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MMOs on the decline since WoW ?
ThomasN7
87.18.7.148Member CommonPosts: 6,690
(1997-2004) - Ultima Online, Lineage,Lineage 2, Anarchy Online,Planetside,Asherons' Call,DAOC,EQ,EQ2,SWG,EvE Online,FFXI and WoW - The best time in mmo gaming. These mmos were more superior in quality and more fun to play compared to the current of what we have today.
(2005-2009) - Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, Lotro, Aion, Champions Online and Fallen Earth - Since 2004 it has been a pretty much a disaster. Alot of these mmos failed horribly for one reason or another. Lotro and Aion had polish but by far they are mearly bad rehashes of DAOC and WoW. The best mmo since 2004 sadly has been Free Realms and lets not forget Hello Kitty Online. MMOs at its finest hour. I don't think we can get any better since 2004. /sarcasm
(2010 and beyond) - Guild Wars 2, The Old Republic, StarTrek Online,Unannounced Blizzard mmo, Unannounced Turbine console mmo, Dust514 console mmo, Planetside 2 mmo and Torchlight mmo. Again so many good titles that will be hyped to the max but which ones will actually be quality mmos ?
Do you guys think we will actually have better success in 2010 or are we going to just get more hype and more item malls ? I guess only time will tell but it is an interesting subject. What do you guys think ? Me personally, I am mostly banking on Guild Wars 2 and The Old Republic. Bioware just keeps pumping out quality games and I just can't see Arenanet stinking up the place when Guild Wars has been the most successful game since WoW.
Comments
You forgot Final Fantasy XIV. Personally I think this will be the salvation of major change of direction for MMO's.
"There is only one thing of which I am certain, and that's nothing is certain."
Ooops forgot about that and you may be right. I had a great time playing FFXI. I'm pretty confident SE will make a good game but like the rest, we'll just have to wait and see.
I see two trends, consolidation and diversification:
Consolidation: 90% of the people play 10% of the MMOs. For the large part, these are the dedicated subscribers keeping the sub games in black ink. These games have money and can spend money to keep their products current and viable in a given market.
Diversification: The other 10% of the people play 90% of the MMOs. For most gamers in this category, long term subscription is out of the question (nobody subs 20 games at 15 a month). I would guess about half of this crowd of players is the box and bitch crowd. They buy the box, it doesn't meet their satisfaction requirements, they bitch about it, and wait for the next game to release (rinse and repeat). Also in this category are the "Free to Play" players, of various descriptions. Of the F2P, there are the never pays, the seldom pays, and the "purchased greatness" players who invest far more than others and usually do quite well because of it.
Consolidation games, just by the nature of the game category, must do an exceptional job at holding the interest of a large group of players. The games are branded as "hardcore and elitist" when marketed, but in reality they tend to be extremely easy for most content, and challenging enough at the most exclusive content to keep those sort of players happy. Broad creativity and innovation isn't normally a feature because they cannot afford the risk. Anything risky is kept to very minimal portions of the game where experimentation with new concepts can be done safely.
Diversification games are both a blessing and a plague on the MMO genre. They are free to innovate, but often under-funded and on strict timetables, most developers of this type of game are LUCKY to release a game that is even mostly completely and somewhat bug-free. Most are seriously incomplete and at best moderately buggy.
So, what's the future of MMORPGs? A few plates of finely crafted Vanilla, and many plates of stuff that you would barely call food that might be edible if you take the time to develop a taste for them, and ignore some of the rough edges.
I don't blame WoW. This is how all businesses evolve. Mainstream changes everything it touches.
Ken
www.ActionMMORPG.com
One man, a small pile of money, and the screwball idea of a DIY Indie MMORPG? Yep, that's him. ~sigh~
I'm not so sure it's a bad thing that these games are failing. People are going to get tired of wow at some point, and the rest of these games being released in such bad shape are going to kill off the market. After some time passing. Someone is going to see an opporunity and are bound to give it another shot. Bingo, just what people are going to be looking for. The next "World of Warcraft".
Wishful thinking.
FFXIV, War 40k, Bioware MMO...
I think we're in a lull at present. Tired of what's out there, but soon to pick up. Everything in life operates by going through stages of feast and famine. We're the latter at present.
That is exactly right, and we're not saying NO to save WoW, because it is already a lost cause. We are saying NO to dissuade the next group of greedy suits who decide to emulate Blizzard and Cryptic, etc.
We can prevent some of the future games from spewing this crap, but the sooner we start saying no, the better the results will be.
