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The Real Reason Why New MMO's Suck (IMHO!)
//\//\oo
Member, Newbie CommonPosts: 2,767
Expectations!
That's right: Games haven't been getting worse at all; your expectations have just gone through the roof!
Being a gamer for more than 22 years, I can recall the time when 8 bits were used to create masterpieces and 16 bits were used to create epic masterpieces: The Legend of Zelda for the NES was absolutely revolutionary for it's time, but if you were to create something of that caliber today (even with great graphics) people would refuse to pay a dime.
I remember playing my first online video game: A MUD. Any kid by today's standards wouldn't be held for more than a minute, but back then people were forced to use their imaginations and put a lot more effort into their gaming experience than kids these days. Role playing wasn't something done by a minority; it was done by EVERYBODY, because there were no fancy 3d graphics which could completely rape your imagination leaving the creativity to the code.
What I've seen a lot of people omit in their analyses of WoW's success was the amount of capital invested as well as the economic conditions at the time: They had already had the basis for an efficient engine from Warcraft 3 as well as a huge company to support them should they fail, which made their venture both cheaper and less risky than what new MMO developers face today. It takes tens of millions of dollars just to provide something as basic as WoW in terms of content, graphics and gameplay quality without ripping something else off.
New MMO's have to include most of WoW's features, which evolved from hundreds of millions of dollars worth of revenue over years brought back to the present. Even with the most efficient company possible, this is not an easy venture; trumping all of the aforementioned with more innovations is an even greater challenge on top of investors who are extremely risk averse due to the current economic uncertainty who are much less willing than they were to invest in a business with a pretty bad historical outcome when taking every MMORPG attempt into account (i.e. AoC, Earth and Beyond).
Add competition from Xbox-live and other innovations and you get what you see today: One successful MMO and many ones that are hanging on by a thread in comparison.
TLDR : Consumer expectations due to evolving technologies and economic conditions including available investment and competition have been hampering the new MMO releases (in my opinion).
This is a sequence of characters intended to produce some profound mental effect, but it has failed.
Comments
I wud love to play a remake of the first Zelda
Still one of my favorite franchise , even bought a wii just to play twillight princess
Well put, and as such, yes, I expect greater things from new MMO's, but don't for a moment think that Blizzard is the sole innovator, they copied from many many other games as well. I still have Civ2, HOMM3, and Pitfall2 - plus some other oldies loaded on my newer system.
The 2 greatest things I wish WoW would add, would be player housing and an alignment system which affects how npc's interact with your toon. Which surprisingly are both in Runes of Magic.
The one thing that you fail to remember however is that while expectations are high, the reason we also don't leave for other games... is community. My level 80 toons in WoW, are getting better and better geared, and more well known in WoW... albeit from not being known to having 3 people know me is a huge improvement
But never-the-less, community in WoW is high. When people leave for other games, they get burnt out within 1 month, because there is no community, yet. If on average players waited at least 2 months, they would probably be hooked.
Don't forget in the golden days of gaming, 300k players was considered great for an mmo, a success story. Now-a-days, if you don't have 1 million then it's bombed in the media, which gives people more of a reason to gripe. They assume if the media thinks it's bad, so should they.
Aion looks to be an awesome game, the beta is surprisingly polished - probably has to do with the fact that is't been out for some time in China and Korea. But other then balancing issues and some minor bugs, it could be a really nice game... which I don't expect to bother with for at least 3-4 weeks after release personally, due to expected queue times to be around 2-4 hours on launch.
Spitt
Uber100.com - Add your MMO site today!
I agree completely, but there are few games that have all of the practical features that WoW does including half-decent graphics. WoW definitely copied a lot of different things from different games, but few games have all of those features, because they don't have all of the manpower to pull it off as quickly.
This is a sequence of characters intended to produce some profound mental effect, but it has failed.
The real reason is that developing companies treat them like business models first, then tack on the entertainment, if any, after. Instead of relying on good content that is very replayable, they use deceptive phsychological mechanics and reward systems that only an obssessive compulsive would find fun and the rest just get sucked in for the ride. They put in just enough effort on the entertainment value to gloss over their business oriented mechanics. Don't you think it's funny how outsiders of the genre keep pointing how these MMO's play like jobs rather than games? It's one of the biggest reasons why the genre as a whole is ridiculed by the outside world other than those who profit from it, yet I bet they laugh at us on the way to the bank.
