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A sad state of gaming
Charisi
Member Posts: 159
I just wanted to share my opinion on the state of gaming, to see if there were many out there that agreed. So /rant on
I have been playing mmorpg's for 10 years., although I really didn't get sucked into one until Star Wars Galaxies came out. I played that game religiously for 2 1/2 years right up until, (yup, you guessed it), the NGE. Before you roll your eyes and curse the rantings of another disgruntled SWG vet, don't worry. I'm not going to rant about what SOE did to that game. Everyone knows what happened, and it's been talked to death repeatedly.
Anyway, after the travesty of SWG, I tried a couple other mmo's before settling into WoW when it launched in 2004. I like many others rather enjoyed it for the first year or so. Once it took off in popularity + the launching of Burning Crusade, was in my opinion, when the game started to fall hard. By fall I mean, they nerfed away all the skill in the game, and replaced it with carebear fun time happiness. The game became much less about skill, and much more about gear and numbers.
I used to say a few years ago that WoW's success was both a blessing and a curse to the mmo world. A blessing due to it finally bringing mmo gaming to the forefront, while being a curse at the same time due to the slew of relative crap games we've seen as a result. Now I disagree with the first part of my statement. I think WoW has grown to be a curse on the mmo gaming industry.
What are we left with? Take a look at the games that have come out since late 2005 and on. It is nothing but a sea of WoW clones. I've always asked myself, who in their right mind would play a WoW clone? If I'm faced with the choice of playing WoW or a crappy WoW knockoff, I'll stick with WoW itself.
Take a look at all the "big" games that have come out the last few years. 99% of them have bombed for one reason or another. Age of Conan, Warhammer, EQ2, STO, and the list goes on. With games like AoC, I have no idea how you can screw something like that up in the first place. If any of you have ever read any of Howard's Conan stories, you know they had such a rich and vibrant world in which to draw material from. Instead we got a clunky, unfinished, linear, piece of junk.
STO is another one that sticks out in my mind. We have one of the biggest sci-fi franchises in history. 11 movies, five tv series' each multiple seasons, and countless books/comics. There is soooooo much they could have pulled from the Star Trek universe that could have made STO one of the most successful mmo's to date. Instead, we get a reskinned Champions Online with space ships. Great job Cryptic.
I could complain all day about games, but I digress. What is wrong with these companies? They continue to churn out clone after clone, despite the fact that the majority of these clones never make any money. Few re-tool their games over time to better suit WoW lovers, (EQ2 comes to mind), and manage to stick around with a meager subscription base.
The sci-fi genre has been left virtually untouched. At first there was SWG and EVE, and we all know how Galaxies went. EVE was ok at first, but as I have always joked, you need a calculus degree to play EVE, where is EVE JR. ? Now it seems we have several EVE clones in the works. Black Prophecy, Jumpgate Evolution, etc. What I 'd like to see, is a game as expansive as EVE, where you can actually get out of your ship and do stuff. Get into a bar brawl, and blast your way back to your ship. You know, a truly epic sci fi game.
The one big game I haven't mentioned yet is Star Wars: The Old Republic. Now, before I get into that, let me preface it by saying, I am a Star Wars junkie, and a Bioware fanboy. I firmly believe Bioware craps gold. In saying that, why does TOR look so bad? I had such high hopes for that game when they finally announced it, but the more I read on it, the more I think it's going to be a great big steaming pile of sith. Granted, no one has played it yet, so I just have to wait and see, but I'm not holding my breath anymore.
So what is left in a sea of WoW clones? Games that developers rush out before they are done, and use subscription fees to finish, (*cough* *cough* SOE)? Games that companies rush out half finished, collect an initial surge of money, and let the game rot? Where are all the unique games? When is someone going to break from the mold and make a good game that isn't just another carbon copy? As I look down the list of upcoming games, I'm not very hopeful.
Anyway, /rant off I guess. Kudos to those that actually read through my wall of text opinion. Please let me know your thoughts, (in a constructive manner please), whether you feel I'm right or wrong. I always welcome a healthy debate.
A Requiem For Argos, now available at e-book retailers.
Comments
There are a lot of us who feel the way you do. We're just waiting for some Dev to complete the epic quest to free us from WoW and cheesy WoW knock offs. Personally I am holding out for The Secret World. /shrug
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
So sad indeed, the year started with a big time fail: STO. It is almost heresy. Can it gets worse than this? I hope not!
Completely agree with the OP. I think that the biggest problem facing this genre and gaming in particular is that it's all about money now.
Look at some of the games from 10 or 20 years ago. There is a reason why people still play them. You can literally feel the heart and soul that the developers have poured into these games (you can still feel that in a lot of indie games btw). Now, it's all about money. Oh, I'm sure that a lot of developers do care about their projects but now it's all about milking the gamers for as much money as possible, in the shortest time possible.
It's not about, what can we do to make this game the most unforgettable experience ever? It's about what can we do to get as many people as possible to buy this game? Followed shortly by: hey, WoW makes a crap load of money, let's do what Blizzard did...
