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Why do MMORPG's suck so much these days
Scolioz
Member UncommonPosts: 110
The first MMORPG I played was Asheron's Call back in 1999 / 2000 and there hasn't been any MMO game since than that held my attention like that one did. World of Warcraft was the only one that kept me playing for about 6 months when it first came out.
It's all just shit.
It's all just shit.
Comments
Their small (30 days), their on rails,their easy, abilities don't count for anything, they have CASH SHOPS.... Dungeons are mini games. No reason to get to know the people.
Should I go on ?
Its like going to the arcade in the late nineties and finding all the video game machines had been replaced with a new type of slot machine.
Moreover, these days the industry is scared to even try and there are other genres trending. But all things in life are cyclical and eventually, it will be the time of MMORPGs once again.
Executive Editor (Games) http://www.wccftech.com
In before the "it's just nostalgia" turds.
Games focused more on short term fun to hook players after that and it got way worse when F2P and pay2win gamesstarted to take over. Suddenly you earn more on getting a bunch of whales play for a couple of months then getting your players hooked for years and that have changed MMOs a lot, more then Wows release in 2004 did even.
1) Novelty has worn off
2) We changed - time issue
3) No innovation
4) The market is saturated with cheaply made crap
5) Cost prices have increased manifold making it more difficult for a western studio to delve into the mix.
6) Increased competition for MMO-like lobby games.
Cryomatrix
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
The 5 years development cycle certainly doesn't help here and neither does publishers with zero imagination themselves and who shot down any idea too far from the norm.
It is not the competition from lobby games, the earliest MMOs went up against Diablo, Quake 2, Counterstrike and so on themselves. Or to be more exact, the lobby games have changed while MMOs basically just become easier with more pay2win the last 10 years. Of course lootboxes means the lobby game is moving in the same direction themselves now.
Just focusing on short term profit is what is slowing killing the MMORPGs. Games with 5 years development time need to be profitable long term or you could make a FPS, TCG or something else way cheaper then a MMO for the same short term profit.
The really successful MMOs like Wow and Lineage are so successful because they earned so much money for such long time, both games is still earning far more then their original development cost each year 14 respectively 19 years after they were made. No other genre can repeat that achivement.
Today the companies want to put in some cash and get a quick return instead of having something that will keep them running for a long time and MMOs perform poorly there. And the more they focus on short term goals the worse the genre are doing.
A lot of that is to blame on the huge publishing studios, the CEOs of them don't plan to stay 20 or 10 years so they don't really care if a game have the company set for a long time, earning 100 mils in 3 years is way better is better for them then earning 300 mil in 10 years with a peak in the middle.
And they also don't like taking risks prefering to play safe. 100 mil safe money is better then 0-500 mils, that together with the fact that is is easier and somewhat cheaper to copy existing games is why there is so little innovation today. Games like UO, EQ and even Wow were rather risky projects, they could have failed misarably and investors are more careful today.
MAGA
There is a lot of truth to that. Most games these days are not designed to be fun games they are designed as a marketing tool to get people to buy crap.
I have had two extremely special gaming experiences, the first one was my first MUD that I played for a total of five years, my second one was my first mmorpg that I played for five years.
Instead of chasing the impossible I am now having my third special gaming experience, this time its one done in person instead of playing on a computer.
I've been pretty happy with how that works out. Swapping between the two when one type of game gets tiring for about a year. Dropping EVE for screeps was a nice bit of special sauce to keep me on MMOs full time since Screeps'es mechanics bear no resemblance to an RPG in most cases.
Personally I think that almost every MMO playing like a very very narrow subset of RPG are tiring people out of the genre way faster than they should be.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
Amazon have some kind of AAA project and I guess we could can the crowd funded Star citizen one as well (it has a huge budget at least). That is 2. 10 years ago it was at least 5 times as many so clearly are the genre not doing as awesome today as back in 2008.
That doesn't mean all MMO fans are miserable but what it means is that if the trend continues Western MMOs will eventually die. That would still take a rather long while but something need to change if the genre want to start growing in America and Europe again.
Wow probably had as much western players in 2008 as the top 5 western games have combined today, maybe it even had more. If you think the gernre is doing as good as ever you are in denial or live in Asia.
They scream for the near impossible things like human like AI instead of demanding the development of deep, layered player driven systems system.
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
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