So - Stand up, pull up your pants, and walk away.
- MMO_Doubter
MMO development got kinda shocked that Wow attracted so many players so they all tried to get a piece of that. They missed that the big bunch from the start was Blizzard fans and after that they just kept on going because a huge game attracts more players.
Another company trying to copy will fail because they are not Blizzard. There are other big companies that can pull in their fans into the genre, like Bioware and Bethesda. But they can't get them in with just copying Wow, they must make the stuff their fans like.
Smaller companies didn't understand that, or they seems to be finally getting it now. A small company can only get so many players by making a great game that isn't like any other on the market, not by copying someone else.
Once a good game gets a million subs it will probably also start to grow like Wow, from mouth to mouth by players but few games have pulled that off. Only Guildwars and possibly Aion have done it so far.
If you look on your list do you notice that most of those games except L2 and EQ2 (why isn't GW on it?) had their own unique features and wasn't copies of other games. The disaster list holds a lot of games that offered something others already had done.
A game must offer a lot of new things or we will just stay playing the game we are playing now. That isn't enough, it must also be fun but it is a start.
Well what I believe transpired is what happens when something is a huge hit. You see it in the movies industry, you see it especially in the music industry just as well as in the VG industry. Remember when the "in" thing with movies was "Which natural disaster could we make a movie out of?" Asteroids and volcanoes and twisters, oh my! Or... dare I say it... remember the era of... "The Boy Bands?" How about the aftermath of the person who sang "Hit me baby one more time"?
I never realized how much I would empathize in a non-criminal sense in comparison with MMO's today with Top Dollar, from the movie "The Crow"...
-------------------
"Problem is, it's all been done before. You see what I'm saying?
*That's no reason to quit.
Wrong. Best reason to quit. Only reason to quit. A man has an idea. The idea attracts others like-minded. The idea expands. The idea becomes an institution. What was the idea? See, that's what's been bothering me, boys. But I'll tell ya, when I used to think about the idea itself, it'd put a big old smile on my face. You see, gentlemen, greed is for amateurs. Disorder, chaos, anarchy - Now that's fun!
*What about Devil's Night?
What about it? I started the first fires in this goddamn city. Before I knew it, every charlatan shitheel was imitating me. Do you know what they got now? Devil's Night greeting cards. Isn't that precious? Yeah. The idea has become an institution, boys. Time to move along.
*You don't want us to do "Light My Fire" time for the whole city?
No. No, I want you to set a fire so goddamn big, the god's will notice us again, that's what I'm saying. I want all of you boys to look me straight in the eye one more time and say, "are we having fun or what!?!?" "
---------------
It's not so much that MMO's are trying to "copy" the fire... they're trying to copy the popularity and prestige that results "from" the fire. Does that sorta make sense? Or is it getting late for me... *yawn*
"There is only one thing of which I am certain, and that's nothing is certain."
LOTRO should be on the good list. I jump between WoW and LOTRO and when out of content I read these pointless threads
Yeah I think we had our Golden Age of MMOs, where that started is another discussion (pre/postUO) but I don't think WoW was what killed it I think we were already headed there once games like WW2 Online (anyone remember running through the French country side for 10 mins.) started popping up, Funcom stopped listening to it's testers, etc. If anything SOE making what it did/does off of EQ was the beginning of the end in a long development cycle. Maybe that's where MMOs differ we can feast while starving. EQ was still going but besides a solitary bright point (IMHO), Shadowbane, I remember my post EQ as mostly trying to figure out why I had an aiming reticule in Planetside if my bullets didn't go where I aimed them. Granted that was my experience and I did enjoy the time I spent with L2 and even CoH early on but as I look back my best MMO days were in UO, then EQ, then SB. I enjoyed all the other games I played but not to the same extent.
I'm hoping Mythic can bounce back and bring us something new, it's own IP would be even better. i know they are trying hard with WAR but the two party PvP system is played out and if anyone can do it right again you got to hope for the guys that brought us DAoC and WAR is still fun, for me anyway. Other than that yeah Square and BioWare are where most of my hopes are pinned. I don't know why but I still believe Funcom has a trick or two left, Dark Days Are Coming and all. And nothing against Blizz but with them stating they are trying to find a way to get to more people with their next MMO I'm a bit blah about the possibilities. I was hoping for an EQesque game from Blizz to see what they could really do, I know it's a business but the WoW fans gotta grow up at some point and need a new place to play.
