Just because many mmorpgs out and coming out will be considered the fast-food of the gaming industry, doesn't mean they are nutritionally entertaining.
Striving for Silver Stars since Gold is so effeminate.
It's called change. Gaming is a multibillion dollar industry, and well you're going to have your summer blockbusters, art house films, independent cult classics, and everything in between. The McDonalds comparison is both cliche and tired.
You could have the same argument for film, TV, sports, music, clothing....pretty much anything that has become popular and accepted by the masses.
Bottom line is: Change happens and there is basically nothing you can do about it. Support the products you enjoy and try to not get bent out of shape over the products you don't enjoy.
Promoting the process of removing features, reducing world size, reducing player access and painting the world with cartoon colors as a ‘change agent’ view would be insulting to most people with a progressive attitude toward change.
I think SnarlingWolf had a good summary on the first page. I would add to that the fact that, when looking literaly at McDonalds, restaurants like Outback Steakhouse have not ceased to exist because of McDonalds' popularity. Since McDonalds has been around, any number of fine dining, 24-hour diner, buffet, etc have come along and been successful.
The point being, where there is money to be made, there will be people trying to make it by trying to cater to the biggest audience possible. There will also be those making money by picking their audience and we see the parallel for this in a game like EvE that has slowly grown its player base over time.
Outback Steakhouse pfft, noone can make better steaks than Lone Star Steakhouse and their delicious breaded mushrooms.
It's official...people can actually argue about anything on the MMORPG.com forums (j/k)
for the record though, I just picked the closest restaurant to my house that wasn't fast food. :P
I love the title of this thread, but I don't agree with the post. I think games have evolved a lot in very positive ways. The fact is, 99% of the beliefs that gamers have about the glorious old days of gaming is just nostalgia. If most of those old games that we think of as "classics" were released today with updated graphics, they would fail. Command & Conquer had basic units, no air units, no sea units, etc. Doom has the poorest excuse for a story. Ultima Online had tons of lag and bugs that let players cheat the game. In EQ, you had to stand around waiting in line to kill a mob. Maybe you'd say these things weren't so bad, or the good things made up for the bad things, but the point is it wasn't all roses and players and reviewers would blast these games for these problems if they came out today.
Games are easier to jump into now, but I don't see that as a bad thing or that it necessarily means games are dumber. Maybe you miss the days when you had to sit down and read a 40 page manual before you could start playing a game, but I don't.
Modern mmos have tons of lag, bugs and exploits, you also have to wait in line often to kill a mob... Modern mmos are easier to jump into because by their very nature they are less complex beasts and yes, they are dumbed down whether you want to deny that or not.
That said, a previous poster has already pointed out why, big money has entered the market, and big money is more adverse (understandably so) to taking risks.
The 40 page manual analogy sums it up nicely, back then people would gladly take the time to learn about a game due to the fact it indicated the game was rich in gameplay. Nowadays the ADHD generation can barely read a sentence without reaching for the ritalin so it's no great suprise that mmos have lessened in complexity.
I wouldn't say complexity its more like rich and diverse features that require attention to detail...
Artsy games exist. They're out there. Play them! Just don't expect them to be the blockbusters everyone plays (and by extension: the games with enough population to be robust MMOs.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Artsy games exist. They're out there. Play them! Just don't expect them to be the blockbusters everyone plays (and by extension: the games with enough population to be robust MMOs.)
If warcraft would just remove raid lockouts I'd be much happier with each content cycle. As it stands I can only play for 1 day / week and hafta look for other games to fill the rest of the week o_O.
Edit: This is alluding to how much more playable the game was in the UBRS / MC eras :P More time consuming, but eh, I need that when progression is done for the content cycle o_O Rarely ran into this shit in EQ because the end encounters were always buggy/broken -- like WoW was before they started PTRing every single encounter ^_^
edit:edit: Also this last content cycle has come out so slowly and lasted so long, it's been brutal. We finished our HLK kill at 10% buff (not awesome, but finished :P -- too many tards on desecrates ~) so that leaves far far too long to keep entertained pre-cataclysm
Good read and I am also disgusted with Bioware. To put out such a limiting product is disgraceful.
