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the future of MMORPGs
bouncingsoul
Member Posts: 211
This post may be more so a rant than anything. A call to the public; MMORPG community as a whole. The future of MMORPGs, is, to the extent of necessary aknowledgment, at stake.
I won't bore you with the whole story about how I played Gemstone III "back in the day" and pioneered games such as Asheron's Call in it's prime. But it's actually what I'm telling you that has to do with that.
To get down to the point, I feel like the future of MMO's are nothing but "Big Business". Appealing to as many people as the devs possibly can in order to make a big hit and brag about subscriber numbers. Sure, many people have attempted to try new frontiers and mechanics, but they all end up getting dumbed down to the point where it's just a silly "extra", and has nothing to contirbute to the game. I guess the only people who can really relate are the old timers: AC, EQ, UO, or even text-based gamers.
Does anyone else feel this way? I mean, really.
WoW=A Huge success in terms of playability, function, and presentation. The pretty much perfect leveling treadmill yet. But how many of you have been able to capture the feeling you got the first days in your first MMO again?
It was something NEW, different, and with blindfolds on we ventured out into new worlds. Now a days, most of us have an established understanding of the MMO, and in order for that to happen again, Developers need to start innovating. I long for a game (non vaporware) to present, and execute, features that appeal to a certain crowd, and not just bland, trendy, knights in shining armor to just sell, sell, sell.
Honestly, am I alone on this?
There's most likely no "cure" for this trend in the MMO business, but I'm just saying it how I feel.
Comments
When I played WoW I thought to myself, here's a game that has done absolutely nothing that could be deemed innovative or original and made no effort to appeal to anyone but the casual gamer. They did however, manage to take the ideas that were most easily marketed from other successful MMORPGs of the past and much to their credit when considering their huge player base and unquestioned success. And yes the more MMORPGs become popular the more they fall victim to Big Business but that's simply the nature of the world. There are very few things if anything that escape the sphere of greed. What I've found is that patience is the real key here. Eventually someone is going to be bold and come out with something rather original that appeals to the old school gamers like you and me by daring to be different and when this happens the rest of the sheep will undoubtedly follow what, at the time, will be considered the most wayward of the flock.
The problem is that MMORPG's are recessing - they are growing smaller , more limited , and less free - with every new MMORPG
When once you had Ultima online > with total freedom of movement (exploration) , open skills , crafting , free pvp ..etc
now you have
DDO > with aligment limited to only good , totally but totally instanced (even more than GW) , no crafting , no pvp , no global chat , totaly limited exploration ... etc
This is frightening trend. And if this is a future of MMORPGS , than i thing this genre is dead ...
"Before this battle is over all the world will know that few...stood against many." - King Leonidas
You are right, given the mass market there is no cure for it. Just because the mass market needs products with pre-made contents to consume and guided gaming, otherwise many will feel lost in the game. The mass market is a consumer market on an average intelligence level where many play a game to relax and NOT think ... it must be simple and can have level-grind en mass, mass market players do not and will not have a problem with it, they need and want direction in games also.
What mass market players do not want is a complex game where you need to think much and where you need to define your own goals ... I am talking of free-style gaming, where you are actually in a world and find your path by your own. The mass market player is not that guy, who wants this ... if he is confrontated with such a game he will feel lost and will call it "crap" after a few minutes. Complex games, which does not give instant rewards, where you need to formulate a long term goal and decide how to achieve it ... that is not the game a mass market player wants.
That is why, all mass market games will become more and more primitive and simple, with an easy to consume gameplay (where you can play just 20 minutes at a time without any problem), suited for casual players, with a given goal to achieve and an end game .... a fully consumable product, not a persistent, dynamically changing world.
If wou want to see new or even revolutionary concepts in the MMO-world, you will most likely find them in a niche market game - the mass market companies will just make the consumer market happy and themselves rich ... there is more money in this business than in the movie industry last century, incredibly much more.
Ragosch
It's funny you should mention.....
Richard A. Bartle wrote an article on this very thing back before Shadowbane came out. Some of our more vocal FFA PvP supporters and GW haters love to rehash Bartle's ideas, but they do so in a way that just makes you tune them out. You'll notice, at the end of the article, he does offer some hope for MMOs.
Personally, I think we're about to see a large number of free, privately run MMO's that will bring a new graphical age to MUDs. There's quite a bit of interest among hobby and indie game devs on how these games are made, and more than a few open source projects that have come a long way in the past few years. World Forge and Realm Forge are the two I'm watching the closest. And there's always NWN2 as a last resort since it's rumored that the dedicated server will be able to handle up 250 players if you hook it up to enough bandwidth.
If big business is the problem, then it's about to be cut out of the loop. There will always be commercial MMOs. It'll be interesting to see how they try to compete with hobby games that are made for good gameplay rather than maximum profit.
It is not said that a niche market game does not provide good profits; sure, it is not maximized, but it is still a multi-million-Dollar market (per game) with great potential for independent companies. This niche is not that interesting for global players (big game companies), they can make much more money by designing a crap game suited for the chinese resp. asian market than in designing a high quality game for a small niche market.
Ragosch
hmm, I only once had the feeling I was playing my first mmo again in World of Warcraft.
I started MMORPG's with the korean MMO Ragnarok Online. these 'two games couldn't be more diffrent, so after playing Ragnarok Online for a year, I joined World of Warcraft. and it was an entirely new experience for me. sadly, no other games has given me that feeling. if I play any other korean mmorpg, for example Lineage 2, I feel like I'm playing Ragnarok Online all over again even tough its pretty diffrent, but I geuss the pve part is pretty much the same. and western games besides WoW? well once I started playing other western mmo's I felt it was WoW over again, so it didn't took long to realise how much WoW has copied (and improved!) from other MMO's.
I think the only MMORPG's that can give you a new feeling are EVE,WW2O,Planetside and the upcomming Auto Assault. sadly, I'm in none of these games.