) but they can play it."
I'm saying all I pretty much saw at end game was kids (hence they did get far and reach end game), also hinting in chess I could choose my opponent (the game does not choose it for me).
I'll stop there.
The average age of WOW players is 28 years old, so it seems suspicious that you're claiming "all I pretty much saw" were kids. Beyond that you choose your teammates (even if you choose random teammates,) so it's within your power to avoid what few children there are in endgame.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
What we need is a different form of experience delivery. For decades games are experienced through the screen, CRT, flat panel, projectors, etc. I think for another great MMO to come out, they need a working VR gear in the mold of SAO .
Originally posted by Dullahan Soon as someone comes up with a good game offering something different than the status quo - with polish, it will pull millions again no problem. We haven't seen that in a decade so using recent history as your metric is like predicting it will never rain again during a drought.
It didn't happen a decade ago, either.
What Blizzard did is take existing concepts from operating titles and refine them, polish off the rough corners, and correcting some of the errors that players of those other titles were already asking for on their forums. (More solo friendly, faster leveling, etc.)
Blizzard wasn't even the only company doing it. Most of the 'earlier' companies were already making efforts to provide the same in the existing titles. The entire industry was seeking the attention of solo players. And the console-player conversion rate over the next five years was enormous, industry-wide. SP RPG players were now entering MMOs in droves. So was the Far East, a rock-crushing big and largely untapped by Western developers market.
City of Heroes had one of those way-fast leveling times, non-group-dependent content. It opened before WoW did (but CoH didn't explode, not without Blizzard's Starcraft and DIablo and Warcraft pre-existing fan base). EQ2 opened before WoW did (by a hair), too.
But "different from the status quo?" No, WoW wasn't really all that different, pretty much a standard-recipe themepark, a recipe that Blizzard didn't invent. Familiar interface, familiar ! over questgiver's heads. Blizzard just saw the trend and opened their arms to catch it.
----
A relevant question to ask is: Where's the big untapped market(s) going to come from, next time?
I'm not going to turn this into a this game is better than that game discussion. What I will say is some games require skill and patience (with organization of large groups) beyond what the ADD kids will ever be able to accomplish. However, since the takeover of the WoW generation, these games are long dead. Everyone wants to solo in an MMORPG, and wow (and pretty much every MMORPG company) is doing their best to accommodates this.
However, there is a playerbase that does prefer mass interaction for overcomming challanges (fighting players by the thousands in a more player driven game) vs 5man instance raids to mash buttons and beat the game. And I can assure you, the crowd is much larger than 1% (I hope I'm not responding to one of those occupy idiots).
And a good start would be a game with 0 instances, take a look:
Another Non-Instanced Raid (with a mix of pvp for the raid boss) -
Non-Instanced MMORPG world (where anything can happen) -
Non-Instanced PVP (wars, flagging system, and option to do whatever with harm to others and risk for yourself) -
And finally, Non-Instanced Event seige where an unlimited number of clans can compete to attack or defend the castle (of their choice). But at the end, only one clan will get to own the castle and reap it's rewards (until the next event begins) -
All we want is just ONE game like this. You can have your 1000 WoW copycat games. We just want ONE without it being turned into another WoW copycat.
Patience was certainly required in greater amounts. There is no better example than L2 of the repetitive grind that characterized early MMORPGs. But players tend to prefer content (ie variety,) and L2's repetitive grind was far less varied than most MMORPGs.
Skill was not required in great amounts. Earlier I linked the warlock rotation as clear evidence of the significant skill involved in mastering WOW. I'd be very surprised if you could link a guide on L2 combat that showed it to require anywhere near that amount of skill. (My limited time in L2 involved endlessly nuking opponents with the same 1-2 spells, and combat struck me as unusually shallow for a MMORPG.) But even though I'd be surprised, evidence carries weight (far more than forum opinions) and so if you showed a rotation that required as much or more skill to master I'd be forced to accept that.
Without instancing, less skill is required. Because without a player limit, you can reduce the amount of skill required by bringing more players. That's typically the main purpose of instancing: to act as a player limit. So with instancing there are fewer ways to sidestep the skill requirement, which makes skill more important.
It's fine that you enjoyed that type of game, and fine for you to try to build a case for more of those games to get made, but let's not toss around claims that are provably false.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
If this bus is going to arrive ,can someone please tell me what section to wait for it?