...using a formula that has worked really well for the rest of their RPG's in their first MMORPG...
Single player games are not MMOs; they use completely different mechanics. Using a single player formula in a massively multiplayer game is not necessarily a good thing. I've enjoyed previous BW games, but this doesn't cut any slack from me in the MMORPG market. The fact that they are working with one of the most beloved IPs of all time (to me, at least), tends to make me even less forgiving.
Sorry. No free passes here. They're going to have to make their bones just like everyone else, making a first offering into this cutthroat MMO market.
There are elements to your post I agree with. Things are becoming streamlined to the point that they're simplified. Simplification is not always good as represented by the direction that WoW is being taken in with Cataclysm. I really dislike the idea of over-simplifying an RPG. I too am disappointed with what I'm hearing about ToR and I might actually give the game a miss now, after I was interested in it for quite a while earlier this summer.
I remember the extreme complexity of the text-based MUDs back in the 90s. True that they would be inaccessible to the majority of today's gamers, much as they were in the 90s, but there were incredible things in those MUDs I haven't seen since in one single MMORPG. Unfortunately, EQ was the closest.
The holy trinity you mention in your post is not from WoW or MMOs in general. It's from AD&D, a formula that has been taken over and over again and not just in the MMORPG genre.The alternative is skill-based progression, but you still have tanking, healing and dps. Even EVE has its healer ships, tank ships and dps ships... There is only one true MMO I can think of that does not have the holy trinity and that's A Tale in the Desert.
How would you change away from the holy trinity? What design elements do you think will be so revolutionary and that people crave? Are walking lizard races really that creative?
most MMOs are designed to cater to the console gamers. It's not like back in the days when only the computer nerds used to play MMOs. We will see what happens in the near future. The past decade got the MMO games bastardized like there is no tomorrow.
There are elements to your post I agree with. Things are becoming streamlined to the point that they're simplified. Simplification is not always good as represented by the direction that WoW is being taken in with Cataclysm. I really dislike the idea of over-simplifying an RPG. I too am disappointed with what I'm hearing about ToR and I might actually give the game a miss now, after I was interested in it for quite a while earlier this summer.
I remember the extreme complexity of the text-based MUDs back in the 90s. True that they would be inaccessible to the majority of today's gamers, much as they were in the 90s, but there were incredible things in those MUDs I haven't seen since in one single MMORPG. Unfortunately, EQ was the closest.
The holy trinity you mention in your post is not from WoW or MMOs in general. It's from AD&D, a formula that has been taken over and over again and not just in the MMORPG genre.The alternative is skill-based progression, but you still have tanking, healing and dps. Even EVE has its healer ships, tank ships and dps ships... There is only one true MMO I can think of that does not have the holy trinity and that's A Tale in the Desert.
How would you change away from the holy trinity? What design elements do you think will be so revolutionary and that people crave? Are walking lizard races really that creative?
I can agree with some of your comments. I too am very leary of the way Blizzard is changing WoW in Cataclysm. The new talent trees offer very little in the way of customization. While that is also true in current WoW (very specific specs working), instead of presenting us with choice they are limited our choices and basically everyone will spec the same whether they want to or not.
I too come from a MUD'ing background. They offered many different elements, and some where highly unique in their design. However, almost every single one of them fell into the Holy Trinity mindset.
The Holy Trinity works very well in a mmo setting. It gives everyone a role and purpose, where the holy trinity fails is when those roles are very specific to specific classes. GW2 looks like they are handling things somewhat differently. While there is still support roles they seem to be divided among all of the classes presented.
How would you change away from the holy trinity? What design elements do you think will be so revolutionary and that people crave? Are walking lizard races really that creative?
Range & cover mechanics .. which is what is being done in TOR now.
Artsy games exist. They're out there. Play them! Just don't expect them to be the blockbusters everyone plays (and by extension: the games with enough population to be robust MMOs.)
