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When will we see the "mmo" back in mmorpg?
scythe99
Member Posts: 326
I been wondering when will we see the "MMO" come back into mmorpg. Most mmorpg's now a days are bascally single player games with a glorified irc chat system for most of the game play. Anyone else miss the old times when you had to group to get anything done? when you couldn't just go solo to cap? I dunno I just seem to miss old school mmo's like daoc, ff11 etc where you have to group to get stuff done. Sure you can solo but its usually so slow its not worth it.
I am sick to death of mmo's like WoW and all the ones after it that gave cloned its quest system. rift is the most biliant offender of this recently, u could put wow over rift and other than graphics its the same game, hell most of the skills were directly ripped out of wow and just renamed. Anyway, I am hoping this wow-easy-mode like system they all are following dies soon, so that a real mmorpg can come from the ashes. FF14 was a good try by square for what I mean but they failed miserably mainly due to never listening to their players and just thinking we gonna shove the crap they gave us down our throats. SWToR, GW2, etc just more single player games most likely with a glorified irc chat system.
Was going to look into earthrise myself due to looking for a decent sci-fi mmo (only good one i played that I didn't think sucked was anarchy online). But kinda.. on edge about how they suddendly releasing the game with virtually no beta testing done. I get the feeling its going to be a disaster.
Anyway what do you think of the current state of mmo's since wow killed the genre?
"An MMORPG could be completely diffirent from WoW. Just look at games like Dofus, Wizard101 or EVE. But as it is, most of the Western MMOs are trying to succeed by out-WoWing WoW. It's like an army of 10 sports games made about same sports, and barely none about other sports. WoW clone is an accurate description of those games, it manages to convey much information with only two words."
-Poster on mmorpg.com
Rift: World of Warcraft clone #9321 Nothing special to see here move along.
Comments
So you have played those games that haven't been released yet eh?
I'm still waiting for the mmo to put in the rpg part.
I've been playing for almost a decade and never played one where I had to group to get something done.
Venge Sunsoar
I used to think like you, I loved FFXI and EQ2 (back when it was extremely group focussed) and I hated WoW for what it did to the industry. I do enjoy WoW as well though for what it is.
I've come to the conclusion now though that what we need is something completely new, that changes the concept of soloing/grouping entirely so that there's no long this constant rift between the players that prefer each playstyle. The way these games divide the communities based on playstyle is as detrimental as games being entirely solo-centric.
How about bringing the RPG back.
It's a MMO as long as there are lots of people in the world at the same time.
But yeh....a game that actually would cater to RPers and enforce even the most basic of RP rules would be great. After all....RPG is in the name.
Guild Wars 2 is leaning towards cooperative friendly content that doesn't force players to have to talk to one another which leads to more positive and open no expectations socialization which is the most laid back (best) form of socialization that there is. This is a very good thing. Everyone eventually socializes. This way everyone does it when they're ready.
I do still believe that grouping should get a tiny little extra bonus over soloing. In Guild Wars 2 I think that grouping is no different than soloing. At least it isn't like WoW where it can actually slow you down in some cases.
Unfortunately everyone lately seems to have mistaken the RPG to mean an instanced/phased single-player storyline.
(1) WoW did not kill the genre and the genre isn't dead. All Blizzard did was develop something that, while innovative, was heavily influenced by other successful mmorpgs. Blizzard admitted as much and the response to World of Warcraft was and still is something rather historical. All things considered, WoW did something absolutely amazing for the mmorpg genre, without it we wouldn't have games like Guild Wars (a multi-player, online rpg) and the upcoming Guild Wars 2 mmorpg.
(2) In Final Fantasy XI players had to group to get almost anything at all done and there was precious little choice about this for the majority of the game's existence. There is and can be no counter-argument to this fact. People either really liked FFXI because of it or found it to be the game's largest (or sole?) flaw. The grouping that we have historically had, and still have, in FFXI is something that many call 'forced grouping.' Groups were often forced to be very particular with class composition, something that can be argued to exist in every multi-player game, of course, but if someone has experienced FFXI they know the reality of the grouping dynamics.
(3) The players make the game because, really, it's about how the game is played. As a person who plays both fps and mmorpgs I think that I can safely make the following argument: too many people play mmorpgs as if they were some sort of third-person fps, viz. players are playing the game with the strong belief that the game world (lore, creatures, zones) don't matter, that it is how you manipulate the game that matters. People who play fps often play deathmatchs, combat with no objective other than earning the most amount of kills, and in those games people are encouraged to 'go Rambo'. This is a problem in fps games where deathmatches aren't the match type (certain Team Fortress 2 maps) and when deathmatches aren't even an option (Killing Floor and Left 4 Dead). The 'Rambo' mindset has led people to play mmorpgs in such a way that soloing is what they do and that's simply that. If you had experience with WoW since the advent of the DF tool this would be alarmingly apparent.
(4) If the mmo is missing from a mmorpg you have something like Guild Wars, a great roleplaying game that has too few multiplayer tools. If the rpg is missing from a mmo you don't have the fundamental basis of a mmorpg, as a mmorpg is really a rpg writ large. Let's be clear on this: unless a game is incredibly 'sandboxy' every mmorpg has that rpg foundation, it's just a question of whether or not players care to play the game as if it is a rpg. Seeing what I said in the 3rd paragraph, too many players don't play the game as though they are playing a rpg. That is a problem for the genre, not the mmo missing, whatever that means, but the rpg missing.
(5) The reason that WoW is considered easy is beause of nothing more than the add-ons that have come to be seen as a requirement for playing the game. WoW is not easy, but it does have easy elements, much like any other game. If you plug something that is essentially a Game Genie into a game it's going to be easy and to my knowledge, even though Blizzard has a contradictory policy about add-ons, no other mmorpg supports such things. In other games that 3rd party software is a ToS violation.
(6) Before you make sweeping claims you should really look broadly at the problem. Most mmorpgs today are not Guild Wars, the mislabeled morpg, most mmorpgs are trying to find a way to be viable in a market where players aren't interested in playing mmorpgs and seem to only be looking for a quick fix. Did WoW participate in this problem? Yes, in some way, but if you want to blame someone you have to blame the players. Companies can't sell things that people don't want, just look at the year of 2010.
(1)TL:DR must be your way of saying that thinking hurts. Then again, this may explain why it looks like you responded to the post without using your brain.
(2) It's not about community, is it? You just have nothing better to do.
I think modern RPG, as far as video games go, more commonly refers to as Roll Playing Game, than Role.. ..anything you can customize your character stat wise/visually, to make it unique.
True Role playing in an MMO.. really is impossible if you want to achieve everything there is to do in a game. I mean, seeing as once you defeat a boss in WoW, it should be dead right? Everything in Wailing Caverns is dead.. never go back again.. you do everything once, don't get the gear you need on the first time through.. oh well, too bad.