I hope this next great game comes out soon,i am not getting any younger.For me it has been since 2002/3 with FFXI,only a glimpse within Vanguard has given me any hope.When i first heard there was a new FF game and engine,i was crazy excited however as news came out and i started to follow it's every progression,i was once again waiting and hoping.
so it has been 13 years waiting,that is a LONG time to see a lot of Indie low quality games fly through this market.
I have been waiting even longer for that next great fps "1999",although i guess COD did capture me for a few years,so the wait's not been that long.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I count a total of 10 skills used in this fight (not by "rotation", but instead by circumstances to the skill needed to be used at that time). And that is not including the 13 buff skills in the beginning of the video.
WoW also using 2-button skills - (after the 4:40 intro)
Oh and trust me, if more people showed up to "help" an open world raid boss, it was most likely going to be pvping to kill the raid boss for it's drops, and not the carebear help.
Oh and some raid bosses never actually got killed, because the server was too busy fighting eachother to "group up and help".
Also in terms of working together, here was the number of players in ventrilo organized for 1 thing (a siege) in the game. In L2, ventrilo (or other voip's) was a requirement to join a clan. You didn't have to speak, but you had to at least follow directions. In WoW, I was always told "we don't use voip because they aren't ever needed".
When I talk about skills, I'm not talking about skills on your hotbar (although even this has been nerfed down to 4-5 skills allowed in mmorpg's today (GW2, ESO)). I'm talking about the skill of having to work together where everyone has a part to play. The skills you choose are all situational based on which one of them is required. For example:
Blade Dancer and Sword Singer: need to decide which buff skills they will be using, and make sure to rebuff every 2 minutes (in sync with eachother, or drain mana for both to not get the full buffs off), or the party dies.
Other buff classes (There is 7+, so I won't bother naming them all): Responsible for making sure the buffs do not roll off, or the party dies. They must keep a timer, know their 30+ buffs and which ones to use depending on the situation.
Tanks: Responsible for pulling monsters back to the party (yes, running in wildly like done in WoW would surely get the party killed). Then the tank is responsible for bundling every mob in range of eachother for the AOE sleep. Or if it's a tank party, making sure he positions himself in accordance to the agro line of the mobs so when they get to him, his pole is hitting all of them at once. In pvp, they are responsible for keeping healers stunned (making sure nobody in party hits a stunned player to knock off stun), and hate agroing the damage dealers.
DD's: Responsible for assisting targets, and pulling agro to the tank when things got out of control.
Nukers: In some parties, they are responsible for aoe sleep (while the party assists to one target killing the mobs one by one). When the sleep wears off, they need to be already in casting for the next sleep cloud, or the mobs wake, scatter, and the party dies.
I played a nuker too, and I can tell you I definately used more than 1-2 skills (especially in pvp). Even nukers had their own specialties. But to keep this simple, I will state how I played my SPS (after they nerfed sleep for pvp):
PVP...
I once 1v9'd a party through wall of argos. They came after me while I was trying to kill 500 monsters for a part of my nobless quest. They had all the buffs I had + songs/dances/COV (in case you didn't know, COV pretty much doubles all your stats, but at the cost of slowing down your run speed). The party consisted of a bishop (best healer in game), Warcryer (party buffer), 2 Daggers, 2 archers, blade dancer (buffer/supportDD), sword singer (buffer/supportDD) and 1 spell singer(Nuker).
How I won: By casting slow on the fastest moving targets while kiting them all the way through. When one got too far away from the party, I would quickly kill him and continue to run (particularly when he ran around corners and out of healing sight). I also used other skills like (weakness to my nuker skill, weakening atk power, cancel buffs, 2 different slows, fear - making them run in the direction away from me, 3 different nukes).
How they could have won: At one point their archer got a stun off on me. Then immediately knocked off stun with another arrow. If he would have just waited till the daggers caught me, or even better the nuker nukes me (nukes did not knock off stun btw), they would have got me. But rushing is what brought them to miss that.
In the end, they blamed their blade dancer for not using arrest on me (a ranged rooting skill).
Raids...
Some bosses required slow and to be kited during the entire raid. Others you had to watch your mana and know if you drain it too fast using nukes, you would most likely pull agro and kill the party.
Solo Leveling (well, more like trio leveling since you couldn't really solo)...
Most the time you couldn't even solo level. You had to have at least 1 buffer and recharger (for mp). So we will call this more of a trio party, since soloing in the game was never really even an option. Hell I even boxed multiple accounts and made macro's for buffs/heals/recharges just to make it easier on myself. Aside from the nuke+slow, nukes, weakness, and sleep for crowd control, you were right that there was not much used here for leveling.
