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Sick and tired of solo-centric rubbish, where have all the REAL MMOs gone?
Yinlor
Member Posts: 55
Title pretty much says it all, I've gone through so many new MMOs my head has gone beyond spinning and has just fallen off altogether. I'm so sick and tired of the direction MMOs have gone, focusing on the solo player constantly and just straight-up forgetting those of us who play an MMO to play alongside others. The last and only time I've played an MMO that actually encouraged group play was FFXI, it's a shame they had to ruin it all with Abyssea.
So do games like these even exist any more? I would love nothing more than to be able to enter a game like FFXI again, where progression isn't me wandering around on my own clicking on NPCs to do endless quests for them, but to band together with my fellow players and relax, killing monsters, exploring, do a quest every now and again that had MEANING like the missions in FFXI and wasn't just a means to an end.
I fear those days are over, however I'd love to be proven wrong, so are there any MMOs besides FFXI like that out there? Or am I just barking up the wrong tree and MMOs have just become glorified singleplayer games with a built-in chat room?
And I don't mean just dungeons, I mean the entire game, I want an entire game with encouraged or forced grouping.
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"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
EQ2 fan sites
Im with you man, but MMO's have shifted and gone the direction of online RPG's. XIV was my last hope to get a good quality PvE MMO. I guess 500K subs for 7 years was far to profitable for them so they had to try lower the number. Which they accomplished with XIV, I doubt they have 100k subs now with XIV. That still boggles my mind how SE screwed that up. People wanted an XI-2, and what did we get? We got a turd.
The market is still there for another game like XI, If a game like it thrived through WoW's prime It would definatly be able to make it now in this shitty time.
MMO's now dont even try to be good anymore. Even the themepark ones. They just are made cheep as possible so they can recover their costs within the first 3 months of launch.
Waiting for:EQ-Next, ArcheAge (not so much anymore)
Now Playing: N/A
Worst MMO: FFXIV
Favorite MMO: FFXI
Put the rose tinited goggles down for a second and realize that game with forced grouping is a thing of the past and will never return. For one it was a niche market in a niche environment which hardly anyone enjoyed. Secondly every MMO (except a couple) features endgame that is group only.
Be thankful that there exists dungeon crawling, raiding, PvPing and other forms of endgame that is suited to the group only. I pray the day that forced grouping comes to an end completely and the genre can grow like other gaming mediums. being required to group for endgame is just as obnoxious and stupid as being forced to group of the older MMO's.
Everything you need to know about Elder Scrolls Online
Playing: GW2
Waiting on: TESO
Next Flop: Planetside 2
Best MMO of all time: Asheron's Call - The first company to recreate AC will be the next greatest MMO.
Thanks for the support, all, glad to hear I'm not the only one who feels this way, it just annoys me so much that every new game now is catered toward the solo player and absolutely nothing is made for those of us who play an MMO to be a social experience any more. The big selling point of an MMO is the presence of others, so how it managed to become a genre for those who are far too antisocial to do anything more than trade and perhaps raid with said other players (though most of the time it's only for the gear) Baffles me.
And I agree with you and toddze, XIV was my last hope as well, how they managed to ruin it so much is just...Indescribable. And while I semi look forward to the overhaul, I fear that it's just gonna become another WoW-clone with the things they've been saying, as you said, XI has survived before WoW, during WoW's prime, and it's still around even now, Funcom had the balls to make a niche game with TSW, but the only thing niche about it was the difficulty level and the fact the quests required some semblence of thought, it's still just as much of a solo game as any of the others. So why someone can't go out and try a party-based niche title I have no idea.
As you said Waybackwhen, there are single-player games for solo people, I'd adore for Skyrim to have been an MMO, but I don't go around expecting them to cater to my whims, I just let the single-player people enjoy it, so why has the MMO genre been taken over by soloers? Now people like us have nowhere to turn, it's either play their way or don't play at all, I'm fine with solo players having titles to play, I do, however, have a problem with them being so vocal and rampant now that literally every MMO caters for them.
