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If we can have 8 months of content, we can have a lifetime world.
delete5230
Member EpicPosts: 7,081
Think about this. If we had an mmo with enough content, about 8 months worth of non repeatable stuff, this would set the stage for having a world we can live in FOREVER.
- Fast leveling mmos have a hidden agenda....Not much content !
What ever happened to being level 22 for several hours ?
What ever happened to being level 51 for days, and content to go along with it ?
What ever happened to being in the same zone for weeks and making friends ?
What ever happened to " can't wait to FINALLY gain six more levels to get that ability you had been waiting for " ?
What ever happened to seeing the very high level player, and saying he made it. That will be me some day !
What ever happened to re rolling a new character and realizing I barely remember the content ?
What ever happened to crafting something valuable, and it stays worth it ?
I'm not talking about Old School......I'm talking about content.
Important:
I'm sitting here thinking about Black Desert Online. Not to bash the game, really !!
Many are enjoying this game and that is fantastic. But it will fail because of lack of content, eventually it will become hated. This cycle happens over and over......All because of lack of content.
Comments
I picked 8 months out of a hat.
An arbitrary time frame to show longevity
MMO's should be a long grind to max level, with a lot of options to get there. It also needs distinct classes that have real purposes, and not try to make every class fit every role.
Your right, I can't dispute this,
But this is getting into a sub category. First and foremost a game has to have content. Many other factors have to exist too....So yes I agree
The rest of your OP has a lot of nostalgia stuff that is just part of experiencing an MMO for the first time. That won't ever come back unless they create a completely and radically different MMO. But then it will be nostalgia for the new things, not the old things.
For example I expect to get a huge dose of atmospheric nostalgia when the first high quality virtual reality MMORPG is released.
Pantheon will hopefully bring it all back again, in the meantime you might want to look at games like, Age Of Wulin European version.
This content your talking about sounds like Guild Wars 2. And this is a modern game with a lot of content too.
Again, what your talking about is a sub category that would be nice, no disputing. BUT if the game is small, players would simply chew it up anyway.
Your right,
I don't think they like doing that !
It isn't they won't play long term, look how many people will play the same MOBA or shooter for years, but the jump in and out on a regular basis.
So I think MMO design has gone the same way. Periodic content updates, frequently that can be charged for to draw them back for a spell.
ESO, GW2, AA, BDO all seem to follow this pattern, even EVE is doing it with larger, but frequent and discernable features to try and draw former players back.
I liked Jean Luc's ideas and as soon as he builds that game for us count me in, probably with multiple accounts even.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Nobody wants and would play that today (except for couple of thousand pantheon fans).
Mmorpg market is booming and millions of players are enjoying themselves. So again, what content not present in dozens of current aaa games you are talking about?
People on here can cry wow clone all they want but to me, every game I've played, they had their own uniqueness. Sure, they have quests, dungeons, raids, etc. But within that subset, they all had their own unique way of doing that type of content. (Lore, mechanics, atmosphere, etc).
So no, the older games didn't have more staying power than the new, we just have more to choose from these days. You're talking about 5-10 games max back in the day to hundreds of MMOs to choose from now. You can't possibly deduct that older games had better staying power just because of that reason alone IMHO.
These days people actually play more than one game at a time and still play those games for years, they just spend less time on each game. In the past, if you get burnt out, you're stuck with that one game, now you can just go and enjoy another and come back later. It's great.
Again, my 2 cents, take it as it is.
Because, at some point in time, the player is going to finish that content. What do they do then? A lot will quit. Some will roll alts and repeat the content. Some will stick at max-level and participate in whatever endgame there is.
Creating an MMO that players want to inhabit long term is all about systems, not content. Some of those systems may be about content (for example, standard questhubs / levelings is a system) but not all of them. You need social systems, deep combat / gameplay systems, fluff stuff etc so that players can define and enjoy their own gametime.
Relying on developer-made content just wont work.
So, procedurally-generated content (to prevent repetition), deep combat (to keep it interesting and skill-based for years), player-based economy, non-combat professions, player-made structures / terraforming, meaningful (consensual) world pvp, hobbies / fluff (for when you're not in the mood).......these are the things that create long lasting games.
Yes there is more content today; yes we could say we have "saturation" but its just as true to say we had a "paucity" of content 20 years ago. Running the same quest and waiting at a camp for a rare spawn wan't "content". And peoples unwillingness to do so today doesn't indicate short attention spans.
Moving from game to game is simply following the availability of "new" content.
And I am not altogether sure it was any different years ago. SoE released churn numbers for EQ1 twenty years ago and the % was huge - wouldn't have been out of place with what seems to happen today. Now my gut says yes people move more but my head warns that things may not be that different today. More players today but we have more games and bigger more global market.
And I am sure developers back then were aiming for the "mass market" as well. I think the biggest difference is that we have more niche developers today.
And the bottomline: if we have new content (that interests us) either from the same game, several games or a stream of different games then we have "an mmo with enough content". And with the growth of multi-game guilds we can also partake in the same community as well if we wish.
Aside: On a personal note, I find that randomizing which daily quests are available per day makes them quite a bit more palatable since I'm not doing the same exact thing every day.