Then we get, yet another, soulless WoW clone. I too share your feelings for TOR and Star Wars. I love the setting and based on what I've read, Bioware's mission is to create as standard an MMO as possible. Bioware doesn't want to revolutionize the genre, although if anyone, they are the most capable to do so. No, they want to release the same type of MMO which we have been playing for 10 years now. I'm sure that the game will have amazing stories, Bioware is great for that, but it will probably play just like WoW and EQ2.
I just do not get it. If you cannot find a game here; you should look to a new genre. There are plenty of games out there. I think the problem is the individual has changed.
--John Ruskin
wait wait, AoC is a mmo? I thought I was playing alone X(
I can completely agree with the OP. I too stay with WOW due to the simple fact that if I want to play WOW...I'll just play WOW. Not a cheesy, bad, unpolished knockoff. But I will say one thing the OP neglected to state, altho she did infer it: WOW didnt hurt the MMO Industry...WOW's SUCCESS did. The lure of making the kind of money that Blizzard makes monthly/annually is simply too great for developers to pass up. Couple this with shareholder pressure for profits, how can we expect any MMO to be free of the WOW grip?
MONEY MONEY MONEY....do we really beleive they can resist selling out? Take 15 million subs (and lets not debate over the REAL number of subs...please???Its moot at this point) and multiply that by $15.99 PER MONTH. Who wouldnt like to see those numbers? Until WOW declines significantly and the next BIG thing happens to come along, as WOW did, at the right place/time/Cosmic Alignment, they will continue to pursue the "WOW Strategy" and continue to fail miserably at it.
Anyway, back to WOW. My DK needs some new armour!
Current Games: WOW, EVE Online
I share similar experience to the OP, and a similar opinion.
The only difference is I've found my "diamond in the rough". Granted, the game was so different that it all but lost all of the 'new' MMORPG crown within its first few months. Because of that, there are certainly flaws and incomplete content, but what it does have has totally enthralled me.
That being said, everyone's tastes differ, so I won't attempt any viral marketing. What I will say is that those of us who are sick and tired of Vanilla, Carebear, hold-your-hand MMO's better stop funding them. Also, it wouldn't hurt to toss a few dollars and euros toward those few developers that are trying to buck the trend...even if their game's population is small.
I have to say for all of EVE players out there that its a great game and its only going to get better with Dust 514 coming out soon and all the other features they have planed and if you are having trouble finding your way contact EVE University www.eve-ivy.com/ thats how i got started and but i do agree that there are a lot of WoW clones out there
you are all freaking crazy the best mmo's of the decade have been released in the last 3 months
blaw all the above must be old people
Exactly. You touch on a point that I didn't really expand on. All the developers care about is money these days. Granted, the goal of any company is to make money, but I think that at the same time, they should be making products people like. Otherwise we end up with companies like SOE that clearly do not give two craps about their customers or their games. It's all about the almighty dollar.
A Requiem For Argos, now available at e-book retailers.
Um well can you really blame them. It is an industry after all. There main objective is making money first.
I have been playing commercial games for even longer than the OP... (remember when you had to pay by the minute for connection + a similar fee for the game?)
and I have felt the same way that they did, for about 8 years or so...
Then I found F2P games, and found that I could enjoy on again off again gameplay. The games were not that high quality, but they were actually more fun than the so called AAA P2P games, that always seemed to disappoint. In the past few years I have been following the advances of F2P games, and honestly believe that the production quality of the games has risen immensely, and that many of them offer superior gameplay.
I think that the gaming industry (in the west) is doing better than it ever has. It is just not doing it in the same way.
Darkfall.
Fallen Earth.
Mortal Online.
Xsyon.
These are games that break the mold you speak of.
I know EXACTLY how you feel, OP. And although big-name studios aren't doing anything different at the moment, indie studios are starting to make some "real" games again.
They might not have the polish that a billion-dollar budget buys, but good games none the less.
Personally I have found a (permenant?) home in Darkfall. But there are other titles recently released, or in development that you may want to watch as well. Games made for the love of gaming, instead of as an attempt to be the "wow killer".
More and more of these games will be made, mark my words.....the MMO industry is finally returning to it's roots.
I think the reason we're seeing so many AAA duds is because developers and publishers have figured out that there's no long-term success to be found in trying to clone WoW, so they cut their losses and try to recoup their investment with box sales. It's a bit tinfoilish, but it makes sense - these people aren't retards.
WoW got huge fast because there were already eleventy million people on Battle.net playing Diablo II, Warcraft III, and Starcraft and SoE decided to give all their best customers a free pass to the competition by launching EQ2 at the same time (which was nowhere near as good as WoW when it launched). And WoW's gameplay isn't something you can clone - from what I've gathered from talking to people and reading posts is that once you burn out on WoW, you burn out themeparks in general.
This leads me to think this will be the last year of big failures. Few of the AAA games in development are geared toward casual players - pitching MMOs at a specific audience that will stay interested for a long time seems like it should guarantee long-term viability, even though they'll never attain massive sub numbers (at least compared to WoW), but it's worked for every game that's had any kind of real staying power so far so I think it's a winning strategy.
