Personally my key 'mmo' atm is Conan Exiles (pve).
Sure we only have about 20 players peak hour but we are familiar with other people, when a patch comes out or a purge happens we communicate and help each other out. Trading to help others.
What we have is the feeling of discovery, community and advancement that you don't get anymore in big mmos.
Leveling systems in traditional mmos don't respect our time, its just busy work to get to the good content. Just give good content asap!
I never get to good stuff (if it exists) because I can't stomach to tedious path to get to it.
For me, personally, there are a couple of reasons why I leave a game behind.
Expense. I'm on a budget, here. I'm not one of the mega-whales that every single game with a cash-shop seems to think I am.
Repetition. I've not seen any new game ideas. The industry has been at this MMORPG thing for over 20 years now, yet no one has managed to offer any significant changes to game play in that time. Yes, these beasts take an awful lot to get them off the ground, but the potential of the genre has not expanded beyond the initial Combat and Crafting.
Max-level population. Most games these days have population only at the very highest levels. If you're new to a game, there's never anyone around. Granted, this problem gets worse the longer a game lasts, but even in the new games, there's a blatant rush to max level, as if the game starts when there's nothing else to do. News flash: when there's nothing else to do, there's nothing else to do.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
I think as we all get older, who have been into MMORPGs for the past 20+ years, we expect more out of them. Some of us have legit played through all the old ones in that time, and we're tired of things looking dated or having garbage gameplay.
I wanted to like things like Elyon or New World that came out in the last couple of years, but my god they just feel so boring and hollow and I expect more in 2022.
I don't think oversaturation is the problem. That implies an excess of choice. But, the MMORPG genre has the fewest amount of games released each year compared to other genres. Oversaturation is not the problem.
Unmet expectations.....is also not the problem. Sure, if you over-promise and under-deliver, its gonna piss off some people. But ultimately, gamers judge a product based on what is playable. If you build a good game, regardless of expectations, players will stick around and have fun.
The problem is one of design.
Like others have already said, the MMORPG genre has the most potential, but the least realised potential. The unique selling point - being massively multiplayer - is rarely utilised. The RPG design usually copies single player design, rather than being designed for a multiplayer environment. Single player games usually lose 75% of players by the end of month 1, so we really shouldn't be surprised that as MMOs more closely resemble single player games, they have run into the same retention problems.
Currently Playing: WAR RoR - Spitt rr7X Black Orc | Scrotling rr6X Squig Herder | Scabrous rr4X Shaman
The formula doesn't change enough. To many of them are based now on gacha mechanics or grinding. Older titles did a better job of offering more reasons to be social.
MMO's share one common flaw. The assumption that everyone playing them wants to be social.
I have been playing MMO's since Everquest first arrived in 1999. During that time I've done a fair amount of grouping and raiding across many games, but as the years have worn on the culture of players has changed a lot. It used to be more about helping each other ("item X just dropped for quest Z, anyone needs this?") to a culture of selfishness and greed ("selling item X for real $$$"). Anyone who wants to experience how players used to interact just needs to jump into the Everquest test server where items and currency have no $$$ value. There is no toxicity.
Over the years I have slowly adopted an increasingly solitary play-style, shunning pretty much all group activities, such that now I automatically look for in-game settings to block group invites, guild invites, etc.
This inevitably leads to hard walls where character progress becomes impossible. Content is locked behind group and raid activities. Essential items are no-drop raid only attainable. Even crafting ends up requiring items that only drop in raids, so it offers no substitute option.
"So why play MMO's at all if you don't want to play nice with others?"
MMO's offer a large world with the potential for exploration in a way that no other genre does. Also, although I don't interact with other people much beyond auction house trading, I like being in a world that feels alive by having other people around. A bit like how empty it would feel going to a shopping mall if you are the only shopper, compared to being in a mall packed with other shoppers.
My biggest gripe is that there is no path to the top gear for solo players. Even if it requires more grinding, playing many more hours than the next guy to achieve the same result.