Procedural sucks for making interesting content. The state-of-the-art AI's can barely produce something intelligible much less something that wouldn't get them booed off the stage on a civic-center community talent show. Creative and talented humans are still necessary for making compelling stories and fun mechanics.
I'm not sure what you'd call it (its churn / retention related) but I remember seeing population graphs 10 years ago compared to today.
The old model was that an MMO would release, it's population would grow for a few months then slowly decline until the first expansion, when it would jump up and grow again until reaching a peak playerbase a month or two after first xpac, but from then on it is a steady decline.
Now, peak playerbase is the release month, then its a steady decline from then onwards.
I guess it might just be that today, that initial peak is created by non-traditional MMO players who consume the single-player aspects of the game then move on, leaving behind the traditional MMO players who follow the same pattern. I'm not sure though.
Television - From 24 episode a season with predictable, realistic breaks in between. Focusing on trying to enthrall and engage the viewers in story arcs and character progression, also targeting specific audiences like action fans. To 8 episodes a season (we used to call those mini series) simply trying to pack as much drama, action, comedy, thriller, suspense and mystery into all episodes as they can in hopes of at least grabbing a little bit of all audiences.
Movies - From well articulated stories trying to detail as accurately as possible events, alternate realities, potential futures and so on, to homogenized shallow, coke brain style, stories meant to appeal to as many diff audiences as possible. Setting unjust standards for common skills like CG art, paying dime a dozen CG artists 15-20x the average national wage for something anybody could do and millions know how to, simply to manipulate fundamental aspects of profit (The more put into a successful venture the more that comes out).
Politics - From governments that pander to the will of the citizens out of fear of death, that design societies to promote health and well being of their population, to governments abusing fundamentals of our psychology to manufacture perception and design entire nation as profit and labor farms to their and their friends benefits.
What do all these wildly different aspects of human society all have in common? Capitalism runs them all. You cannot allow a social system to put anything before the citizens, in the case of most nations that use capitalism it is a nation design to put profit before people.
Many will say shallow minded things like "Yeah well you wouldnt have a computer or the internet without capitalism", to that I say, you are confused and maybe sick in some way. NEED drives innovation, not profit. The internet itself was not designed for profit in any wy shape or form, or security for that matter. It was designed to be a profitless government tool. Computers would have been invented as the need for the arose, much as the steam engine was (the steam engine was not invented in a capitalist nation, nor for profit, but for functionality...aka need.).
As long as we allow financial profit to dictate our lives and actions like freakin ferengi we as humans have no other future but to become products ourselves. More like tools than people, and treated the same way. In case you havent noticed, with great profit comes great corruption. Capitalism tied to democracy results in rampant fascism. Quality is lowered, profit is increased, people are farmed, entire nations get pumped and dumped.
Yet we have Iphones and murica so it must be good right? I mean it says that it is good on some paper, loads of these smart people that make millions off the system say it is good so that means its good right?
I think meaningful repeated "unscripted" content is the best for longevity. I also think that if it feels like a grind and rewards no-lifers, then that idea is also doomed to fail. So what I mean by meaningful in this case would not be just cosmetic rewards but in-game politics, maybe unique costumes, mounts, guild housing, weapon skins, that are unique and only available when your faction is in power. Stuff like that.
Looking forward to: Crowfall / Lost Ark / Black Desert Mobile
Saturation is not what's the problem, since I know saturation exist since early 90's. In fact back then the access to PC's, internet and MMO's being something still unknown while there was also far superior titles that were very competitive in nature makes your argument DMKano not so logical, imo.
The problem today is that producers want to have full control over us, what we can do in their games rather than allow us to have freedom to shape their games based through our actions and choices. So, the endless themepark content dependent rails were shipped that were more of the same only worse than what WOW already was offering. No wonder Trion (Rift), SOE (SWG NGE, DCUO, EQ 2 etc) and Funcom (Age of Conan, Secret World) are just some of the big example of once highly successful producers are nearly extinct today.
Look at EVE, look at Ultima Online, look at Second Life and how highly regarded SWG Pre-CU is still spoken of until today, and those were the only decent MMO's that didn't follow the themepark on rails, content dependent formula. More importantly they all focused on players importance and unique experiences based on players path and choices.
Star Citizen is doing something right with the bounty system in place. Bottom line, players need to have purpose, big purpose, some meaning and long term goals to aim for to get sucked and immersed into these games that are supposed to feel like virtual worlds. The market exists and it's bigger than ever just the product is lacking, despite the tools and technology being available and that's because doing something simpler, cheaper without much creativity, risks to try something fresh, something different, no wonder it won't be successful in the long run.
It's at the end those who spend $ on what was released these last 5½+ years, they are the ones who encourage these type of games to continue, and as long as they gain some profits expect nothing to change. I might even be skipping WOW: Legion because I know 80%+ of my free time will end up just doing endless 3v3 arena for some website rank, some number that at the end makes no difference whatsoever, but braggin rights, which I can find from playing these F2P FPS games as well.
Boy: Why can't I talk to Him?
Mom: We don't talk to Priests.
As if it could exist, without being payed for.
F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing.
Even telemarketers wouldn't think that.
It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.