PVE Parties...
Nuker was basically playing the roll of crowd controll. One time in a train party. The warlord (a class for pulling trains of mobs) liked to pull a super train at the end of the party. I had to do aoe sleep (since the train was so big, his weapon would not hit all the monsters), followed by support healing since the healer could not get heals off fast enough. It was a low level heal skill, but just healing that 500hp here and there allowed me to keep the trainer alive, thus we did not have a party wipe.
In train parties, I used 3 aoe nuke skills.
In hard monster parties, I was crowd control: sleep, slow, weakness, fear, so forth...
My point is skill was all situational. Each skill served it's own purpose for the type of environment a player was in. Since L2 was not designed to be solo friendly (unlike wow), you had to work together with other players to get ahead in the game. Ultimately this is what I am looking for again.
We would all immediately recognize that a video of two 7 year olds playing chess badly wouldn't serve as evidence of chess being shallow. Similarly we understand that showing WOW at its shallowest (in world PVP using a class which was overpowered at the time) tells us nothing about WOW's actual depth at high-end play.
So I'm going to assume you posted Roguecraft purely for its entertainment value.
To compare actual depth, you have to take the best examples of both games, which might include this one of WOW's high-end PVP. While a count of abilities used isn't really how you measure game depth, it's worth noting that the 9 abilities shown per class are just cooldowns and that many more abilities are used.
The majority of high-end raiding guilds in WOW do it with VOIP. Certainly the ones who achieve meaningful kills use it.
Player skill is what I mean by skill too (I tend to use "abilities" when referring to the things a player's char can do.)
The brief summaries you've provided aren't the way to showcase the game's depth. They just leave me wondering, "Uh, so all you have to do is maintain a buff by hitting a button every 2 minutes?" and make me inclined to conclude L2 isn't especially deep.
Instead just link one guide. Choose the deepest class; find the best guide for it. (We're only interested in the best examples of each game, after all.) The guide will presumably run through all of the nuanced situations where you'd want to use each ability, and that will show the game's depth.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Lot's of posts derailing thread I see, but back on topic. The question of WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHY will cause a new great MMORPG to arrive is a challenging one, but I'll put my input on it.
Currently MMO's development solely depend on the private sector. Currently also developers don't see to understand that they can pass the $15 monthly fee that's existed for over a decade (given they justify the quality of the product they deliver and continue to develop).
Who will deliver this MMORPG? It's a combination between those desperate to make big profit and desperate to make a game they finally see themselves play for a decade. A truly unique and amazing experience on a new set of standards that will allow us to treat it as more than just a game made for children without any significant meaning to be part of.
What will it take that MMORPG to happen? Also awareness of gamers in general, that MMORPG is the genre where most depth, creativity and features one can bring into a game. I strongly believe the MOBA market is big because the younger audience is starving for that competition that us vets enjoyed with Star Craft 1, Quake, Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike and so forth. I myself spent years and years playing Star Craft 1. Sadly, Star Craft 2 lasted me for 10 days and I never touched the campaign/story. The new battle net and the nerf to skill cap/difficulty to Star Craft 2 was big disappointment. I could just hot key all building on a single button to make units lol, something not possible in SC1 for example.
When? Well like I said 2018 earliest, 2020 latest hopefully. This is just my prediction based on what is currently in development and how long it will take. A great MMORPG to be developed can require different time based on the team size its developing it. Back in the days the average time it took to deliver AAA MMORPG was 3 years, but that's shorter now due to improvements in tech.
Why? Simply because us gamers demand it and that's mostly evident in how half of this community choose to purchase WOW:WoD after a decade since launch. Sadly, I doubt 20% of the community still is playing WOW right now. WOW is done and as some posters above proved it with actual links of disappointment of what's left of its community from this expansion which was suppose to be improvement, which was not the case. Best example is the token brought in game for Blizz to help increase population in their game.
The publishers and developers don't care what we demand. That's the point. The ONLY way things MIGHT change is if people start to walk back to single player games, and even then its unlikely. They both like quick development, fast release, ride the wave until boredom and move on. Very very few are willing to actually try anything really new. Those that are trying something new are all single player games.
"Are people really comparing the difficulty of WoW to chess in this thread?
I find that disturbing on so many levels."
+10
About WoW:
WoW is in decline but the only thing that can kill WoW is WoW itself and to me (imho) it looks like it's doing a good job at that atm. It's not gone yet tho and depending on where they go after WoD will show us all if it will destroy itself or not.