My question to other MMO players is why do all MMO's offer an easy path to max level for everyone to do on their own, and only then force them to group up to make progress?
Shouldn't grouping be mandatory from level 1, so everyone knows what to expect later on?
Maybe this is because if they did that, people like me wouldn't buy the game to boost subscriber numbers for a month or two.
It seems that the developers recognize to have a viable player base, they need people like me who are happy doing their own thing. But then when it comes to end game, its all party dungeons and raids and that is when I quit and move on.
If you want to keep people like me around, all you have to do is offer me a path to get the same kind of stuff (at a much slower pace) than I could get by doing the social thing. Otherwise, I'm off to the next shiny download, dreaming maybe this will be my new home for years to come, but knowing that honestly, it really really won't be.
I'm an old mmorpg lover but most of the new games are Asian style looks and combat that turnn me off or even worse, are heavy cash shop and I'm sick of that shit.
So I just play a mix of dota and some iso turn based rpgs now.
mmorpgs, in general, are terrible, that is the reason.
Games like GTA V, Fortnite, PubG, Minecraft, CSGO, DOTA, LoL have people still playing them year after year after year.
mmorpgs on the other hand seem to be made for a different playerbase than the one that generally likes the genre for the reasons it became successful.
Worst genre in gaming.
Jack of some trades, master of none. That is why games that take very specific elements (survival, moba, lobby etc.) flourish yet the ‘all you can eat buffet’ grows stagnant after just a few bites. ‘Online’ was the distinguishing feature back in the day, now everything is always online.
But still, some of those worlds…. There is magic in there, somewhere.
/Cheers, Lahnmir
It's in actually creating massively multiplayer interaction in a persistent shared world.
Things like player cities with elected mayors, or territory control actually meaning something to the game world, or PvE forces that can alter how the game world reacts to players and can, in turn, be influenced by players.
It's by actually creating a game that leverages the only thing this genre *ever* had going for it, instead of trying to make scripted content and action combat to compete with games like the ones blueturtle mentioned that focus on their specific genres' strengths and reap the rewards for doing so while the MMORPG genre becomes more and more irrelevant in the face of smaller shared world games.
Alas, the integrity of persistent virtual worlds like the above are not incredibly compatible with the current trend of maximizing microtransactions for the smallest amount of dev work humanly possible.
Every game is hyped as the second coming, yet it's released as a buggy shallow mess. (See new world). You have games that are either trying to be a jack of all trades but fail at them all or master of one but never figured that one thing out. They have a very short beginner to max time with no content at end game. The quests are dull and forgettable, seriously how many games do the deliver letter to so and so that's like 20 feet away. kill 10 rats and return, 5 wolf paws and return. We have seen this all before and it's been done way better than now, it's time for devs to step up their game a little. Not to mention the predatory monetization that they are ALL shooting for, quick high income for a ruined reputation, greed is going to be the destruction of a lot of these companies.
Honestly too as gamers we have a lot of blame here, I see complaints about diablo, every EA game yet how much are you dropping on them?
It's not hard to figure out, the hard thing is pointing out the main one of the long list of screw ups.
I see some people compare saturation to the genre and not the entertainment medium as a whole and it makes me think is that the right way to look at it. Time is limited and everyone values it differently. If a new single player game comes out that someone is looking forward to, they might choose to play that for 1-2 weeks instead of logging into a mmorpg. There are also some people that just like to dabble or treat mmorpgs like single players games, where they just play for a bit and then put it down for a few months to a year. Going back to my point of time, it doesn't just apply to games vs games but even shows/activities/etc. Supposedly, the average adult has between 5-10 per week for entertainment (dont quote me on that though). If that's true, that doesn't mean the person wants to use that time to game. They might want to watch shows/go out/etc.
To kind of over simplify it, it could just be the people have changed as opposed to the games themselves. Even if a person was hardcore in the past, does not mean they can be again. What could also be true is that the nature of people has changed and the people of the current generation aren't drawn to what was popular 10+ years ago. Unless you change the way people think now, this is just the track things will continue to go down.
