One variation I nick-named MSOTSG + embedded multiplayer.
Massively
Single-Player
Online
Task-Driven
Storyline
Game
with embedded competitive and cooperative multiplayer mini-games.
I didn't coin the term with intent on being insulting. It was simply an observation at the time.
Guild Wars 1 was the future !!!
Ken Fisher - Semi retired old fart Network Administrator, now working in Network Security. I don't Forum PVP. If you feel I've attacked you, it was probably by accident. When I don't understand, I ask. Such is not intended as criticism.
MMOs have been invaded by marketing... I would be surprised if we don't see overt advertising of products in game soon... I mean really, if Twitter and Facebook can get the MMO giant to incorporate their products into their game, who's to say Kellog's or Budweiser aren't far behind.
No, that's not Mead you are drinking it's Red Bull. That tasty gruel over there is a nice big bowl of Cheerios... gluten free of course... don't forget to add a nice helping of pre and post-biotics.
If you call that evolution, then the genre is indeed doomed.
... staple in a MMORPG is nothing more (IMO) than an aspect designed to attract market share. Why am I pointing all this out? Because the industry is NOT evolving, it is devolving to appeal to more market share and those without the patience to play a face to face rpg.
So what if companies are trying to appeal to "more market share"?
Do you really think AAA companies can put millions of $ in your favourite niche type of game to end up selling to the few players of a niche? This is what smaller companies are here for, which I hope you support financially.
Why do you use the term "devolving"? Surely designers aren't taking away features, rather changing those features for new or different features that appeal to a majority of other players ("more market share" to quote you).
I can safely say that a 100 millions $ MMORPG of today has more features than a 10 millions $ MMORPG of the past.
And you said it, 'more' features, more bleh, more meh, more colors and fx and wow factor to get you to buy in. (I think peacocks do this to get a mate) LESS content, story, difficulty, excitement, addictiveness, replayability as anyone who quits a game after 3 months and chucks it into a cardboard box with all their other games can tell you. To evolve something needs to improve, get more intelligent, more useful, better. How do you consider taking a concept that worked for what it is and adding in a third leg, a larger forehead or an extra appendix? The games are cheaper to make because they are FAR shorter in content and story with FX/UI platforms already in use. PVP requires little or no other effort because the models are already made but it does draw in players. The problem is there are alot of colorful birds out right now and companies want quick cash now, not over 2 or 3 years. If we stopped buying into this kind of de-evolution they'd make better games and considering how many crowd-funded or indie games are popping out right now at least someone is listening and seeing what I see.
First PC Game: Pool of Radiance July 10th, 1990. First MMO: Everquest April 23, 1999
I kind of agree with the author. Persistence is pretty much the main component of an MMO. I think there were other games before MMO's that had it, but they weren't massive. There are many FPS games now that are trying to emulate the persistence, such as Day Z. They just aren't massive with multiplayer though.
The author mentioned SL, but that game is old now. It had the potential to change the MMO genre, but developers never seized that potential. An MMO that has user-generated content will be the next big thing. User-generated content is the true sandbox people are waiting for, where players can create their own gear, scripts, A.I., buildings, textures, etc. It's already happening to some extent, with Landmark and Neverwinter, but they are still limited.
I just don't see this genre evolving though. It's actually stagnant, if we're talking about the core components of it. These MMO's are all focused on combat, leveling, and stats. They are not focused on virtual sandbox environments such as SL. If the genre wanted to truly evolve, it would move beyond developer-generated content.
I wouldn't say evolving, I'd say devolving. MMO's are delivering less and less than they used to.
When EQ2 was released, it had everything you could possibly want in a game. Now as the game grew, it added even more, but when it was released, it wasn't just a theme park with one click crafting, raiding and pvp. It also had hundreds of armors and weapons, excellent housing (you could place anything in the x,y,z axis including upside down and anywhere in the room, even partially into the ceiling and floors and through the walls), and even collections. I could spend hours and hours just decorating my house, meaning customization was excellent. The only thing it didn't have was the ability to change the color of your armor and weapons as you choose and create new designs for them. The game even has an extremely easily searchable broker where most don't (Rift has one of the worst broker/auction houses that I've ever seen, and ESO doesn't have one at all).
Name a single game online right now released in the last ten years that you can do all of that with. Even LOTRO's housing totally sucks. I bet you can't name even one. And the game companies are trying very hard to convince us that this is the way things are supposed to be and trying very hard to pretend that they don't know better. And their stubborn refusal to do as we ask is whats causing MMO's to begin having alot of problems where they spend millions in development, last a couple years, and then start to fail.
Originally posted by tuppe99 Originally posted by XiaokiOriginally posted by vidiotkingMMOs are dead, they are not evolving at all. SWG was the pinnacle. It's been down hill ever since.
Good. MMORPGs need to die.And hopefully what rises from the ashes of the old MMORPG will be of no interest to the bitter vets that desperately cling to the corpses of SWG and EQ1.Maybe then, the genre can finally move forward.You are right. MMORPGs need to die, but not so that it can finally move forward as you suggest. They need to move back to their roots to become these great worlds of danger and wonder that they once were.
