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Too Many MMORPGs?
EnemyN666
Member Posts: 3
I don't know if its just me but as i see the list of anticipated mmorpg being about four times longer then the number of mmorpgs out right now it just confuses me. I mean even now there are so many mmorpg and the gaming community is so scattered that it is practically impossible to try all of those games while the current mmorpg are aimed at making you spend an ample amount of time on the game before you are able to start playing it for real and see the core of the game. Please just comment on how do you think this will be resolved and about the dozens of new MMORPG titles to be expected.
Comments
I personally think that every single company that made an MMORPG should join together and make one super mmorpg..... yea....
True enough, most of the game companies out there make MMORPGs only to jump on the EQ bandwagon and try to bask in the success that they've gained. As result they usually fall off and get left in the muck, ie they suck ass.
I really don't see all of the upcoming titles being overly successful. Maybe a couple of them will turn out to be pretty good, but others are just going to be like Shadowbane and Horizons, fading away like those ugly new clothes you get for Christmas.
I am of the opinion that there are far too few MMOG titles available today. The primary issue here is competition, which is the primary driver of innovation and delivering a quality product. The more competition for my attention there is, the more companies will invest in making a game that caters to my interests. That's how the capitalist market works, and it works very well when it's allowed to.
But since you raise a few interesting points I'll answer each of them specifically.
I don't buy this argument at all. It has been my experience that I am able to tell if I will enjoy a MMOG within a few days of playing it. While it's possible for the long-term gameplay to fall flat or get better over time, the first impressions I have usually are strong indicators and tend to pan out. Thus, I can easily consume 5+ MMOG a month just playing on weekends alone. It would take me half a year at most to play every one of the games on the current market, not counting MUDs.
Even if you include the releases of the heavily cloned anime-themed MMOGs you are still looking at a release of about 1-2 MMOGs per month. If you look at the prime releases, the big-ticket items, you are closer to 1 every 2-3 months. I have had no problem whatsoever giving a full month of play to each of them. So this argument falls completely flat, in my opinion.
Any game that can't catch my interest in the first couple of weeks isn't going to get my subscription. That's just the bottom-line for me. I highly enjoy building characters from the ground up. A game that focuses all its attention on the endgame is missing the majority market that will almost never reach the endgame.
While there are MMOGs that fit this bill, the majority of games do attempt to provide a curve of experience that is intended to keep the interest of the player the entire time. The success of the game, in my opinion, can be directly measured to how well they do this. It's arguable that WoW has had vast success owing specifically to having put its best foot forward from the beginning...and equally arguable that they failed to keep it forward at the end, but that's a different discussion.
Every MMOG I've seen on the market seems to expect me to be playing for a few months, and seems to try to cater its full offering to that expectation. I don't have a problem with this, and I think that's a decent idea...after all, I'd like to have unique experiences for a few months if I do decide to play the game. But more than a few MMOGs fail to provide a compelling experience early and I believe that that is a horrible failure on their part.
The "dozens" of new MMOG titles you refer to span the course of years, not weeks. Since I do not expect my interest in a MMOG to last more than a couple of months, and I can usually dismiss "poor" MMOGs in a matter of a few days, I see absolutely no conflict here at all. In fact, I'd much rather be overwhelmed with choices than not.
We come back to the issue of competition once again. My current problem with the offering of MMOGs on the market right now is that quite a few of them have features that are highly attractive to me, and features that are not. As of yet, I have not found a single title that provided me a very high quantity of attractive features with a very low quantity of unattractive features. Some have been close (UO, EQ, EVE, ATITD) and many have been way off the mark.
The more titles there are the better the odds that I will find a title that gives me a lot of what I'm looking for. Further, the more titles there are on the market the better the odds are that the envelope of innovation and creativity will be pushed ever upwards.