The only real solution (to me) is for publishers/developers spending the money to accommodate both. It may not be the most profitable way to do things, but it does keep the integrity of the industry, which kind of feels more important since gaming is realistically competing with other sources of entertainment.
I mean this genre is an oversaturated market if you look at all the trash too. It's just like what a bunch of people here already said.
The genre is stale and most MMORPGs just aren't that good. Every top 10 list for MMOs in the past 5/6 years has been the same games in slightly different orders. The dropoff is so harsh because there's no quality or significant enough difference from Game A and Game B
People shouldn't STILL be talking about Tera as the metric for good MMO action combat. You know how old that game is now? Yikes.
If you're looking for a good RPG, single player ones deliver that infinitely better. Single-player and non-MMO co-op games also offer better gameplay. Those games also typically don't have terrible monetization as well or terrible grinds to make you want to pay for something in a cash shop or sub.
What we will keep seeing is people blindly putting their faith in games that offer nothing because everyone wants the next MMO to be "the one" (see: New World) and then it doesn't pan out even if the writing is in everyone's face.
MMO's share one common flaw. The assumption that everyone playing them wants to be social.
I have been playing MMO's since Everquest first arrived in 1999. During that time I've done a fair amount of grouping and raiding across many games, but as the years have worn on the culture of players has changed a lot. It used to be more about helping each other ("item X just dropped for quest Z, anyone needs this?") to a culture of selfishness and greed ("selling item X for real $$$"). Anyone who wants to experience how players used to interact just needs to jump into the Everquest test server where items and currency have no $$$ value. There is no toxicity.
Over the years I have slowly adopted an increasingly solitary play-style, shunning pretty much all group activities, such that now I automatically look for in-game settings to block group invites, guild invites, etc.
This inevitably leads to hard walls where character progress becomes impossible. Content is locked behind group and raid activities. Essential items are no-drop raid only attainable. Even crafting ends up requiring items that only drop in raids, so it offers no substitute option.
"So why play MMO's at all if you don't want to play nice with others?"
MMO's offer a large world with the potential for exploration in a way that no other genre does. Also, although I don't interact with other people much beyond auction house trading, I like being in a world that feels alive by having other people around. A bit like how empty it would feel going to a shopping mall if you are the only shopper, compared to being in a mall packed with other shoppers.
My biggest gripe is that there is no path to the top gear for solo players. Even if it requires more grinding, playing many more hours than the next guy to achieve the same result.
My question to other MMO players is why do all MMO's offer an easy path to max level for everyone to do on their own, and only then force them to group up to make progress?
Shouldn't grouping be mandatory from level 1, so everyone knows what to expect later on?
Maybe this is because if they did that, people like me wouldn't buy the game to boost subscriber numbers for a month or two.
It seems that the developers recognize to have a viable player base, they need people like me who are happy doing their own thing. But then when it comes to end game, its all party dungeons and raids and that is when I quit and move on.
If you want to keep people like me around, all you have to do is offer me a path to get the same kind of stuff (at a much slower pace) than I could get by doing the social thing. Otherwise, I'm off to the next shiny download, dreaming maybe this will be my new home for years to come, but knowing that honestly, it really really won't be.
Impressive first post.....I am guessing you have done this before......
It isn't rocket science, and it's no longer just an MMO problem, Conan Exiles being the most recent victim.
Game development is being taken over by companies like Tencent, who have absolutely no desire or passion in designing games. They design virtual store fronts wrapped in psychological traps meant to drain wallets instead of interesting worlds for people to escape into. Games used to be made "By gamers for gamers", which meant it was made with being fun and entertaining in mind. But now corporations pretending to be something they aren't have convinced a bunch of "useful idiots" to attack gamers for wanting genuine entertainment, because they know all they have to do when THAT group gets upset is to throw in some tokenism and they'll eat it up like pigs at the slop trough.