About WoW's depth:
If hitting same buttons on exactly the same order for 12 to 18 months combined with fast reflexes is enough to make a game deep then all the more power to you who enjoy it.
I prefer TSW kinda depth where I have only those eight buttons to use, but where I have to think what those buttons need to be in order to finish the mob / boss infront of me. And yes you really need to switch weps and skills totally in some cases to get things done.
Also in contrary to WoW: there isn't a one single build for wep/skill combos which is absolutely OP: there is always more than one viable combo.
For OP:
I agree, scene could use new blood to make things interesting again: problem is that gamers are rather conservative: if the game does not resemble previous games enough players will cry to high heaven and back.
(Brings back memories of SWToR's launch: literally in same thread players both accused the game of being a WoWclone and demanding exactly same features as WoW had).
So innovative game with enough of "old" features is what we need: if someone can deliver that only time will show.
Comments
While I don't think FF14 will ever come close, claiming that no MMORPG will ever have 4-5 million players again is ridiculous. Soon as someone comes up with a good game offering something different than the status quo - with polish, it will pull millions again no problem. We haven't seen that in a decade so using recent history as your metric is like predicting it will never rain again during a drought.
The average age of WOW players is 28 years old, so it seems suspicious that you're claiming "all I pretty much saw" were kids. Beyond that you choose your teammates (even if you choose random teammates,) so it's within your power to avoid what few children there are in endgame.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
It didn't happen a decade ago, either.
What Blizzard did is take existing concepts from operating titles and refine them, polish off the rough corners, and correcting some of the errors that players of those other titles were already asking for on their forums. (More solo friendly, faster leveling, etc.)
Blizzard wasn't even the only company doing it. Most of the 'earlier' companies were already making efforts to provide the same in the existing titles. The entire industry was seeking the attention of solo players. And the console-player conversion rate over the next five years was enormous, industry-wide. SP RPG players were now entering MMOs in droves. So was the Far East, a rock-crushing big and largely untapped by Western developers market.
City of Heroes had one of those way-fast leveling times, non-group-dependent content. It opened before WoW did (but CoH didn't explode, not without Blizzard's Starcraft and DIablo and Warcraft pre-existing fan base). EQ2 opened before WoW did (by a hair), too.
But "different from the status quo?" No, WoW wasn't really all that different, pretty much a standard-recipe themepark, a recipe that Blizzard didn't invent. Familiar interface, familiar ! over questgiver's heads. Blizzard just saw the trend and opened their arms to catch it.
----
A relevant question to ask is: Where's the big untapped market(s) going to come from, next time?
Patience was certainly required in greater amounts. There is no better example than L2 of the repetitive grind that characterized early MMORPGs. But players tend to prefer content (ie variety,) and L2's repetitive grind was far less varied than most MMORPGs.
Skill was not required in great amounts. Earlier I linked the warlock rotation as clear evidence of the significant skill involved in mastering WOW. I'd be very surprised if you could link a guide on L2 combat that showed it to require anywhere near that amount of skill. (My limited time in L2 involved endlessly nuking opponents with the same 1-2 spells, and combat struck me as unusually shallow for a MMORPG.) But even though I'd be surprised, evidence carries weight (far more than forum opinions) and so if you showed a rotation that required as much or more skill to master I'd be forced to accept that.
Without instancing, less skill is required. Because without a player limit, you can reduce the amount of skill required by bringing more players. That's typically the main purpose of instancing: to act as a player limit. So with instancing there are fewer ways to sidestep the skill requirement, which makes skill more important.
It's fine that you enjoyed that type of game, and fine for you to try to build a case for more of those games to get made, but let's not toss around claims that are provably false.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I feel like i am at a bus stop lol.
If this bus is going to arrive ,can someone please tell me what section to wait for it?
I hope this next great game comes out soon,i am not getting any younger.For me it has been since 2002/3 with FFXI,only a glimpse within Vanguard has given me any hope.When i first heard there was a new FF game and engine,i was crazy excited however as news came out and i started to follow it's every progression,i was once again waiting and hoping.
so it has been 13 years waiting,that is a LONG time to see a lot of Indie low quality games fly through this market.
I have been waiting even longer for that next great fps "1999",although i guess COD did capture me for a few years,so the wait's not been that long.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
We would all immediately recognize that a video of two 7 year olds playing chess badly wouldn't serve as evidence of chess being shallow. Similarly we understand that showing WOW at its shallowest (in world PVP using a class which was overpowered at the time) tells us nothing about WOW's actual depth at high-end play.