I see on the WoW EU forums there is a thread now of players posting their selfies from the new in-game feature. Please tell me that is NOT what you mean with moving forward. Please...
Thanks for perfectly illustrating my point.
First you say that MMOs have to regress 15 years(in a topic about evolution, which is hilarious) so they can be "virtual worlds" then you complain about people having fun.
Are you in some way offended by people having fun? Is fun not allowed in these "virtual worlds"?
If fun isn't allowed in what you would call an MMORPG, then Yes, MMORPGs need to die.
Originally posted by vidiotking MMOs are dead, they are not evolving at all. SWG was the pinnacle. It's been down hill ever since.
Look I'd agree SWG is the pinnacle of what I want in an MMO, however to claim the genre is dead because it hasn't expanded on that pinnacle is too subjective to be true, or IMO even said...
To evolve is to change, so in that the OP is correct.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Originally posted by vidiotkingMMOs are dead, they are not evolving at all. SWG was the pinnacle. It's been down hill ever since.
Good. MMORPGs need to die.And hopefully what rises from the ashes of the old MMORPG will be of no interest to the bitter vets that desperately cling to the corpses of SWG and EQ1.Maybe then, the genre can finally move forward.
You are right. MMORPGs need to die, but not so that it can finally move forward as you suggest. They need to move back to their roots to become these great worlds of danger and wonder that they once were.
I see on the WoW EU forums there is a thread now of players posting their selfies from the new in-game feature. Please tell me that is NOT what you mean with moving forward. Please...
Thanks for perfectly illustrating my point.
First you say that MMOs have to regress 15 years(in a topic about evolution, which is hilarious) so they can be "virtual worlds" then you complain about people having fun.
Are you in some way offended by people having fun? Is fun not allowed in these "virtual worlds"?
If fun isn't allowed in what you would call an MMORPG, then Yes, MMORPGs need to die.
Yah, thats hilarious, "MMOs need to regress 15 years just so they could do it ALL over again so in 15 years we could have topics how MMOs need to regress 15 years....again"
I thought this was an absolutely terrible article.
I believe it stems from an obviously faulty premise:
[quote]I thought about what makes an MMO an MMO. To me, above all, it is persistence. Not even numbers, really, but persistence. That means that it doesn’t matter as much if 10,000 people are playing a game if they do not affect the game in a persistent way.[/quote]
I'm confused here because he appears to be using different definitions of "persistence" in his examples.
The author then follows up with this assertion:
[quote]I’m going to make a bet: most of you reading this do not play with the 10,000 other people on your favorite server. Most of you play with, maybe, 10 on a regular basis (your guild.) The key ingredients to the persistent world is the potential for meeting other people, and the persistence that comes from in-game systems and player interaction (not only real-time, one-to-one interaction, though.)[/quote]
This is one of the major problems with the "MMO" industry today. Play with 10 other people on a regular basis? When I played Everquest 1, DAOC, early WoW, Shadowbane, or one of the other MMOs I played in the "past era," I played with FAR, FAR more than 10 different people on a regular basis. I still keep up with more than that many people from EQ and WoW. Playing with this few players on a regular basis is something I view as laughable in an MMO. Our raids were frequently ten times that. I played with hundreds of different people regularly in Everquest. The same goes for early WoW. In Vanilla, my PvP squad totaled up to around 30 some odd people. My guild had somewhere over 120 active players. I was had friends in other guilds I played with regularly and that brought me into contact with a lot of members of those guilds.
If we want to look at what makes an MMO an MMO, we don't need to go further than the first word- Massive. When all is said and done, this is the only real distinctive feature of an MMO. It is possible to play an MMO like a co-op game or a single player game. I've yet to play one that did not have that capacity if a player wanted. Going 100% hand in hand with the massive aspect is how this qualitatively impacts the game's community. Counter Strike has a community. Halo has its community. LoL, DOTA, HoN have their communities. Diablo has its community. And so forth. Unlike many of these games and the genres they represent, an MMO community develops inside the game and around and because of the game play. One does not have to participate in this community, but it is this community aspect of the MMO that really sets it apart from other genres.
It has been a long time since I've played a game that had this. As to why games stopped having this, we could speculate all day: the elimination of raiding (40 people is the absolutely minimum for me to consider anything a raid), the de-emphasis on guilds, excessive catering towards casuals, lack of content (or ease of content- could be related to strategies and guides becoming more and more prevalent online), movement away from "trilogy" play styles or just players becoming less reliant on other players, difference in the characteristics of gamers in the latest generation, etc.
Regardless, the MMO genre has not evolved. It has simply changed. What passes as an "MMO" now is really a Diablo style game dressed up as an MMO with a few legacy aspects. There is no such thing as a pseudo MMO. You are either an MMO or you are not.
Edit: I do not mean that these new "MMOs" are bad games. I've enjoyed playing many of them. They just are MMOs.
MMORPGs are evolving? No kidding! Gamers are demanding things to be different all the time, so developers give them that. Although, gamers do not usually know what they want. To quote a former Carbine employee, "We gave gamers what they asked for, not what they wanted".