Take raiding for example. Every MMO tries to force this down our throats, despite its lack of popularity. Yet, this kind of content is gold for them, it appeals to the addictive nature with it's reward system, despite the need to replay it ad nauseum in order to attain those shiny bits of loot. I would bet my soul that if you could get the same rewards with regular questing or just random drops from mobs, you would see a mass exodus from this outdated, outmoded and outrageous raid content. Add onto that, it's also the cheapest way for them to program without having to put any real effort into replayable content that the majority of players would enjoy.
The way they set up their questing hubs. Notice how they make you run back and forth without the ability to clump all of the quests that send you to the same area or NPC together? Purely time sink.
Crafting, not in itself a malicious time sink, but in the way they make you wait tedious amounts of time for the combination of ingredients or the high rate of failure on important items or the need to grind for cash to either buy certain components or just to buy the products themselves. The sheer grind of skilling up. Crafting is a niche game play, yet every game puts a large focus on it becasue it's a great time waster not just for the crafter, but also the adventurers who are forced to be dependent on their products. Not just the gear, but health, mana and buff potions and bandages and so forth.
The genre is stagnant, the developers are lazy and sadistic and the publishers and investors are looking to milk it for all it's worth.
With PvE raiding, it has never been a question of being "good enough". I play games to have fun, not to be a simpering toady sitting through hour after hour of mind numbing boredom and fawning over a guild master in the hopes that he will condescend to reward me with shiny bits of loot. But in games where those people get the highest progression, anyone who doesn't do that will just be a moving target for them and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay money for the privilege. - Neanderthal
Edited to add more ^^
Forgot to mention the achievement thing which was recently added... which first saw on WAR's release... within 1-2 months, WoW had it too. Tho WAR has much better achievements then WoW I think. WoW I think added them as a response to something they found added appeal and an endgame attitude to people, and a goal for them to do until reached. WAR on the other hand made it part of the game from the start and was well thought out.
Aion will also have achievements btw, but in their case, using the title given with them, gives you a stat bonus.
Spitt
Uber100.com - Add your MMO site today!
Agreed! Games are no longer made by gamers for gamers and for fun or love of prgramming, they're written for profit and nothing else.
Sure, companies have to make a profit, I'm not against that but the love has gone IMHO.
You can't wake a person who is pretending to be asleep. ~Navajo Proverb
@Vrazule
So you would rather have all the quest guys all located together in one area, and perhaps the ability to run in a clockwise fashion around a given area to complete a set of quests. And in this way, you would feel more compelled to play it?
Perhaps you would like vendors to sell you all the food and pots you will ever need?
The pots issue reminds me of RFO. Someone game me some currency when I was level 1, and I was able to thin buy 1k health pots, which btw had no timer on them. This effectively allowed me to powerlevel my own toon, never running out of health, never dying... I quit the game. At that point it was too easy, there was no challenge.
What you see as a time sink, I see as taking out the boredom of the game - in that I don't want to grind mobs all day. I don't think anyone wants to simply grind all day. Imagine a world where there were no quests, no tradeskills, and everything could be bought at the market. Now add to this a drop rate of 1000% times whatever you need to buy to make your character elite... Now lets also take away Raiding, and everything else you think is a time sink, and this is what we get... Boredom... or Second Life?
Those individual time sinks all add up to make a game more enyoyable.
Spitt
Uber100.com - Add your MMO site today!
Agreed! Games are no longer made by gamers for gamers and for fun or love of prgramming, they're written for profit and nothing else.
Sure, companies have to make a profit, I'm not against that but the love has gone IMHO.
If you want a game of the kind of epic magnitude, then you will have to pay money for it. The love of programming really breaks down when you're debugging tens of thousands of lines of code; then it changes from love to business.
A small team of fanatics would have to sacrifice their entire lives to perform the work a team of full paid employees delivers in a couple of years: It's simply not feasible to not expect a complete lack of investment, which entails a required rate of return and therefore necessitates the implementation of a business model.