Played in some form:
UO til tram, AC, EQ, AO, WW2O, PS, SB, CoH, AC2, Hor, LoTRO, DDO, AoC, Aion, CO, STO
Playing: WoW (for gf), WAR
Waiting For: SWTOR, FFXVI
Hoping For: DCUO, Secret World, Earthrise
-S- (UO Sonoma)
"The best mmo since 2004 sadly has been Free Realms and lets not forget Hello Kitty Online."
I really hope you are exaggerating there. I felt Free Realms gameplay on all the minigames had the quality of one of those weekend Wii games that get rushed out to help fund a failing developer. I guess it's just me though - but if you want to play a minigame/puzzle game based MMO you should try Puzzle Pirates (which also sadly, was released before 2004). As many problems as the P2P games you listed in 2005-2009, I think every single one of them had superior gameplay to Free Realms. Then again Free Realms isn't marketed to my age group.
Same with Hello Kitty Online. I'm sure the P2P games you mentioned at least are better than Hello Kitty Online, but I can't say for certain (I haven't played it nor have no desire to). The trailer I saw out of curosity didn't seem to be doing anything too impressive.
I do agree with your main point. I'm pretty jaded about the MMO industry right now. Over 4 years of turds. Actually I did find Age of Conan, Warhammer, Aion, and Champions Online to be fun for a bit (1-3 months), but they just suffer from so many problems for one reason or another. I wish MMOs could still hold my attention like Everquest (almost 5 years) and WoW (3 years? off and on).
Still it's looking good for 2010 and 2011. While I no longer have interest personally in Star Trek Online and The Old Republic there are plenty of other MMOs that look interesting on the horizon and possibly innovative: Planetside 2 as mentioned should be excellent like Planetside, The Secret World, FFXIV, All Points Bulletin, and possibly a few out of Korea like Blade and Soul and TERA.
Question: If The Old Republic MMO becomes successful like WoW, will people start bashing Bioware in every single thread like they with Blizzard?
Yeah you gotta bash whoever's on top. Used to be SOE, now Blizz, maybe Bioware's next. On the more serious side I still see Blizz as a decent company, I don't agree with most of what they do but I don't feel dirty giving them my money like I still do with SOE. Maybe it's still old wounds, EA and SOE are on my pretty short list of companies to avoid.
Played in some form:
UO til tram, AC, EQ, AO, WW2O, PS, SB, CoH, AC2, Hor, LoTRO, DDO, AoC, Aion, CO, STO
Playing: WoW (for gf), WAR
Waiting For: SWTOR, FFXVI
Hoping For: DCUO, Secret World, Earthrise
-S- (UO Sonoma)
Yes.
You do not have to bash whoever is on top, I don't remember EQ or SW being bashed in the same way that WoW is. I think that is because WoW heralded the flooding of the MMO player base by kids, welcome to a world of fanboys and haters.
And I have no doubt that to you, it's all perfectly fine that "Blizzard blew the competition out of the water and no one has recovered ever since".
It's not really a case of nobody being satisfied post-WoW because "we saw what can be done", but because the whole industry saw what money can be done by copying Blizzard. People looking for an alternative don't really have a choice. What screwed up Warhammer Online? It tried to be WoW, and now Mythic is paying the price.
I have no idea what Cataclysm is supposed to do, but I'm pretty sure it will be yet more stacking on top. Let's wait and see if the foundations can support all that weight, shall we?
I keep seeing "WAR tried to be WOW', yet personally I still don't get why people say this. WAR offers a signifiantly different game style.
I mean, I can go into details about the precise ways WAR's PVE mobs have the least design effort put into them of any major MMO, or how the combat for each class lacks game depth if you want the discrete reasons WAR's failure wasn't about "trying to be WOW". If I'd played more DAOC I could even feel justified pointing out that DAOC's 3-faction system was a superior world PVP design, but that's a little unfair because it's forced by the IP (still..it was up to them whether to attempt a game with a world PVP focus. :X )
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I keep seeing "WAR tried to be WOW', yet personally I still don't get why people say this. WAR offers a signifiantly different game style.
