Do you feel like mmo's are less good than they used to be or that consumers are just bored of them?

Yakuto

Howzr

Old school MMOs seemed to have more variety. These days every game plays the same way. Grind generic quests to max level, sprinkle in some group finder dungeons along the way, then transition to end game instanced raiding and pvp. The gameplay is so focused on those narrow ludic functions that players are divorced from the IP and the game world and the "massively multiplayer" aspect. I suspect most of these games don't really need to be an MMO anymore, and probably would have provided players with a better experience had they been developed as single player RPGs or multiplayer dungeon crawlers. 

Nightlite

I'm certainly not bored with MMOs, I look forward to every new release. BUT, I've become a bit of a junkie for that new game euphoria when everything is fresh and no one has reached the top. That brief period in game releases just feels so alive.

Yakuto

Both good points. Honestly I feel like more is honestly less. I think you appreciate something more when there is just less of it all around you everywhere you look. The vastness of options to choose from really makes the water that is mmo's murky and hard to sift through imo.

jigo86

none above for me its the casual fact that liked the old ones more

heerobya

I think my problem is that I've played SO many games (MMOs) over such a long period of time (15-16+ years) that I see things that I really like, and things that I really hate.

Like, how hard is it to have the combat of X with the crafting of Y and the world/exploration of Z in the same damn game?!

Really hard to enjoy a game for the whole package, not enough time and $ to play multiple games to their fullest, etc.

Makes me wish I had a magic blender that could take bits from all these different games and create The One MMORPG To Rule Them All (for me at least.)

khanstruct

I know, people will say that we're an aging demographic, longing for the "good ol days". But I don't think it's just MMOs. All games are being dumbed down to a ridiculous level. There's no true sense of accomplishment anymore, just one spoon-fed reward after another.

This is really evident in the plague of browser MMOs in which you literally have to do nothing more than click on text.

I have a quest.
Click the name of the quest and my character walks there automatically. (Often starts fighting or gathering automatically too.)
I'm done.
Click the name of the person I have to return to and my character walks to them automatically.
Collect my reward and get another quest.

deniter

Howzr said:

Old school MMOs seemed to have more variety. These days every game plays the same way. Grind generic quests to max level, sprinkle in some group finder dungeons along the way, then transition to end game instanced raiding and pvp. The gameplay is so focused on those narrow ludic functions that players are divorced from the IP and the game world and the "massively multiplayer" aspect. I suspect most of these games don't really need to be an MMO anymore, and probably would have provided players with a better experience had they been developed as single player RPGs or multiplayer dungeon crawlers. 

+1.

Nothing to add, Howzr basically nails it in this post.

nariusseldon

MMOs are much better games now than the old classical mmorpgs. They also are more varied, from instanced pvp games, to diablo-ish ARPG like games. 

SpottyGekko

MMO's today are better than they have ever been.

There are more players today that are bored with MMO's than ever before.


That above may look like a contradiction, but it isn't...

Loke666

Some things have been improved, bugs are rarer now then in the old days. Graohics ae generally pretty good and some new mechanics are fun. 

But the difficulty are the same in all of them: incredible easy in the open world, easy dungeons and hard raids. I enjoy open world content the most, hard open world content and whenever a game makes something just slightly more challenging then so easy I don't really have to use any tactics whatsoever to win people whine until things gets nerfed.

That almost all games use the same mechanics, lore, setting and generally are very similar to eachother doesn't help either.

Jacobin

Old school games were actually very badly designed due to insane grind and downtime which is why WoW destroyed them all.

They were however still appealing because a massive multiplayer persistent world was a new concept that few games offered.

15 or so years later these games are a dime a dozen and have actually gotten worse by becoming way too easy, more on rails than ever, more loot slot machine than ever and now spam never ending cash shop infomercials for RNG loot boxes.

AAAMEOW

You can try some asian mmorpg.  I find those have more variety.  Bad part is the cash shop and grind.

Mserotica

in all honestly Asian MMO's are the way to go atm.

Huge wow player & SWG. but i left both behind.

in general....AA titles or U.S made mmo's are starting to bore the masses.

SWG did stuff right but game never got advertised but for a day or two. but it had alot of stuff that in general you do not see in any MMO.

Rollgunner

They certainly are *different* than they were. There are two more recent general changes that I'm not such a fan of :

The idea of breaking the play experience down into 15 or 20 minute bites. I understand that it opens the window for people who have less play time to be a part of the game, but for me it makes it harder to feel like you're involved in the game, and that any success you have is extraordinary.

The radical difficulty curve between group content and raiding. In many games, the group content requires almost no teamwork at all to succeed (making failure nearly impossible), whereas the raiding content often requires flawless co-ordination. I liked it more when that continuum was flatter and more centered.

I'm reminded of one of my favorite lines of dialogue from the movie Avalon in which one of the mysterious Gamemasters asks the player a question :

Ash… Which is the greater challenge?

Which is the better game?

Which would you choose, given the choice?

The sort of game that you think you can win, but cannot,

Or, alternatively, one that seems to be impossible, but isn’t?

Maintaining a precise, delicate balance somewhere in between,

Throughout every level of the game – That’s what keeps it going.

And it is all up to us.

nariusseldon

Rollgunner said:

The idea of breaking the play experience down into 15 or 20 minute bites. I understand that it opens the window for people who have less play time to be a part of the game, but for me it makes it harder to feel like you're involved in the game, and that any success you have is extraordinary.

hmm .. we are playing games here. Any "success" is just an illusion that was calibrated to produce fun. You know that, right?