If warcraft would just remove raid lockouts I'd be much happier with each content cycle. As it stands I can only play for 1 day / week and hafta look for other games to fill the rest of the week o_O.
Edit: This is alluding to how much more playable the game was in the UBRS / MC eras :P More time consuming, but eh, I need that when progression is done for the content cycle o_O Rarely ran into this shit in EQ because the end encounters were always buggy/broken -- like WoW was before they started PTRing every single encounter ^_^
edit:edit: Also this last content cycle has come out so slowly and lasted so long, it's been brutal. We finished our HLK kill at 10% buff (not awesome, but finished :P -- too many tards on desecrates ~) so that leaves far far too long to keep entertained pre-cataclysm
Little confused by how this post relates to my own, but I suppose even my own post was guilty of jumping forward a few mental hurdles while omitting the necessary preface (the point of my previous post being that the OP seems jaded by existing MMOs because they have a generic, mass-produced feel, so clearly the OP should desire artsy games...but artsy games exist and that's where my post takes over.)
I find your WOW comments a little off, and self-justifying from Blizzard's standpoint.
In the MC era raid lockouts existed in basically the exact same state they're in now.
You're clearly still playing and subbed to the game, and still churning through content, and still able to reach the end of the current content pack despite the lockouts.
So the idea that you want lockouts removed is "a little off" because you'd have burned through that same content 2-5 times faster without a lockout and probably stopped playing the game (which is not what Blizzard wants.)
Hopefully you're not simply waxing nostalgic over the content quality in early WOW. Pre-BC was nothing but a series of learned lessons for the WOW Live Team -- and they took that learning and went on to create far superior content ever since (generally speaking.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Hopefully you're not simply waxing nostalgic over the content quality in early WOW. Pre-BC was nothing but a series of learned lessons for the WOW Live Team -- and they took that learning and went on to create far superior content ever since (generally speaking.)
Ganna have to disagree there, early WoW was ALOT more fun because it lended itself more towards "hardcore" gaming. It was certainly alot less casual than todays version of wow:
1) log in a couple times a week for raids, then log out.
2) log in every once in a while for daily's (or just buy gold and skip this step)
Call my crazy but if ALL i can get out of my mmorpg is 9 HOURS of content per week, then something is wrong. When i was playing EQ1 (kunark era) it wasnt strange for players to put in 60 hours per week. (or more) Granted thats extreme, but 9 hours is weaksauce.
Don't even get me started on instancing, or cross server que'ing.
How would you change away from the holy trinity? What design elements do you think will be so revolutionary and that people crave? Are walking lizard races really that creative?
Range & cover mechanics .. which is what is being done in TOR now.
and denerally making positioning and movement really important so tactics are logically sound rather than depending on all enemies irrationally firing on the hardest person to kill. Eliminating the insane toughness disparity (tanks in games are literally 10 times harder to kill than non-tanks). This does require better AI, but we can certainly manage better than what we've been doing in MMORPGs.
I read a little bit into the long post and decided I would sum it all up.
The bigger the company the less risk it is willing to take with it's money. That is why big budget games, movies, TV shows all follow a cookie cutter formula for success rather then doing anything innovative.
Big companies don't have to take risk, they are already making lots of money. Their goal is to continue to make lots of money so they create products that can almost guarantee a profit rather then investing 50-100 million in something that might be big but might also fall flat on its face.
It is that simple.
Small companies take risks, big companies do not.
Allow me to crush your post with the name of one developer. Valve.
Ganna have to disagree there, early WoW was ALOT more fun because it lended itself more towards "hardcore" gaming. It was certainly alot less casual than todays version of wow:
1) log in a couple times a week for raids, then log out.
2) log in every once in a while for daily's (or just buy gold and skip this step)
What are you talking about? That has always been the mode of play for raid-only players in WoW. In vanilla WoW you would log in for 5-9 hours a week to raid and then only log in to farm for mats for flasks. It would take even less if you had the raid content on farm status. I did it for a while when I run out of non-raid content and it was why I took a long break from WoW soon after.