I mean, I can go into details about the precise ways WAR's PVE mobs have the least design effort put into them of any major MMO, or how the combat for each class lacks game depth if you want the discrete reasons WAR's failure wasn't about "trying to be WOW". If I'd played more DAOC I could even feel justified pointing out that DAOC's 3-faction system was a superior world PVP design, but that's a little unfair because it's forced by the IP (still..it was up to them whether to attempt a game with a world PVP focus. :X )
What's funny is 99% of wow fans have no idea what Warhammer is. Warcraft ripped Warhammer lore 20 years ago when it was supposed to be a warhammer rts game. After numerous court battles it was released as War"craft". The only reason alot of people played Warcraft was because there was no Warhammer RTS. What has made Wow famous is blizzard fan boys who number in the hundreds of thousands. It's not the ignorant fan boys that have hampered the genre though, it's the rich ex-jock trust fund babies who are now venture capitalists and think Wow is a money tree so they do whatever they can to mimic it. War is based off DAOC and DAOC was around long before wow was. If anything, wow is a wannabe DAOC and in turn a wannabe War.
Many arguements have be fought over various things about WoW - as a game and as it's contributions to the MMO market.
One fact that can't be argued is Blizzard made a successful game. People stood up in mass and put there money where they wanted to play, but I can't help but wonder if all the criticisms that came with it have detered game dev's from a producing something similar.
I'm not saying make a WoW clone, but there are a lot of MMO's that once you strip down to the gameplay are close, but each of them different enough to make a WoW fan think "It's just not quite the same". After playing numerous MMO's I stopped skipping from launch to launch when I got to WoW because I liked the feel of the game, simple things like the player/camera control, combat flow, easy NPC interaction with accepting quests. Lots of little things that since finally moving on when a game doesn't have some of the simple parts I admit to having that lacking feeling.
There are a lot of other good and valid arguement that I have read about WoW being too 'Care Bear' with the players, but obviously that is what the market wanted or it wouldn't have made such a name. I have no doubt that Blizzard will follow through with this format completely for there next big thing. With Cataclysm coming I don't think we will be seeing the next project from Blizz in 2010, but maybe next year some other dev team will use the WoW template to make a name for themselves.
For those that hate WoW / Blizzard and everything they stand for then maybe if this happens the game won't be the next big thing for you, but as in almost every other industry if the most popular can be recreated then there is a good chance of it being rated just as good.
Currently Playing: SUN Online
Until it's played out and watered down to the point that it crashes an industry. Wow made/makes a fortune and every greedy bastard with money to spend is looking to screw over whoever they have to to make a mmo and make triple+ their investment back. Look at EA or for a more recent corporate takeover, Gazillion. The future is dim for games in general when people that don't even play games are in control of what is released and when.
I keep seeing "WAR tried to be WOW', yet personally I still don't get why people say this. WAR offers a signifiantly different game style.
I mean, I can go into details about the precise ways WAR's PVE mobs have the least design effort put into them of any major MMO, or how the combat for each class lacks game depth if you want the discrete reasons WAR's failure wasn't about "trying to be WOW". If I'd played more DAOC I could even feel justified pointing out that DAOC's 3-faction system was a superior world PVP design, but that's a little unfair because it's forced by the IP (still..it was up to them whether to attempt a game with a world PVP focus. :X )
What's funny is 99% of wow fans have no idea what Warhammer is. Warcraft ripped Warhammer lore 20 years ago when it was supposed to be a warhammer rts game. After numerous court battles it was released as War"craft". The only reason alot of people played Warcraft was because there was no Warhammer RTS. What has made Wow famous is blizzard fan boys who number in the hundreds of thousands. It's not the ignorant fan boys that have hampered the genre though, it's the rich ex-jock trust fund babies who are now venture capitalists and think Wow is a money tree so they do whatever they can to mimic it. War is based off DAOC and DAOC was around long before wow was. If anything, wow is a wannabe DAOC and in turn a wannabe War.
No, WAR was "trying to be WoW". I thought we're talking about gameplay here, lore might be as well obsolete in this context. WAR's combat system(don't confuse with class skills or other combat-related stuff) felt the closest to WoW compared to these newly-released MMORPGs. Even Aion, with its slow-based combat, gave me a different taste. WAR didn't.
Then they made scenarios pretty much the main PvP focus of the game, while RvR fights were rare, sometimes people even tried to avoid the other faction just to get the NPC and enjoy their chest and the engine was badly optimised.
Oh and then, if you like lore that much, can you say the lore in WAR is accurate compared to the actual Warhammer lore? Instead of being very grim, they made it far less scary so teens can play the game.
And then, sieges themselvs were dissapointing...2 floors, boss and 10-11 NPCs. Compare Lineage 2 sieges then.The game had so problems, but man, sieges felt and looked amazing.
I strongly disagree.
Name all the games that have done "the same thing" really, really well.
Almost none.