And Kuro1n, that's probably what I'm gonna have to do at this rate, but I guess I'm just crazy enough to constantly run around finding new MMOs just to seek out some semblance of what I used to love about them, only to be disappointed over and over.
Made me smile... not because you are wrong, but just that this has been said for a long long time now by some.
I wrote in '07 (and probably elsewhere before, but my patience for looking at old posts is limited);
"...it's just that they don't make games to last anymore. Everything is super casual/ solo/ easy now to sell to the mass market is all. Dev companies arnt interested in keeping a core group of challange demanding gamers happy anymore, they want disposable high turn over idiot games that people will play for 2-6 months, get bored of, leave for a while, and return when they deem to release some weak arsed expansion in a year or two.
The kind of 'sticky' game you describe is all but dead imo... It's all MMORPG lite... Console dumb games that give a great big initial sugar rush, before letting you crash once you realise how hollow the experience is"
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/128813/page/4
REAL mmos:
Dude, quoting a five year younger you...just wrong on so many levels.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Rose tinted goggles? I played FFXI a few years ago, like maybe 2009, so it's hardly nostalgia speaking, it gave me so many things no other MMO was ever able to, solely due to me being able to forge such strong bonds with other players due to us all being forced to meet, cooperate and overall have fun in each other's company. It's the only game I've actually met people IRL from because it brought us THAT close. I don't care if some people hardly enjoyed it, that's the problem, everyone caters to THOSE people and not to people like us who loved everything about forced grouping. Loads of people enjoyed it which is why FFXI is still going strong today.
I can't be glad those things exist because the rest of the game only ever brings players in with a solo mindset, so really dungeon runs to them are nothing more than a gear grind, the only "social" thing about it is that I happen to be standing there hitting stuff with them, nobody talks, nobody has fun, if you wipe people leave because they just don't care, I don't want to play alongside people like that, yet they're the only people modern MMOs draw and cater for. The genre isn't growing, it's shrinking, rapidly, everything is just like the previous thing with a fancier combat system or fancier quests because developers can't count on anyone working together, they have to cater everything to the solo player. All we want is ONE game that we can enjoy forced grouping in, is that too much to ask? The genre is saturated with solo-centric MMOs, all I and everyone else who feels this way wants is a game they can enjoy to the fullest without being hampered by the community or the solo-focused game systems.
look mmorpg.com game list ,many players count Diablo3 or Torchlight2 as mmo's, something wrong is here with mmo gaming players.Seems they don't know what is MMO!
devs only making what majority asking, it is sad when we seen what is final product ; sp games sell as mmo's
World of Darkness !!!
Nuff´said!
well, until then TSW
What is real? Here's my understanding:
Old definition: Massively Multiplayer (500+ in the same always connected world working with and/or against other players) Online (connected via networking) Role Playing Game (persistent player created character with development and progression where player acts out the role of the character in the environment)
New definition: Any single, cooperative, or multiplayer game with developer/pubisher hosted servers, often including embedded mini-game environments not connected with the main world (aka: other players cannot walk to where you are and see you unless specifically invited) and commonly including gameplay that is difficult or impossible to play as a group.
Real changed.
Forced grouping is not being social ,you are social when you have a choice between soloing and grouping and you chose to group .Also didn't 'old school' people complain on how mmos should be virtual worlds ? In a virtual world you are not glued to people and you don't have do to numbing boring grinds like killing 10000 boars to level unless you want to recreate a worse version of real life.That type of gameplay you want was only possible because at that moment players didn't had a choice in mmos and thankfully those times are gone.
EVE is not a good example for forced grouping because you can do a lot of things on your own (btw EVE is not an example for a successful FFA PVP game too because developers understood the importance of having safer areas for players ).
Correct, forced grouping is not necessarily social, however, it helps to create a far more social environment than other games. You say that being social is picking to group when there's a choice, but what you're not factoring in is that in order to achieve this there has to be other players willing to group. In a solo-centric game full of solo players, that is nigh-on impossible, in a forced grouping game, people go in with the mindset that they know they have to group, and as such, they must be the type of player who wants to group, when like-minded players come together the grouping experience is FAR more enjoyable.