For me a lot of the times when I quit an mmo, it's because I can't do the content in the manner I want to do it in. For example, I don't like grouping with randoms, so I'll try to play the game with my brother. We start out doing the main quests and we try to play together but quickly realize that we are either one shotting everything or getting put into instanced zones every few minutes so it's pointless to even try to cooperate. So we play solo for a few hours until one of us (usually my brother) isn't wowed by the new skills anymore and realizes that the actual game is pretty boring. Just a treadmill of uninspiring scenarios and braindead quests. It's at this point that he quits. But I, having more fortitude, am able to stick around and play for a bit.
I'll push on through the brain-dead early parts of the game and then usually there's a period in the middle of the game where it actually becomes kind of fun. The story scenarios get better and the progression for new skills and gear feel good. I'll be enjoying myself and then BAM I hit a wall called "end game". All of a sudden the solo scenarios that the game built up for me to take on solo (usually through some kind of chosen one narrative) will now only be possible to clear by grouping up with other "chosen ones". I try to invite my brother again to play through the game and help me, but he doesn't want to go through the slog of boring content and would much rather play other games. And even if he does want to join me, these "end game" challenges usually require 5+ people so we'd have to group with randoms still.
I bite my tongue and try to clear the content by using the usually present auto group finder. It's then I run into the next problem which is the layered endgame. It's not enough that the contents now require groups, but there are also tiers to this type of content. And the games are mostly all designed so that once you move out of one tier of group content, you advance to the next tier and never look back. This leads to emptier queues for the slightly lower than max tier content which still requires grouping. After sitting in a queue for 30 mins I call it quits and go play a single player RPG.
The design of these games are sometimes so bizarre to me. They are supposed to be mmos but at the gate they alienate the mm part from their designs. This turns away people that were looking for that group experience from the jump and they go find that elsewhere. Then after many levels of having you used to playing the game like a single player rpg, they all of a sudden want to be mmos again with all the mandatory group content. This alienates people who at this point just want to play the game solo and they will just go play a solo rpg. For a genre that has it's success dependent on as many people playing as possible, the games do too much to turn people away.
In my honest opinion... while the developers are maybe not what they used to be.. us players are not aswell.
Most of us are over our 30's or more, and we had our golden times between 16 and 24 years old, let it be World of Warcraft, Lineage 2, Runescape, Tibia..
Were those games the best thing ever created at the time? No they weren't, we like to think they were, because we had a great time playing it, but they weren't.
We were experiencing online gaming for the first time (so did our friends) and we were engaging each other, that was probably 90% of the fun. That was what it made us stick around.
It was exciting to log in and have the ability to meet people from other cities, or even other countries. We were not used to that kind of relationships, and we got to play some okayish game while completing content together, awesome!
Now we are overexposed to endless sources of entertainment, and we don't find anything enjoyable anymore. Smartphones and it's endless pit of games, all the streaming platforms, social media... and it's never enough. At the end of the day we are always bored.
We have nostalgia, understandable. But are the games nowadays that bad? No they aren't, they are pretty awesome in fact. It's just that the playerbase (us, the ones between 30 and 45) just hates everything new, because nothing is good enough.
The best thing is when people stop playing a game because "it's dead". A good friend of mine stopped playing a popular game the other day, when i asked him about it he said:
- "Bro the game is dead, is no use playing it! Won't spend my precious time in a dead game, the devs are trash, the game is horrible"
- "Is that so? I logged in recently and looked good to me, did a couple of dungeons and got myself new gear, it was awesome"
- "Man, you know nothing, that particular streamer just said that the game is dead, he even uninstalled it live, lol. So did I"
- "Oh, I see.. why did you started playing then?"
- "Well, that particular streamer was playing the alfa and it was super dope, and then at launch i got the premium package and it was super cool. I couldn't log in for the first week because bro it was so hype!! Ah those were the days, but now the game is trash"
This is a theatralization of the actual conversation but it was more or less like this.
I think it's simpler than most people think. We're looking for all these "problems" with games, but it seems more likely it's just human psychology.
1. Fickle gamers: most gamers are younger with busier lives, so while they're quick to jump on the newest thing, they're quick to leave when the NEWER thing comes along.
