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Problem is the gamer not the MMO?!?
Painlezz
Member UncommonPosts: 646
I expect many others have a very similar story:
Started out with Mario and other very similar games...
Moved to Final Fantasy, Zelda, and such...
Then Half-Life, Starcraft, Warcraft...
Next, AC, DAOC, WoW, WAR, RIFT....
Now, Dota, LoL, HoN...
The simple point i'm trying to make is, it seems the problem isn't that games are bad, it's that players change and move on. Can anyone really say they picked up Madden 1 (whatever the first version was called) and played each and every single year since and still enjoys it as much as day one?
We get sick of a game type and need something new. I used to play TFC for hours and hours on end. I used to play SC1 every single night. I haven't enjoyed or really touched a FPS or RTS in a long time. Sure, Starcraft 2's single player was a cool story. Yeah, MW3 was a fun story as well, but the actual game doesn't really hook me.
I feel the same is true with the MMO market now. DAOC was a big jump in graphics and polish. I consider it one of the first standard (WoW style) mmo's for ME. WoW was the next big thing that really pulled all of the polish and action oriented RPG elements to the table. I've noticed since playing WoW for all those years, each new game I pick up I barely make it to the level cap before getting burned out and quitting.
WAR, made it to 30's or 40's (I forget) and realized it just wasn't enjoyable.
AOC, made it close to level cap but my class was buggy, underpowered, and it just wasn't enjoyable for me.
RIFT, made it to level cap quickly and farmmed some instances before I realized it was exactly like WoW with the exact same elements. Why farm "tokens" to buy gear in RIFT when I can do it in WoW? Why click icons on my hotbar or spam key bindings to cast the same basic spells as I did in WoW?
SW:TOR, again, made it to level cap, farmmed some instances and yet again... Token farming to buy gear.
Comments
sad but true.
i started out with cs 1.5 and red alert, moved to a game i could still play now but theres just not enough ppl playing it anymore. it was called legend of mir the 3 heroes. pro game i loved it and played it for 4 years. then i moved to wow, aion and some other lame ass mmo's after. played wow for like 5 years and got sick of it. i moved over to console games for about 6 months now but im just bored... cant find shit to do. im back to mmo's atm hoping tera will get me hooked till gw2 and thats what im prolly gonna stick to. gw2 and tera. but that is to be continued :P
I think its game developers.They try and get as many gamers as possible so they make thier MMO's as wide catching as possible to cater to more types of players.This makes the games crappier to people who want more of a challenge in thier gameplay while making people who want to play for 2 hours a day happy.
I also think the most mmo players tend to like thier first MMO better than the newer ones.Well i know I do.I first played EQ2 and have never played an MMO as good.I'm not saying they arn't as good its just what you get used to and when you try something else it just feels alien.I can safely say that 100% of mmo's i have played since EQ2 for me are nowhere near as good.
If you want something different from WoW, then why are you going out of your way to pick out games as close to WoW as possible? If you want something different, then play something different. For gamers who want something different, but cherry-pick the WoW-clones as the games they'll play, yes the problem is the gamer and not the industry.
"Can anyone really say they picked up Madden 1 (whatever the first version was called) and played each and every single year since and still enjoys it as much as day one?"
The first was simply "John Madden Football", without any number or year attached. I've played it. It was such an awful game that I've avoided EA ever since then. There are probably few people who played the first Madden game, then also played the second one, and somehow never managed to discover that Tecmo Super Bowl was massively better. After all, if you wanted a football game back then, Tecmo Super Bowl was the one to get that everyone and his neighbor's dog would have recommended.
OP picks games that are very similar and complain how similar they are. Yeah its definitely the gamer this time!
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Do you notice a trend? Since WoW you only played WoW or WoW-clones. Small wonder that you think you're burnt out.
Me, I'm firmly in the sandbox/hybrid camp of MMORPG players and haven't played a single of the games you listed above. There are plenty of alternatives. Sure, you will not have that AAA polish, you won't play the latest flavour of the month, you won't play a game where the marketing department has more employees than the developer department - instead you play a gem in the rough.
Fine for me.
I maintain this List of Sandbox MMORPGs. Please post or send PM for corrections and suggestions.
I'm interested in knowing what your current list of sandbox/hybrid MMO's is, and what youre currently playing, if anything.
And no, the problem isnt with the player.
The main problem is that there is no more "MM" in MMORPG.
PAST: UO-SWG-DAOC-WOW-DDO-VG-AOC-WAR-FE-DFO-LOTRO-RIFT-GW2
PRESENT: Nothing
FUTURE: ESO
My favorite game of all time is castlevania symphony of the night. That game is just awson.
A few month ago, I try to play again, but I just can't. The graphic is just soooo 10 years ago. I thought I would have fun play it again, but I don't.
People just move on. Our expectation get higher.