You don't have to do anything different, you just have to do the same thing, realy really well which most new releases don't even come close to.
I think City if Heroes should also be in the success list. It was a fun game, and I'm pretty sure it was profitable since it's still going.
Many games are still around and holding out with dedicated players. It doesnt mean that they are in decline. IMO is that people want more variety and are trying new games out. On top of that many developers unfortunately copycat other successful mmmo's thinking that the onyl way to make money.
(Wins dancing with the stars hands down........AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH fires plungers at judges)
All my opinions are just that..opinions. If you like my opinions..coolness.If you dont like my opinion....I really dont care.
Playing: ESO, WOT, Smite, and Marvel Heroes
In all honesty, we as a community tend to compare wine to grape juice rather often.
Those who played WoW at launch remember login queues, unexplainable server crashes, bugged quests, etcetera. The only nod to PvP was dueling and world PvP/ganking. There were no battlegrounds, no Wintergrasp, no PvP objectives. You either sparred with random people, or, on a PvP server, you killed every member of the opposing faction you came across. Of course, with 5 years of patching, 2 expansions (with a third on the way), WoW has grown and evolved to a state of being the most heavily polished MMO on the market today. Most people have started playing WoW at varying stages of that development, and seen it in better lights, or simply don't recall the growing pains except as an afterthought.
Now, when a new game comes out, many of us in the community instantly draw the comparison. But the games in question don't have the level of polish that WoW does. How could they? Just like grape juice to wine, they don't have the time to age and ferment into something that people really want. We try a game when it comes out, and are overly critical of the errors that we perceive, because WoW (or our other MMO of choice) does not seem to have them anymore. We open the bottle of grape juice before its time, try it, and throw it away before it can mature.
MMOs are always in flux, and need time and money to shine. If we try every new MMO in the first month of its life, then throw it out because of a lack of polish, it'll never have the money to support itself, much less keep evolving. It's not a matter of the genre being in decline; it's a question of a lack of patience, for the most part. No MMO is perfect at launch, regardless of what anyone may tell you. No MMO is "finished" until a year or more of solid testing from an open playerbase. In fact, one could argue, an MMO is never truly "finished" at all.
I'm with this guy. I find a lot of similarities between video games and the movie industry.
Torrential: DAOC (Pendragon)
Awned: World of Warcraft (Lothar)
Torren: Warhammer Online (Praag)
I'm sure a number of people posting on these forums have beta'd at least one game. I've done a few and I can honestly say that each and every game I beta'd made the same mistake.
It wasn't launching too early. Every game launches before the beta community thinks it should. The money people have the unenviable job of balancing development time and expense against the corporate expectation that said money is going to be paid back "sometime soon please".
No, instead the games tried to do too much right at launch. With WoW being the example developers hold up to corporate to say "see, they make money, we can too", todays development teams try to include everything they think (or have been shown) that players want right out of the gate instead of starting with a solid base and expanding the game with time.
As was said earlier in this thread, WoW had a rough start. I've not seen a MMO yet that hasn't had a painful first few months after launch. But the difference between WoW and other MMOs is that WoW methodically fixes its problems and once fixed began an aggressive schedule of content releases meant to add features to their game. Even the WoW content releases often came out with problems, but those problems were once again assaulted and fixed.
The wrong lesson is being taken from WoW. No game will ever release with the resources available to the WoW team, with the exception of maybe another game by Blizzard. The lesson to take from WoW is to start with a smart toolkit and a basic game and use that toolkit to add to the game. Use major content releases to make major changes, have a constant schedule of small to medium content releases to keep the rabid player base sated and above all polish your current game before going out and introducing a major expansion that is going to require more polish.
If WoW caused a decline in MMO's its because new MMO's try to beat WoW right out of the gate in a mad sprint instead of settling in with a solid, ground-eating pace and slowly gaining on WoW. This race is a marathon, not a sprint.
I respect your right to voice your opinion and reserve the right to blow it right out of the water
MMOs havent declined they have boomed, not so sure alot of them need to be made but the problem, or not the problem but the solution is the infilration of the F2P. F2P will rise to the top, afterall know anything Asian that hasn't. VG should be added to the decent MMO list.
F2P games are only good if they can learn to balance their cash shops. When they make the game "free to play pay to win" then only the biggest spenders will stay. I have seen people spend upwards of $40000 in a year just so they can claim to be the greatest player on a F2P game. When spending money by itself can make a player who spends 1 hour a day ingame better than someone who no-lifes 12+ hours into a game there is no balance.