The kind of MMORPGs you see today would not have been made into existence were it not for the allure of returns, so you should never, ever expect an "entertainment before business" model.
This is a sequence of characters intended to produce some profound mental effect, but it has failed.
I agree to an extent. The problem is I feel its the developer's and company's expectations hampering the industry more at this point than anything else. That isn't to say consumers are innocent because you have a valid and credible point. Problem is the companies all think they're going to have a cash cow and be the next multi-million player based game (regardless of the bullshit line they always give when asked about it) and it shows in their product - lack of Q&A, lack of creativity, pisspoor customer service, mismanagement in focus,direction, goals, lack of realistic expectations,etc.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
1) Hype
2) Producers are impatient, game gets released too fast.
3) Devs want to make lots of money instead of a good game
These are the main reasons imo.
Yes, our expectations are higher.. but they should be. They are also much much more expensive to create and market in order to do well. I don't know about you but I've heard enough of these threads... can't people think up something new and different to talk about?
Agreed! Games are no longer made by gamers for gamers and for fun or love of prgramming, they're written for profit and nothing else.
Sure, companies have to make a profit, I'm not against that but the love has gone IMHO.
This. Completely this.
My expectations haven't gone up. In fact, I'm simply looking for a game with the featues that were available in SWG 5 years ago. The fact that no game has come close to comparing to the features SWG had so long ago tells me games have gotten worst, while my expectations have remained constant.
Tried: LotR, CoH, AoC, WAR, Jumpgate Classic
Played: SWG, Guild Wars, WoW
Playing: Eve Online, Counter-strike
Loved: Star Wars Galaxies
Waiting for: Earthrise, Guild Wars 2, anything sandbox.
No, IMHO.
This is a sequence of characters intended to produce some profound mental effect, but it has failed.
Agreed! Games are no longer made by gamers for gamers and for fun or love of prgramming, they're written for profit and nothing else.
Sure, companies have to make a profit, I'm not against that but the love has gone IMHO.
Both quotes are closer to the truth that what the original poster speculates about. Most companies are to concerned about making products and not about making games.
People want fun games and they won't mind if Game B doesn't have all the same features of Game A.
Warcraft certainly didn't have more features that other games already on the market and it sure did ok. The reason it was successful is due to the design process of making the game fun first above all else. Extra features and refinement came over time.
Companies don't need limitless budgets to make games fun, they just need to know what they are doing.
I disagree. New MMOs suck because they aren't nearly as good as older MMOs. Compare WAR and DAoC for example. DAoC has more features. I think we'd all expect the new MMOs to be at least as good as previous MMOs, and then hopefully go above and beyond.
______________________
Give a man some fun and you entertain him for a day. Teach a man to make fun and you entertain him for a lifetime.
some of you are not kids anymore, MMOs these days are developed with the ADHD kids in mind
I did not read all the posts in here, but I did skim some of them.
This really is a matter of perspective. The younger generation who started with these newer game (WoW and such) will not find the old games fun for the most part. While the older generation (myself included) are fans of the older games. It is not a matter of the new games sucking, it is just a whole new generation of games, and players to play them. I do not see the old style coming back anytime soon, but I am hoping that the "next-gen" games come along in the near future and change the current style.
What I am seeing from these companies is they just keep making games along the current path with little change between all the games. To me they are all just being cautious, and not wanting to take a chance with a new style. It will just take the 1 company to think outside the box and hopfully do it right.
This is also not just an issue with devs. The player base is also at fault for the games coming out. We are paying to play during this generation of mmo's, and we do it willingly. Sure a lot of people might be doing it just for something to do, but with the current number across all current games is astounding. Until the market starts to fall the current style will most likely keep on coming.
This is not really true, at least not for me. I've had a blast playing many of the current MMO's. The problem is, I eventually reach a point where some part of the game (usually PvP) is so utterly broken it just boggles my mind. At that point I become so disgusted and frustrated with the game I just can't play it anymore. I've waited and hoped for many of my favorite games to have these obviously broken game elements fixed, but it never happens. Heck, they usually just get worse.
@Abrahmm
swgemu anyone?
Spitt
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