150 million dollars for a rail shooter is a bit pants, even by the standards of the navel obsessed MMO industry. We have seen a move from small companies headed by pioneers in the MMO field to large companies headed by suits. In some ways a rail shooter should not have surprised me one bit.
To say that the entire industry has become greedy is completely insane, companies with millions of dollars to invest will invest it in areas they feel will grant them the highest rate of return. That's what businesses do, how can you possibly begrudge a company of not wanting to lose money? So star wars will be bland and stripped down, don't play it then, bottom line is companies like Bioware have one goal in regards to business, create as large a return for the investors as possible. It's like expecting to have home quality cooking at Mcdonald's the way your mom makes it, it will never happen because it's not economically viable, same reason large scale mmo's will never be groundbreaking or unique. If you want unique mmo's go look for them, Eve , APB, Fallen Earth, Pirates of the Burning Sea etc. etc. etc. most of you probably don't like these games because they don't fall exactly into the niche you prefer which is exactly why companies like Bioware are unwilling to take 150 million dollar risks, they need to hit the largest market possible, to do anything else would be financially irresponsible, it's business. When was the last time you saw a big budget arthouse film directed by James Cameron, oh yeah, never.
150 million dollars for a rail shooter is a bit pants, even by the standards of the navel obsessed MMO industry. We have seen a move from small companies headed by pioneers in the MMO field to large companies headed by suits. In some ways a rail shooter should not have surprised me one bit.
Dude, it's a mini-game that's part of the main game.
That happens everywhere imo. From movies, music to electronic entertainment. Especially when art becomes a "consumable" product and imagination is limited by the desire of financial success, we may not see anything revolutionary for several years to come.
If really an "alpha class" mmorpg costs 150 million (I'd love an arcticle explaining why), i am not surprised that things work this way, even worse i would not find it easy to convince someone who can afford that amount of money to spend it on an game that deviates from the standards.
I've also experienced the golden era of gaming where there were small studios who spent years trying to fit a game into 48 Kbytes of memory, but unfortunately nowadays we have industries run from people who never played a game in their lives and developers who never faced the challenge of limited hardware space and slow processing speed.
But it's amazing how marketing works these days, Hype rather than quality of the final product. I bet that they rely on that more than we think they do.
That happens everywhere imo. From movies, music to electronic entertainment. Especially when art becomes a "consumable" product and imagination is limited by the desire of financial success, we may not see anything revolutionary for several years to come.
If really an "alpha class" mmorpg costs 150 million (I'd love an arcticle explaining why), i am not surprised that things work this way, even worse i would not find it easy to convince someone who can afford that amount of money to spend it on an game that deviates from the standards.
I've also experienced the golden era of gaming where there were small studios who spent years trying to fit a game into 48 Kbytes of memory, but unfortunately nowadays we have industries run from people who never played a game in their lives and developers who never faced the challenge of limited hardware space and slow processing speed.
But it's amazing how marketing works these days, Hype rather than quality of the final product. I bet that they rely on that more than we think they do.
*sigh* 30 years ago there were still a ton of games that were total crap. Don't let nostalgia overwhelm you.
Comments
Just because many mmorpgs out and coming out will be considered the fast-food of the gaming industry, doesn't mean they are nutritionally entertaining.
Striving for Silver Stars since Gold is so effeminate.
I was just kidding also :P
I wouldn't say complexity its more like rich and diverse features that require attention to detail...
Artsy games exist. They're out there. Play them! Just don't expect them to be the blockbusters everyone plays (and by extension: the games with enough population to be robust MMOs.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
If warcraft would just remove raid lockouts I'd be much happier with each content cycle. As it stands I can only play for 1 day / week and hafta look for other games to fill the rest of the week o_O.