I can point you in direction of EvE (tried trial like 3 times but without success) and Perpetuum (aka EvE light). Maybe Haven & Hearth. Interesting game but server instability (awful lags + crashes) turned me away. Can mention Wurm Online and Ryzom. But have not tried his games myself. Maybe you will like game like Puzzle Pirates. I think it's a great game if you like puzzles. You can even count Minecraft as an MMO...
And i really disagree with you. It's players and publishers. Games are just a result of what gamers want and what publishers give to them. For instance in vanilla WoW you had to read the quest and understand where you need to go and what to do. Nothing serious in 99% of quests. But a lot of people were like "screw you and your text, just show me what i need to do because i don't care about story (or can't read?)". And that how "Quest helper" addon was born. And because it was very popular now you have a big arrow and a mark on your map in most of new MMORPGs. And so on. And we all know that publishers want to sell their games to as much people as possible so no wonder they put popular things in games. Yeap, they dumb games with this kind of things in my opinion, but why? Because we, gamers, wanted it and publishers just give it to us.
But i agree that modern theme park MMORPGs have less and less MM in them. Mostly because of players again. Most people just rush to the level cap to start famous gear/tokens/whatever treadmill. Why they act like that? I don't know.
Well, I have to agree, in this case it probably is the player, OP has played nothing but standard theme park MMORPG's for quite some time. (which DAOC being his last title that was significantly different in design from today's model)
My case was a bit different, I missed the early titles such as UO, AC1, AO and the like (much to my chagrin) however I did get off to a strong start with L1/L2, DAOC, SB as my first few titles.
Even WOW was a lot of fun at first, had a decent run with it until I realized their focus on end game raiding/gear grinding and decided that wasn't what I wanted in my MMO's.
Trouble is, when I went to the next game, (Vanguard, LotRO, who can remember) I found myself playing the same game. (in basic construction).
Fortunately, I found EVE around that time, and it was totally refreshing in its basic design and turned out to be the title I played the longest (on and off), over 3 1/2 years in total.
Every now and then I would dip my toes back into the AAA world, with games such as AOC, Aion, Rift and some others, and found that other than a few minor twists, I was still playing WOW in the end. (but even when I went back to WOW after Cata launch, it wasn't the same game as Vanilla WOW either)
So I try to find new and different games, and I confess, I am a bit too focused on large, AAA titles and should spend more time on games such as UWO or some others. (not a huge fan of Eastern made titles outside of NCSofts MMO's though)
But it would help if we could get some well made titles with a bit more variety in design than we've been seeing recently, and it looks like perhaps we're starting to see some movement in that direction with MMO's like GW2, TSW, ArchAge and perhaps some others.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Embarrasingly the only game I've liked so far is WoW.
But I have high hopes for GW2 and World of Darkness.
Each to their own once they've settled into something enjoyed.
Theres no shame in that, its is a solid game. There is a reason so many people play it. I am not playing wow now, but i have for years and enjoyed it.
My own belief is that the biggest issue facing the Mmo market at the moment, is that any Mmo that becomes popular gets fan sites that break the game down and explain how everything works, usually before the game is live.
Nothing I've seen suggested will avoid this. If you have 1000 skills/abilities, the theory crafters will break them down and spell out the best way of doing anything you can do.
Why make quests with mutiple ways of completing them when the majority will take the quickest.easist option.
Where as exploits/Over powered set ups used to take a long time to be exposed/shared, now they will be known by most the players before the patch adding them hits the live servers.
In a way you are right. Maybe one of the reasons for that, is the speed in which nowdays games come out. Back in the days games didnt come out so freguently as now and there was less games to play. Now you dont have time to really dedicate to a single game and you already go to next one. Like we are on some kind of contest "Who can play as much games in shorter time". Or maybe we just got spoiled like little children.
I think it's a combination of both. Kyleran pointed something out that should be noted; they went back to WoW for Cataclysm and saw that it didn't have the same feel as vanilla WoW. In that particular case, I think it had a lot more to do with the game than the player, primarily because Blizzard had made such a major shift in their approach to a "casual" audience, removing a lot of freedom of choice from the game.
New MMO's all seem to want to jump on the "Today's WoW" bandwagon, not realizing that the true long-term fanbase is trying to get away from the dumbing down of game mechanics and lack of variety. This seems to be the major complaint I see time and time again when it comes to games like SW:TOR and RIFT--- people are tired of getting more of the same.
If someone wants to hold onto new subscribers, they have to realize that those subscribers are most likely people that have already invested a lot of time performing identical actions in another game.
So, why would they want to leave a fully geared character that probably has time invested in crafting, enchantments, gear, and achievements, so on and so forth, to do it all over again in the same manner in a supposedly "new" game?
You shouldn't be ashamed, I enjoyed early WoW very much, I just didn't like the constant overhauls that gradually removed my freedom to build my characters the way I wanted compared to vanilla WoW, and I loathed the fact that across-the-board game "balance" (translation: nerfs) would utterly destroy PvE mechanics to appease the PvP crowd.
The problem is the Developers. 100%.