As for the casual games, they seem to be migrating to social networking sites. Which is fine, that's where they belong.
And so far, they all have no mass appeal. Go figure.
Did it ever occur to you that maybe most people just WANT more of the same?
Couldnt agree more. Big title publishers and dev studios that grab their support for easy cash input and launch collaberation for a the fast and easy to-market buck of appeal to younger roll-coaster enthusiasts, which produce a game that takes 'you' for a fast-paced thrill-ride of eye-candy, cartoon graphics and imaginably-sized rainbow spectrum gear, with little sustainable immersive mmorpg game-play is at hand; except for smaller studios and independent studios that have returned the genre to its roots.
Striving for Silver Stars since Gold is so effeminate.
Think you mean Everquest
The designs of developers reflect the way they think:
We've been inundated by developers with a surge of top-down games, but that isn't because they're idiots or jerks. They are trained to view their careers from the top down - to concentrate on keeping their jobs. They invest in the goal of getting money, rather than the process of game development. Game development is no longer fun, and some see this as a good thing.
It is not.
When caught in a top-down system, one invests in the goal, with the process being an inconvenience that should be rushed through as quickly as possible because the goal will supposedly bring happiness. This is why we have games that reflect this mechanic, and they seem linear or boring even if they're very expansive and detailed worlds. They are if -> then statements.
"If you achieve, then you will be happy."
That is the maxim of the corporate world, and it causes inadequacy and unhappiness in both developers and consumers despite the promise of happiness.
What's happening is that the goal is the investment and the target, while the process is downplayed or inconvenient. The process is considered work.
What needs to happen is the opposite: for the goal to simply be a guide, and the process to be the main investment - for the work to be enjoyable.
When people don't do for the love of doing, and only for the love of the yield, the purpose of the activity and all resulting happiness is lost. This is what you see happening now.
Developers are not happy doing what they do, and their games reflect this.
I play the original. No problems here.
The only games better than wow are the unpublished ones.
Hundreds of them in the last years.
Want a real mmorpg? Play WOW with experience turned off mode and be Pve_Pvp King at any level without a rat race.
I believe that there's a basic point that's being overlooked here.
There is a problem with the genre at the moment, but it's not that developers are attempting to maximise profits (that's just business) and it's not that developers are sticking fairly close to the established mainstream preferences (that's just sensible).
The problem is that they're turning out crap games.
That's it. That's the entire problem right there. They're making games that are heavily influenced by WoW and that would be absolutely fine if the games they were churning out were better than WoW. They're just not. Pretty graphics isn't enough to sell an MMO long term.
MMO's have a lot of longevity; some people put in 2000 hours over the course of a year. They ain't going to stick with a crap game for that length of time no matter how sexy it looks.
The problem is quality, not design.
Playing: EVE, Final Fantasy 13, Uncharted 2, Need for Speed: Shift
. taken
Want a real mmorpg? Play WOW with experience turned off mode and be Pve_Pvp King at any level without a rat race.
So you're saying just because a game has the interface of WoW it's a clone? AoC is nothing like WoW and it's coming back with a vengeance. I will admit WAR is toast. Not because its a so-called "WoW Clone" but because the PvP is bland and alot of levels you feel so alone it's not even funny. And technically WoW is an "EQ Clone" and EQ would be an "Ultima Clone" and Ultima would be similar to some MUD. I just fucking hate when ignorant people start assuming games are WoW Clones.
To a large the OP is right, but he still exaggerates in many ways. Not all games are WoW clones, there are unique games out there. But if you keep playing WoW, you send the companies the wrong message.
And about WoW beeing too easy:
It's an MMORPG, it aims for the masses. The masses don't want difficult games, because they dislike failing. They want to be superheroes and smash through the enemies. That's why MMORPGs at large are easy. And I guess in WoW there are still the hardmode achievements, of which not all are that easy to get.
If you want difficult games, don't play MMORPGs.
Let's play Fallen Earth (blind, 300 episodes)
Let's play Guild Wars 2 (blind, 45 episodes)
yes they want to be superhero but,how they can feel like suppahero,without challenges and doing super things??
it is that reward ,give "epics" to everyone and everyone feels like suppahero.
Generation P
yes they want to be superhero but,how they can feel like suppahero,without challenges and doing super things??
it is that reward ,give "epics" to everyone and everyone feels like suppahero.
Well that is the conflict. To generalize it: each player wants to be able to kill everything, have the best equipment and be the champ of the virtual world. Also, each players wants to be different, and better than the others. And both doesn't go well together.
Now, if the companies would create a game with very difficult to beat content, than the tiny percentage of players would feel like heroes (they have beaten everything) and better than the others (who haven't achieved the same). Most players however would feel bad, because there is content they have no chance of beating, and they look the same as most others, who can't beat that content either. That is a pretty bad situation for the game, so companies rather go for the other way.
Which is making the content too easy. Sure, people will be look-a-likes in the end, but at least they all have the feeling of beeing strong and good in the game.
Let's play Fallen Earth (blind, 300 episodes)
Let's play Guild Wars 2 (blind, 45 episodes)