Considering my time grouping in WoW, a solo-centric game, usually revolved around hoping people didn't leave parties if we wiped, and the only talking was regarding boss strategies or people complaining, whereas my time in FFXI was spent chatting with my fellow players and making great new friends, I'll leave you to decide which is better.
In a virtual world, anything can go, the world can be an incredibly dangerous place in which it's dangerous to go alone, and that sounds far more enthralling to me than a world in which anything remotely dangerous can be defeated by me within a matter of seconds. That sounds like a better version of real life to me, a world in which excitement and companionship is encouraged and enforced.
If in 1982 we played with the current mentality, we would have burned down all the pac man games since the red ghost was clearly OP. Instead we just got better at the game.
In the beginning of WoW, before they added op items from raids and the bg grind, I met quite a lot of nice people and most parties were friendly, even after a few wipes probably because the server community was small enough ,you knew most people by name and reputation meant something. I don't think being able to solo the game was the problem,I did a lot of quests solo but while doing that I met people ,some of them are still my friends.
What destroyed that game and in my opinion a lot of other games was the growing popularity of the genre which brought a lot of new players who didn't care about socializing,lore,role playing or a virtual world and just wanted a fantasy version of a fps.That made meeting decent players while questing or exploring the world harder and harder until you end with the communities of today where in most games no one wants to talk and all are in a hurry to kill npcs and get loot.
So I am glad for the choice to solo because I prefer that to just party with people who don't even bother to talk or even say hi when in a party.
What's obonoxious and stupid in my opinion is playing an MMO to solo, solo, solo, when there are so many single player games out there with gameplay that is superior to any MMO.
I enjoyed FFXI immensely. Do I want that forced grouping to come back though in newer games? Hell no. I HATED sitting in an 8 hour party in one spot for ONE level. I also HATED sitting in Jeuno for 2 hours waiting for a party to form and having no solo option of worth to go do while I waited.
Besides, it wasn't the grouping that made me love FFXI. It was the sheer amount of crap to do in the game, the immersion factor, the depth and lore and having one character any job on any given day aspect. The grouping was fun up to about level 50 where it became so tedious and monotonous that I ended up just doing another job up to those levels and never got any further. Kept hoping they would make FFXIV with all the parts I loved about FFXI but with a leveling system similar to WoW so that I could actually see the whole game and not just the lower half. I'm talking leveling mind you, grouping for dungeons and raids and pvp is fine and makes sense. But not for everything else.
But then again, we have hybrids these days with GW2 and Lotro's RoR expansion with open tapping rules so that you technically are tackling content in a group at times just not actually having to waste the time to form one for certain aspects of the game, mostly leveling. I kind of like that better. Open tapping FTW!!
we used to group in Asheron's call all the time, but it was the game was brutally hard, scary and full of unknown dangers. you just couldn't survive alone.
same with EQ 1 and early Anarchy Online
The WoW came out and decided to make things easy so that more people play these games
it worked so well that everyone started copying it, with the extreme being chinese games where you're literally spooned fed best weapons and armor and like 1000s of healing potions right off the bat just to keep you in the game. why bother grouping when the game holds your hand through the entire process and gives you everything you desire as long as you pay?
that's what happened.
-fun games are hard, they challenge us to the point of wanting to throw up, so you need people to help you survive
-lame games give you things up front and ask for money later
I review lots of indie games and MMORPGs
And thank GOD for that. Any game that forces you into any activity is bad design.
But but...they all force me to get 'experience' and gear and stuff.
Beware of generalization.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Ummm nowdays MMOS give you option to either solo or form groups for loot and experince. So no i m not forced into getting XP if that is how you feel it would be better to stop playing games all together. Because experince gain is basis of progression for MMOS.
What OP and others are asking for is removal of option of solo play and force everyone to get something as basic as xp and loot only through grouping.
You and I we are not even on same wave length here.
Hardly anyone? Get over yourself. Just because you did not like it and it is/was not mainstream does not mean hardly anyone liked it. EQ 1 had 300k+ subs for years so there are definetely a lot of us who still like an MMO to be an MMO and not a single player online games which 90% of the current crop of "MMOs" are.
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