So I'm going to assume you posted Roguecraft purely for its entertainment value.
To compare actual depth, you have to take the best examples of both games, which might include this one of WOW's high-end PVP. While a count of abilities used isn't really how you measure game depth, it's worth noting that the 9 abilities shown per class are just cooldowns and that many more abilities are used.
The majority of high-end raiding guilds in WOW do it with VOIP. Certainly the ones who achieve meaningful kills use it.
Player skill is what I mean by skill too (I tend to use "abilities" when referring to the things a player's char can do.)
The brief summaries you've provided aren't the way to showcase the game's depth. They just leave me wondering, "Uh, so all you have to do is maintain a buff by hitting a button every 2 minutes?" and make me inclined to conclude L2 isn't especially deep.
Instead just link one guide. Choose the deepest class; find the best guide for it. (We're only interested in the best examples of each game, after all.) The guide will presumably run through all of the nuanced situations where you'd want to use each ability, and that will show the game's depth.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Lot's of posts derailing thread I see, but back on topic. The question of WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHY will cause a new great MMORPG to arrive is a challenging one, but I'll put my input on it.
Currently MMO's development solely depend on the private sector. Currently also developers don't see to understand that they can pass the $15 monthly fee that's existed for over a decade (given they justify the quality of the product they deliver and continue to develop).
Who will deliver this MMORPG? It's a combination between those desperate to make big profit and desperate to make a game they finally see themselves play for a decade. A truly unique and amazing experience on a new set of standards that will allow us to treat it as more than just a game made for children without any significant meaning to be part of.
What will it take that MMORPG to happen? Also awareness of gamers in general, that MMORPG is the genre where most depth, creativity and features one can bring into a game. I strongly believe the MOBA market is big because the younger audience is starving for that competition that us vets enjoyed with Star Craft 1, Quake, Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike and so forth. I myself spent years and years playing Star Craft 1. Sadly, Star Craft 2 lasted me for 10 days and I never touched the campaign/story. The new battle net and the nerf to skill cap/difficulty to Star Craft 2 was big disappointment. I could just hot key all building on a single button to make units lol, something not possible in SC1 for example.
When? Well like I said 2018 earliest, 2020 latest hopefully. This is just my prediction based on what is currently in development and how long it will take. A great MMORPG to be developed can require different time based on the team size its developing it. Back in the days the average time it took to deliver AAA MMORPG was 3 years, but that's shorter now due to improvements in tech.
Why? Simply because us gamers demand it and that's mostly evident in how half of this community choose to purchase WOW:WoD after a decade since launch. Sadly, I doubt 20% of the community still is playing WOW right now. WOW is done and as some posters above proved it with actual links of disappointment of what's left of its community from this expansion which was suppose to be improvement, which was not the case. Best example is the token brought in game for Blizz to help increase population in their game.
From LacedOpium:
"Are people really comparing the difficulty of WoW to chess in this thread?
I find that disturbing on so many levels."
+10
About WoW:
WoW is in decline but the only thing that can kill WoW is WoW itself and to me (imho) it looks like it's doing a good job at that atm. It's not gone yet tho and depending on where they go after WoD will show us all if it will destroy itself or not.
About WoW's depth:
If hitting same buttons on exactly the same order for 12 to 18 months combined with fast reflexes is enough to make a game deep then all the more power to you who enjoy it.
I prefer TSW kinda depth where I have only those eight buttons to use, but where I have to think what those buttons need to be in order to finish the mob / boss infront of me. And yes you really need to switch weps and skills totally in some cases to get things done.
Also in contrary to WoW: there isn't a one single build for wep/skill combos which is absolutely OP: there is always more than one viable combo.
For OP:
I agree, scene could use new blood to make things interesting again: problem is that gamers are rather conservative: if the game does not resemble previous games enough players will cry to high heaven and back.
(Brings back memories of SWToR's launch: literally in same thread players both accused the game of being a WoWclone and demanding exactly same features as WoW had).
So innovative game with enough of "old" features is what we need: if someone can deliver that only time will show.
I'm fairly certain that if "we" is the people hanging out on this website, that the vast majority of them will never even see the demands.
On their native message boards, "we" might affect the path of future developments, just a little.
But not very much. A game driven by the masses only crashes against the cliffs quickly.
Actually, what the market demands is what they care about most.
What the market demands most may be at odds with what you personally want though.