2. Overhyping by media and streamers: YouTube and Twitch creators play, so their viewers quickly jump on board. As they move on, so do many of their viewers.
3. Jaded players: This happens all across entertainment as the "everything sucks" mentality takes hold and most things fail to meet the ever-expanding and often unreasonable expectations.
I think many companies just want to be the next "WoW", but that phenomenon isn't likely to repeat itself. In the same way we see massive-budget movies flopping in the box office, the problem is trying to get EVERYONE on board. Frankly, it's good we're seeing more indie games (including MMOs) being made. While some people may think a game is unsuccessful because it doesn't have a million players, that isn't exactly true.
then you will loose 90% of your Playerbase realy fast.
New World lost most of its player base because of how completely broken the game was. Every time the devs fixed a bug they would introduce 50 new ones.
The economy was completely destroyed as a result of the constant duping bugs / exploits. Again every time they fixed one exploit they introduced 10 more.
The Castle Siege PvP was a complete laggy disaster... The blamed this on certain skills causing the lag so they just completly nerfed those weapons into the floor. No surprise this did not fix the problems.
People were duping not only large amounts of money but also the end game gear making it worthless.
The list goes on and on. They did not lose most of their player base because of only having a grind as endgame but rather the completely broken game and incompetent developers. Now eventually without new content, yes they would have lost a lot of players with the current end game... but that is not what killed NW.
Crisis - the first world began to die...(this is the reality in capitalist countries). Another reason is the fact that the games industry is 'cutting costs' (to increase executive profits) which makes games horrible - unsurprisingly...
The moment I know the MMO is coming in from Korea, I know there's roughly a 85, maybe 90% chance that it's going to be low-effort garbage. A vast majority of them are. They can turn around a game that is either doing poorly in its native country or a publisher sees dollar signs by purchasing the rights to distribute a game that is more or less already created with built-in monetization and updates (if the game has been released for a while in Korea already). They can do voice-overs (usually very bad, see Rev Online, whatever else.) and maybe change up some of the most egregious pay-to-win features, but they can still monopolize on the ability to create roadblocks and problems for their players that they can sell solutions to. (Low inventory, locked out of dungeons without keys, whatever your poison).
It's an easy win because people here in the West will continue to suck down whatever dribble is brought to them because the MMO genre is stagnating to such a degree that we haven't seen a new MMO worth putting on a 'top 5s list' in the last 10 years. Most of the MMOs that are played and mentioned or are well known are at least 12+ years old. The new blood is fleeting, and the communities we once knew of have grown increasingly fickle as the "core base" of players either diminishes or is replaced by a wave of players who enter the space and immediately leave to the next game or follow their favorite streamer.
I think there's also just such a massive drive from older players though who just want something new. The formula is very trite and recognizable at this point. New as in innovative, something different. What that looks like? I don't think anyone knows. So folks move from new game to new game only to realize that they're horribly disappointed because it doesn't do much that sets itself apart from the games that have come before it. Same boring quests. Same boring grind. Dungeons, Raids, whatever. So once we figure out there's nothing new or innovative out there, we get nostalgic for the "old days" and look for something that reminds us of when MMOs were NEW and something interesting to explore and not just another generic game shit out by a publisher to capitalize on the fact that there's nothing interesting coming to the space.
I don't know why there even needs to be a debate about that. Simply put, MMORPGs released in the past two decades are copy/paste worse than the originals. New World failed because it was a mess, even though I was having fun with it I felt forced to stop playing it because I didn't think the devs would be able to fix the game so I was just wasting my time. There were too many issues ranging from server performance to combat, and to make matters worse, the new things they were adding to fix the game, i.e watermark system and other things, were making the game even worse. People are coming back to New World now because the game has actually got better, and it looks like it is going to get even better in the coming updates. New World is a fun game, if the devs are able to convince people that they can fix it, more and more people will go back.
In my honest opinion... while the developers are maybe not what they used to be.. us players are not aswell.
Most of us are over our 30's or more, and we had our golden times between 16 and 24 years old, let it be World of Warcraft, Lineage 2, Runescape, Tibia..