Edit: This is alluding to how much more playable the game was in the UBRS / MC eras :P More time consuming, but eh, I need that when progression is done for the content cycle o_O Rarely ran into this shit in EQ because the end encounters were always buggy/broken -- like WoW was before they started PTRing every single encounter ^_^
edit:edit: Also this last content cycle has come out so slowly and lasted so long, it's been brutal. We finished our HLK kill at 10% buff (not awesome, but finished :P -- too many tards on desecrates ~) so that leaves far far too long to keep entertained pre-cataclysm
all this nonsense comparing games to fast food makes me want to go out and get a bigmac
Single player games are not MMOs; they use completely different mechanics. Using a single player formula in a massively multiplayer game is not necessarily a good thing. I've enjoyed previous BW games, but this doesn't cut any slack from me in the MMORPG market. The fact that they are working with one of the most beloved IPs of all time (to me, at least), tends to make me even less forgiving.
Sorry. No free passes here. They're going to have to make their bones just like everyone else, making a first offering into this cutthroat MMO market.
There are elements to your post I agree with. Things are becoming streamlined to the point that they're simplified. Simplification is not always good as represented by the direction that WoW is being taken in with Cataclysm. I really dislike the idea of over-simplifying an RPG. I too am disappointed with what I'm hearing about ToR and I might actually give the game a miss now, after I was interested in it for quite a while earlier this summer.
I remember the extreme complexity of the text-based MUDs back in the 90s. True that they would be inaccessible to the majority of today's gamers, much as they were in the 90s, but there were incredible things in those MUDs I haven't seen since in one single MMORPG. Unfortunately, EQ was the closest.
The holy trinity you mention in your post is not from WoW or MMOs in general. It's from AD&D, a formula that has been taken over and over again and not just in the MMORPG genre.The alternative is skill-based progression, but you still have tanking, healing and dps. Even EVE has its healer ships, tank ships and dps ships... There is only one true MMO I can think of that does not have the holy trinity and that's A Tale in the Desert.
How would you change away from the holy trinity? What design elements do you think will be so revolutionary and that people crave? Are walking lizard races really that creative?
Playing MUDs and MMOs since 1994.
most MMOs are designed to cater to the console gamers. It's not like back in the days when only the computer nerds used to play MMOs. We will see what happens in the near future. The past decade got the MMO games bastardized like there is no tomorrow.
I tend to agree, back in 2000 we all thought the MMO world will be the best ever, after 2005 it dived down to the abyss and never recovered.
If it's not broken, you are not innovating.
I can agree with some of your comments. I too am very leary of the way Blizzard is changing WoW in Cataclysm. The new talent trees offer very little in the way of customization. While that is also true in current WoW (very specific specs working), instead of presenting us with choice they are limited our choices and basically everyone will spec the same whether they want to or not.
I too come from a MUD'ing background. They offered many different elements, and some where highly unique in their design. However, almost every single one of them fell into the Holy Trinity mindset.
The Holy Trinity works very well in a mmo setting. It gives everyone a role and purpose, where the holy trinity fails is when those roles are very specific to specific classes. GW2 looks like they are handling things somewhat differently. While there is still support roles they seem to be divided among all of the classes presented.
Range & cover mechanics .. which is what is being done in TOR now.
Little confused by how this post relates to my own, but I suppose even my own post was guilty of jumping forward a few mental hurdles while omitting the necessary preface (the point of my previous post being that the OP seems jaded by existing MMOs because they have a generic, mass-produced feel, so clearly the OP should desire artsy games...but artsy games exist and that's where my post takes over.)
I find your WOW comments a little off, and self-justifying from Blizzard's standpoint.
In the MC era raid lockouts existed in basically the exact same state they're in now.
You're clearly still playing and subbed to the game, and still churning through content, and still able to reach the end of the current content pack despite the lockouts.
So the idea that you want lockouts removed is "a little off" because you'd have burned through that same content 2-5 times faster without a lockout and probably stopped playing the game (which is not what Blizzard wants.)