Flintsteen

none of the above.  

i dont think mmo's are the best they've ever been.  Online singleplayer games have never been better though.

Used to be more fun ?  maybe so for certain playstyles, but tbh the new mmorpg's mostly have better stories than the old ones.  Problem (for me) is that it's fokused on character story instead of building world lore/story.  The new games haven´t realy improved in that area.

Play the same ?   I dont know.  To me the playstyle is very different from SWTOR to GW2 to TSW.  Also if you enjoy a playstyle it realy doesn't matter if it stays the same. Dont fix what isn't broken. 

It's more that the singleplayer RPG makers have been taking over the mmo market and making it feel less of a massive multiplayer online game and more of just a massive online game with an added multiplay feature.

I prefer themeparks tbh,  but add lots of sand to my themepark. Wow did that right to me once.  I was just another guy walking about in the world and helping out where i could. I never felt i needed to do some storyquest,  i could allways just choose not to. I played SWTOR from launch and while i liked the story and the companions i allways felt like it belonged more in a singleplayer rpg. It was a good singleplayer online game though and the added groupfeature was pretty good so i stayed.

craftseeker

Yakuto said:

Really?? Another piece of sad 'push polling'.  Do you really think you have covered ALL of the options with these four alternatives?  The answers you are going to get are going to skewed, and irrelevant to the original question.

Rollgunner

nariusseldon said:

Rollgunner said:

The idea of breaking the play experience down into 15 or 20 minute bites. I understand that it opens the window for people who have less play time to be a part of the game, but for me it makes it harder to feel like you're involved in the game, and that any success you have is extraordinary.

hmm .. we are playing games here. Any "success" is just an illusion that was calibrated to produce fun. You know that, right?

Some people spend hundreds of hours ( and hundreds of dollars) playing puzzle games in which the only reward is feeling good after finishing a puzzle. That feeling of success is what gets them to move on to the next puzzle.

I'm saying that if it is impossible to fail, then success requires no effort.

If success requires no effort, then that success is emotionally meaningless.

If success is emotionally meaningless, then there is no reason to play if that is the only reward.

When you get to the point of feeling "I won, but so what?" the game is over for you, no matter what kind of game you are playing.

nariusseldon

Rollgunner said:

nariusseldon said:

Rollgunner said:

The idea of breaking the play experience down into 15 or 20 minute bites. I understand that it opens the window for people who have less play time to be a part of the game, but for me it makes it harder to feel like you're involved in the game, and that any success you have is extraordinary.

hmm .. we are playing games here. Any "success" is just an illusion that was calibrated to produce fun. You know that, right?

Some people spend hundreds of hours ( and hundreds of dollars) playing puzzle games in which the only reward is feeling good after finishing a puzzle. That feeling of success is what gets them to move on to the next puzzle.

I'm saying that if it is impossible to fail, then success requires no effort.

If success requires no effort, then that success is emotionally meaningless.

If success is emotionally meaningless, then there is no reason to play if that is the only reward.

When you get to the point of feeling "I won, but so what?" the game is over for you, no matter what kind of game you are playing.

Sure ... that is why we have difficulty slider and leader boards on some games, so people can feel their "success" in games. 

I am quite sure some will think that beating GR 80 in D3 is an extraordinary "achievement". Just that it is not how i value "achievement". 

Distopia

Not really black and white for me, as games they're better, in terms of community involvement they're worse.

Cecropia

nariusseldon said:

Rollgunner said:

nariusseldon said:

Rollgunner said:

The idea of breaking the play experience down into 15 or 20 minute bites. I understand that it opens the window for people who have less play time to be a part of the game, but for me it makes it harder to feel like you're involved in the game, and that any success you have is extraordinary.

hmm .. we are playing games here. Any "success" is just an illusion that was calibrated to produce fun. You know that, right?

Some people spend hundreds of hours ( and hundreds of dollars) playing puzzle games in which the only reward is feeling good after finishing a puzzle. That feeling of success is what gets them to move on to the next puzzle.

I'm saying that if it is impossible to fail, then success requires no effort.

If success requires no effort, then that success is emotionally meaningless.

If success is emotionally meaningless, then there is no reason to play if that is the only reward.

When you get to the point of feeling "I won, but so what?" the game is over for you, no matter what kind of game you are playing.

Sure ... that is why we have difficulty slider and leader boards on some games, so people can feel their "success" in games. 

I am quite sure some will think that beating GR 80 in D3 is an extraordinary "achievement". Just that it is not how i value "achievement". 

Well, so far you fall into the minority of how folks feel regarding this poll. You put quite a bit of stock into this sort of thing, so it will be intriguing to see how this one pans out.

Most people do not share your opinion and by a large margin. That's gotta hurt a tad; but not to worry as there are limitless varieties of entertainment out there...

AAAMEOW

Player always talk game style but never about budget.

Unless the mmorpg is low budget, it kind of have to appear to the mass.  That's why most large budget mmorpg are almost identical.

And most low budget games, people don't care.  I find some low budget games quite interesting.  You just have to accept it's probably not as refined, and the community is much smaller.

mmoguy43

Playing an MMO because, it's an MMO!, there's all these players nearby!" isn't even remotely special anymore. Games get to be better with fewer players, not more.



my name needs to die

Antiquated

Combination of aging demographic (bittervets) and the expectation of perpetual entertainment from an all-too familiar formula. Prima facie doomed to failure... But that doesn't keep us from whining about it.

Cecropia

Robokapp said:

Narriuss accidentally picked the top option instead of the last...

Ahh, indeed. Indeed.