Were those games the best thing ever created at the time? No they weren't, we like to think they were, because we had a great time playing it, but they weren't.
We were experiencing online gaming for the first time (so did our friends) and we were engaging each other, that was probably 90% of the fun. That was what it made us stick around.
It was exciting to log in and have the ability to meet people from other cities, or even other countries. We were not used to that kind of relationships, and we got to play some okayish game while completing content together, awesome!
Now we are overexposed to endless sources of entertainment, and we don't find anything enjoyable anymore. Smartphones and it's endless pit of games, all the streaming platforms, social media... and it's never enough. At the end of the day we are always bored.
We have nostalgia, understandable. But are the games nowadays that bad? No they aren't, they are pretty awesome in fact. It's just that the playerbase (us, the ones between 30 and 45) just hates everything new, because nothing is good enough.
The best thing is when people stop playing a game because "it's dead". A good friend of mine stopped playing a popular game the other day, when i asked him about it he said:
- "Bro the game is dead, is no use playing it! Won't spend my precious time in a dead game, the devs are trash, the game is horrible"
- "Is that so? I logged in recently and looked good to me, did a couple of dungeons and got myself new gear, it was awesome"
- "Man, you know nothing, that particular streamer just said that the game is dead, he even uninstalled it live, lol. So did I"
- "Oh, I see.. why did you started playing then?"
- "Well, that particular streamer was playing the alfa and it was super dope, and then at launch i got the premium package and it was super cool. I couldn't log in for the first week because bro it was so hype!! Ah those were the days, but now the game is trash"
This is a theatralization of the actual conversation but it was more or less like this.
Comments
Sure we only have about 20 players peak hour but we are familiar with other people, when a patch comes out or a purge happens we communicate and help each other out. Trading to help others.
What we have is the feeling of discovery, community and advancement that you don't get anymore in big mmos.
Leveling systems in traditional mmos don't respect our time, its just busy work to get to the good content. Just give good content asap!
I never get to good stuff (if it exists) because I can't stomach to tedious path to get to it.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
I wanted to like things like Elyon or New World that came out in the last couple of years, but my god they just feel so boring and hollow and I expect more in 2022.
You have over 13k posts on a website named MMORPG....which you say is the worst genre in gaming? huh?
Really is simple as that.
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
I have been playing MMO's since Everquest first arrived in 1999. During that time I've done a fair amount of grouping and raiding across many games, but as the years have worn on the culture of players has changed a lot. It used to be more about helping each other ("item X just dropped for quest Z, anyone needs this?") to a culture of selfishness and greed ("selling item X for real $$$"). Anyone who wants to experience how players used to interact just needs to jump into the Everquest test server where items and currency have no $$$ value. There is no toxicity.
Over the years I have slowly adopted an increasingly solitary play-style, shunning pretty much all group activities, such that now I automatically look for in-game settings to block group invites, guild invites, etc.
This inevitably leads to hard walls where character progress becomes impossible. Content is locked behind group and raid activities. Essential items are no-drop raid only attainable. Even crafting ends up requiring items that only drop in raids, so it offers no substitute option.
"So why play MMO's at all if you don't want to play nice with others?"
MMO's offer a large world with the potential for exploration in a way that no other genre does. Also, although I don't interact with other people much beyond auction house trading, I like being in a world that feels alive by having other people around. A bit like how empty it would feel going to a shopping mall if you are the only shopper, compared to being in a mall packed with other shoppers.
My biggest gripe is that there is no path to the top gear for solo players. Even if it requires more grinding, playing many more hours than the next guy to achieve the same result.
My question to other MMO players is why do all MMO's offer an easy path to max level for everyone to do on their own, and only then force them to group up to make progress?
Shouldn't grouping be mandatory from level 1, so everyone knows what to expect later on?
Maybe this is because if they did that, people like me wouldn't buy the game to boost subscriber numbers for a month or two.
It seems that the developers recognize to have a viable player base, they need people like me who are happy doing their own thing. But then when it comes to end game, its all party dungeons and raids and that is when I quit and move on.