Hopefully you're not simply waxing nostalgic over the content quality in early WOW. Pre-BC was nothing but a series of learned lessons for the WOW Live Team -- and they took that learning and went on to create far superior content ever since (generally speaking.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Ganna have to disagree there, early WoW was ALOT more fun because it lended itself more towards "hardcore" gaming. It was certainly alot less casual than todays version of wow:
1) log in a couple times a week for raids, then log out.
2) log in every once in a while for daily's (or just buy gold and skip this step)
Call my crazy but if ALL i can get out of my mmorpg is 9 HOURS of content per week, then something is wrong. When i was playing EQ1 (kunark era) it wasnt strange for players to put in 60 hours per week. (or more) Granted thats extreme, but 9 hours is weaksauce.
Don't even get me started on instancing, or cross server que'ing.
and denerally making positioning and movement really important so tactics are logically sound rather than depending on all enemies irrationally firing on the hardest person to kill. Eliminating the insane toughness disparity (tanks in games are literally 10 times harder to kill than non-tanks). This does require better AI, but we can certainly manage better than what we've been doing in MMORPGs.
Allow me to crush your post with the name of one developer. Valve.
What are you talking about? That has always been the mode of play for raid-only players in WoW. In vanilla WoW you would log in for 5-9 hours a week to raid and then only log in to farm for mats for flasks. It would take even less if you had the raid content on farm status. I did it for a while when I run out of non-raid content and it was why I took a long break from WoW soon after.
150 million dollars for a rail shooter is a bit pants, even by the standards of the navel obsessed MMO industry. We have seen a move from small companies headed by pioneers in the MMO field to large companies headed by suits. In some ways a rail shooter should not have surprised me one bit.
To say that the entire industry has become greedy is completely insane, companies with millions of dollars to invest will invest it in areas they feel will grant them the highest rate of return. That's what businesses do, how can you possibly begrudge a company of not wanting to lose money? So star wars will be bland and stripped down, don't play it then, bottom line is companies like Bioware have one goal in regards to business, create as large a return for the investors as possible. It's like expecting to have home quality cooking at Mcdonald's the way your mom makes it, it will never happen because it's not economically viable, same reason large scale mmo's will never be groundbreaking or unique. If you want unique mmo's go look for them, Eve , APB, Fallen Earth, Pirates of the Burning Sea etc. etc. etc. most of you probably don't like these games because they don't fall exactly into the niche you prefer which is exactly why companies like Bioware are unwilling to take 150 million dollar risks, they need to hit the largest market possible, to do anything else would be financially irresponsible, it's business. When was the last time you saw a big budget arthouse film directed by James Cameron, oh yeah, never.
Dude, it's a mini-game that's part of the main game.
That happens everywhere imo. From movies, music to electronic entertainment. Especially when art becomes a "consumable" product and imagination is limited by the desire of financial success, we may not see anything revolutionary for several years to come.
If really an "alpha class" mmorpg costs 150 million (I'd love an arcticle explaining why), i am not surprised that things work this way, even worse i would not find it easy to convince someone who can afford that amount of money to spend it on an game that deviates from the standards.
I've also experienced the golden era of gaming where there were small studios who spent years trying to fit a game into 48 Kbytes of memory, but unfortunately nowadays we have industries run from people who never played a game in their lives and developers who never faced the challenge of limited hardware space and slow processing speed.
But it's amazing how marketing works these days, Hype rather than quality of the final product. I bet that they rely on that more than we think they do.
150 million budget!
"Nice they can do many things with it!"
Some years later...
"what? "
"Star Fox got remade?"
Judging by the half-ass job they did with the animations and the space combat, I wonder how much of that money got to VO.
110 million?
"It has potential"
-Second most used phrase on existence
"It sucks"
-Most used phrase on existence
*sigh* 30 years ago there were still a ton of games that were total crap. Don't let nostalgia overwhelm you.
SWG etc did a real space universe, they didn't need 150milion to do that. So the fact it is a mini game in the main game is not an excuse.
ITT: People complaining about the production cost to content ratio of a game that hasn't been released yet...
"Come and have a look at what you could have won."