Almost everyone who plays a new MMO is coming from WoW or another older MMO. Thus, we've all experienced the entire quest hub to quest hub grind etc. I'm getting older and it's just not fun anymore. I want more control of my character. I'm sick of being told what to do and where to go the entire time via quests etc.
Sometimes I just want to shift the engine in neutral and do my own thing. New MMOs don't provide the tools to do so.
We need optional social classes and elements.
I'm currently playing Ryzom.
Before that I played Vanguard and I would still be playing it but I got a bit disappointed how SOE handled an exploit a few weeks ago and I was equally disappointed that a few people of my guild took part in that exploit. Maybe I go back to Vanguard, I don't know.
Before that I played Haven & Hearth for about half a year (Yes, it's a rough game, the server can have lag or crash and it's not 3D but has isometric view, but it's a great little MMORPG - and it's completely free and has no cash shop). Before that I played Xsyon for about half a year (It's not ready for prime time but it's a rough gem in the making - players change the world and build structures, combat has been compared to Blade and Soul). I only left Xsyon because - personally - I do not like twitchy action combat, I'm aware that others find that type of combat great.
Just look beyond all these AAA themeparks and you'll find an ocean of creativity and innovation.
I maintain this List of Sandbox MMORPGs. Please post or send PM for corrections and suggestions.
I would go a step further and say the problem is the Investors, which demand the developers follow their path to quick profit but at the expense of customer loyalty/satisfaction, and if the developers don't follow their whims they will be "replaced"
Nope it is the de-evolution of MMOs. They are only about 10% of what we use to get to play. It is like calling ME3 a RPG and selling it for the same cost as Skyrim which is a RPG and has well over 50x content but people think they are both RPGs.
Oh this thread again. At least we got the OP to see that he is playing the same game type over and over again within the first page this time.
Taru-Gallante-Blood elf-Elysean-Kelari-Crime Fighting-Imperial Agent
I blame the games. They're meant to be like fast food now; you buy it, you consume it, you move on. Graphics are irrelevant if the game is great. People have been playing chess since the early middle ages and nobody complains that we need new, bigger and more colourful pieces. I'd still play Civ2 if the newer versions weren't available. I lost count how many years I played UO and the reason I quit had nothing to do with boredom. I still play Diablo 2 every once in a while.
I did quit FPS's though since they are a young man's game and heavily rely on having a beastly computer. I'm not saying I'm getting old, I'm just not as fast as I was 15 years ago...
Probably some truth to this.
I think a triple A open world sandbox might be able to draw me in, but my gaming days are mostly behind me. But I think part of the blame does lie with developers. They make sequel after sequel. How many Call of Duty, Medal of Honor and Battlefield games do we need? I'm tired of War games so that removes a large swath of games for me. I've played WOW and I loved it at the time, but now I'm done, but how many similar games have launched since. Again, those games are out, removing a large swath of games.
This is probably why I've started playing strategy games and some open world rpg. The strategy games, though many are sequels are relatively fresh to me having never devoted much time to the genre, and the open world rpgs appeal to for the the unscripted quality of the adventuring.
I think as development costs have risen, the need to acquire large sums of money has become even more important, and that means bringing in the kind of investment that favors a more corporate thinking mindset. As a result, you have people trying to distill gaming down to a science to increase profit potential. The problem is, making a great game is more art than science, even though it is heavy on the technical aspects.
I like to make connections....
I relate games to life. I think they are very alike actually. I have a feeling, and that's all I can call it... a feeling, that life is just like an MMORPG. Our Spirit incarnated on this planet, just like we make an avatar in a game. Spirit is non physical, pure energy/divine unconditional love.... anyways.
So, life is a grind for money, money to get better things etc. It's VERY linear, at least that's how it's set up in the West. Family, School, Work, Marriage, Children, Retirement. Cycle repeats. You play the game with your friends, you "party", you gather materials, you level up your skills, you create better gear for yourself, you train your body et al.
I think PvP and PvE are the same... players and the environment form a cohesive whole. Like a video game, life too is an illusion.
Long story short, there is no problem, when one is water fasting and being celibate.
Entertainment is simply an escape from doing those two things. We seek the mystery and wonder in our creations, yet eventually find boredom in them instead (save for awesome Iluvatar-like music).
Yeah... I can't help talking about stuff like this, no matter how hard I try to subdue myself.
So in response to the OP, yes the games are fine. They are amazing. I still play SNES and SEGA to this day, and enjoy them.
Words don't do justice. I can say "Transcend the Ego" yet those are just letters. I don't even like posting. Sigh.
I don't see it as problem. It is natural. If one kind of hobby start to wear out, try something else.
It is not like there is a lack of entertainment in the world.
Sorry OP, but I played FFXI for 3 years and loved every minute (I actually quite because it was taking to much time and I would have failed high school)...Now I can't even play a MMO for more then a week.
Second: I've been playing AoE2 since 1999...and I still love this game to death, If I ever do stop playing it, it'll probably because its not supported on hardware anymore (that will be a sad day)
(I played LAN parties, and probably 2-4 a month)
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