If you want to keep people like me around, all you have to do is offer me a path to get the same kind of stuff (at a much slower pace) than I could get by doing the social thing. Otherwise, I'm off to the next shiny download, dreaming maybe this will be my new home for years to come, but knowing that honestly, it really really won't be.
So I just play a mix of dota and some iso turn based rpgs now.
Things like player cities with elected mayors, or territory control actually meaning something to the game world, or PvE forces that can alter how the game world reacts to players and can, in turn, be influenced by players.
It's by actually creating a game that leverages the only thing this genre *ever* had going for it, instead of trying to make scripted content and action combat to compete with games like the ones blueturtle mentioned that focus on their specific genres' strengths and reap the rewards for doing so while the MMORPG genre becomes more and more irrelevant in the face of smaller shared world games.
Alas, the integrity of persistent virtual worlds like the above are not incredibly compatible with the current trend of maximizing microtransactions for the smallest amount of dev work humanly possible.
Honestly too as gamers we have a lot of blame here, I see complaints about diablo, every EA game yet how much are you dropping on them?
It's not hard to figure out, the hard thing is pointing out the main one of the long list of screw ups.
To kind of over simplify it, it could just be the people have changed as opposed to the games themselves. Even if a person was hardcore in the past, does not mean they can be again. What could also be true is that the nature of people has changed and the people of the current generation aren't drawn to what was popular 10+ years ago. Unless you change the way people think now, this is just the track things will continue to go down.
The only real solution (to me) is for publishers/developers spending the money to accommodate both. It may not be the most profitable way to do things, but it does keep the integrity of the industry, which kind of feels more important since gaming is realistically competing with other sources of entertainment.
The genre is stale and most MMORPGs just aren't that good. Every top 10 list for MMOs in the past 5/6 years has been the same games in slightly different orders. The dropoff is so harsh because there's no quality or significant enough difference from Game A and Game B
People shouldn't STILL be talking about Tera as the metric for good MMO action combat. You know how old that game is now? Yikes.
If you're looking for a good RPG, single player ones deliver that infinitely better. Single-player and non-MMO co-op games also offer better gameplay. Those games also typically don't have terrible monetization as well or terrible grinds to make you want to pay for something in a cash shop or sub.
What we will keep seeing is people blindly putting their faith in games that offer nothing because everyone wants the next MMO to be "the one" (see: New World) and then it doesn't pan out even if the writing is in everyone's face.
Impressive first post.....I am guessing you have done this before......
Game development is being taken over by companies like Tencent, who have absolutely no desire or passion in designing games. They design virtual store fronts wrapped in psychological traps meant to drain wallets instead of interesting worlds for people to escape into. Games used to be made "By gamers for gamers", which meant it was made with being fun and entertaining in mind. But now corporations pretending to be something they aren't have convinced a bunch of "useful idiots" to attack gamers for wanting genuine entertainment, because they know all they have to do when THAT group gets upset is to throw in some tokenism and they'll eat it up like pigs at the slop trough.
I'll push on through the brain-dead early parts of the game and then usually there's a period in the middle of the game where it actually becomes kind of fun. The story scenarios get better and the progression for new skills and gear feel good. I'll be enjoying myself and then BAM I hit a wall called "end game". All of a sudden the solo scenarios that the game built up for me to take on solo (usually through some kind of chosen one narrative) will now only be possible to clear by grouping up with other "chosen ones". I try to invite my brother again to play through the game and help me, but he doesn't want to go through the slog of boring content and would much rather play other games. And even if he does want to join me, these "end game" challenges usually require 5+ people so we'd have to group with randoms still.
I bite my tongue and try to clear the content by using the usually present auto group finder. It's then I run into the next problem which is the layered endgame. It's not enough that the contents now require groups, but there are also tiers to this type of content. And the games are mostly all designed so that once you move out of one tier of group content, you advance to the next tier and never look back. This leads to emptier queues for the slightly lower than max tier content which still requires grouping. After sitting in a queue for 30 mins I call it quits and go play a single player RPG.
The design of these games are sometimes so bizarre to me. They are supposed to be mmos but at the gate they alienate the mm part from their designs. This turns away people that were looking for that group experience from the jump and they go find that elsewhere. Then after many levels of having you used to playing the game like a single player rpg, they all of a sudden want to be mmos again with all the mandatory group content. This alienates people who at this point just want to play the game solo and they will just go play a solo rpg. For a genre that has it's success dependent on as many people playing as possible, the games do too much to turn people away.
Most of us are over our 30's or more, and we had our golden times between 16 and 24 years old, let it be World of Warcraft, Lineage 2, Runescape, Tibia..
Were those games the best thing ever created at the time? No they weren't, we like to think they were, because we had a great time playing it, but they weren't.
We were experiencing online gaming for the first time (so did our friends) and we were engaging each other, that was probably 90% of the fun. That was what it made us stick around.
It was exciting to log in and have the ability to meet people from other cities, or even other countries. We were not used to that kind of relationships, and we got to play some okayish game while completing content together, awesome!
Now we are overexposed to endless sources of entertainment, and we don't find anything enjoyable anymore. Smartphones and it's endless pit of games, all the streaming platforms, social media... and it's never enough. At the end of the day we are always bored.
We have nostalgia, understandable. But are the games nowadays that bad? No they aren't, they are pretty awesome in fact. It's just that the playerbase (us, the ones between 30 and 45) just hates everything new, because nothing is good enough.
The best thing is when people stop playing a game because "it's dead". A good friend of mine stopped playing a popular game the other day, when i asked him about it he said:
- "Bro the game is dead, is no use playing it! Won't spend my precious time in a dead game, the devs are trash, the game is horrible"
- "Is that so? I logged in recently and looked good to me, did a couple of dungeons and got myself new gear, it was awesome"
- "Man, you know nothing, that particular streamer just said that the game is dead, he even uninstalled it live, lol. So did I"
- "Oh, I see.. why did you started playing then?"
- "Well, that particular streamer was playing the alfa and it was super dope, and then at launch i got the premium package and it was super cool. I couldn't log in for the first week because bro it was so hype!! Ah those were the days, but now the game is trash"
This is a theatralization of the actual conversation but it was more or less like this.
This. Yep.
New World lost most of its player base because of how completely broken the game was. Every time the devs fixed a bug they would introduce 50 new ones.
The economy was completely destroyed as a result of the constant duping bugs / exploits. Again every time they fixed one exploit they introduced 10 more.
The Castle Siege PvP was a complete laggy disaster... The blamed this on certain skills causing the lag so they just completly nerfed those weapons into the floor. No surprise this did not fix the problems.
People were duping not only large amounts of money but also the end game gear making it worthless.
The list goes on and on. They did not lose most of their player base because of only having a grind as endgame but rather the completely broken game and incompetent developers. Now eventually without new content, yes they would have lost a lot of players with the current end game... but that is not what killed NW.
It's an easy win because people here in the West will continue to suck down whatever dribble is brought to them because the MMO genre is stagnating to such a degree that we haven't seen a new MMO worth putting on a 'top 5s list' in the last 10 years. Most of the MMOs that are played and mentioned or are well known are at least 12+ years old. The new blood is fleeting, and the communities we once knew of have grown increasingly fickle as the "core base" of players either diminishes or is replaced by a wave of players who enter the space and immediately leave to the next game or follow their favorite streamer.
I think there's also just such a massive drive from older players though who just want something new. The formula is very trite and recognizable at this point. New as in innovative, something different. What that looks like? I don't think anyone knows. So folks move from new game to new game only to realize that they're horribly disappointed because it doesn't do much that sets itself apart from the games that have come before it. Same boring quests. Same boring grind. Dungeons, Raids, whatever. So once we figure out there's nothing new or innovative out there, we get nostalgic for the "old days" and look for something that reminds us of when MMOs were NEW and something interesting to explore and not just another generic game shit out by a publisher to capitalize on the fact that there's nothing interesting coming to the space.