To those saying the MMORPG genre is dead....I don't know how you come to that conclusion at all. What makes the perfect MMORPG to you might be dead because your ideals are so niche that you would be one of very few to play that sort of game. But that does not mean the genre is dead. Get over yourself.
^I couldn't agree more.
These two posters are a good example of the tyranny of the majority that pretty much defines the business that is MMORPGs. There is always the big re-statement about how the business has essentially allowed for natural selection amongst game designs, namely that those games that produce the most dollars from the most amount of people survive.
The thing is that at some point when people approach something for entertainment they are not playing a game because it is successful, they play it because they find it entertaining. When the things that you find entertaining in your hobby disappear, it's not going to breed satisfaction.
The MMORPGs are dead probably comes from the viewpoint of people who at one time played games called MMORPGs, had that experience, and now find that each new release is further and further away from the original conventions. With MOBA influence and broadening of the genre to include anything that allows more than one person to be in the game at once, the definition of the MMORPG has at that point drifted so far as to be near meaningless from the original MMORPG perspective.
New classifications of sub categories would help, and in most things it usually happens. The broadening of the term is making it less useful for description.
The genre that you once enjoyed is effectively dead, but you need to be happy about it because millions of WoW-bred users are happy.
Yet WoW is old school, as much of its gameplay is derived from EQ1 and as are the types of content and many of its systems and mechanics. The fact that so many still play WoW still shows how popular old school content is today. We are merely waiting for someone to take up the torch and make something old school that is worth playing. Lord know, the crap that has come out recently is hardly palatable to the new school, let alone the combined millions who still play all of the old games like EQ, WoW, Lineage, FFXI and FFXIV, DAoC, LOTRO, UO, AC, AO and the boat load of Asian games that are right out of the old school playbook.
Sorry, but I'm not buying. There are real MMOs still... and they are also evolving,
And there are also a lot of genre bent FPS, RTS and lobbies of all types posing as MMOs aided and abetted by the gaming media simply because, from the media;s perspective, they want growth and more games to cover so they get more hits and traffic.
I've heard the "I don't play with all 10,000" rationalization for lowering the bar on the definition used to justify calling a 4 person, 15 minute RTS in a MOBA an MMO... "after all", the saying goes "there are more than 10,000 possible players I could play with."
For me to think of it as a real MMO, there has to be some core game play elements, even if they're rare, that bring 100s of those players together to participate in a shared event... massive PVE or PVP events as seen in GW2... massive PVP battles as seen in ESO... it's something that has been there since the genre was defined by UO, EQ and AC almost 20 years ago.
It's those massively multiplayer moments that define the genre much more so than permanence, world change or a huge pool of potential group or scenario players that only come together in controlled small numbers.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
Let's be honest here, pure video gaming died with the Dreamcast. People turned away from visual memory units, the first console with online gaming, and a diverse library of games. And embraced a console that played DVDs instead. The last of the old gaming gods drew it's last breath and faded away.
They just feel like they are dead to me now. Really haven't felt interested in an mmo since LOTRO came out. Had high hopes for Archeage, and those were lost after playing the game for a month. I'm past that point of hope for a great game like Anarchy, WoW, or even LOTRO to ever be made again.
MMORPGs are evolving? No kidding! Gamers are demanding things to be different all the time, so developers give them that. Although, gamers do not usually know what they want. To quote a former Carbine employee, "We gave gamers what they asked for, not what they wanted".
To those saying the MMORPG genre is dead....I don't know how you come to that conclusion at all. What makes the perfect MMORPG to you might be dead because your ideals are so niche that you would be one of very few to play that sort of game. But that does not mean the genre is dead. Get over yourself.
^I couldn't agree more.
These two posters are a good example of the tyranny of the majority that pretty much defines the business that is MMORPGs. There is always the big re-statement about how the business has essentially allowed for natural selection amongst game designs, namely that those games that produce the most dollars from the most amount of people survive.
The thing is that at some point when people approach something for entertainment they are not playing a game because it is successful, they play it because they find it entertaining. When the things that you find entertaining in your hobby disappear, it's not going to breed satisfaction.
The MMORPGs are dead probably comes from the viewpoint of people who at one time played games called MMORPGs, had that experience, and now find that each new release is further and further away from the original conventions. With MOBA influence and broadening of the genre to include anything that allows more than one person to be in the game at once, the definition of the MMORPG has at that point drifted so far as to be near meaningless from the original MMORPG perspective.
New classifications of sub categories would help, and in most things it usually happens. The broadening of the term is making it less useful for description.
The genre that you once enjoyed is effectively dead, but you need to be happy about it because millions of WoW-bred users are happy.
Yet WoW is old school, as much of its gameplay is derived from EQ1 and as are the types of content and many of its systems and mechanics. The fact that so many still play WoW still shows how popular old school content is today. We are merely waiting for someone to take up the torch and make something old school that is worth playing. Lord know, the crap that has come out recently is hardly palatable to the new school, let alone the combined millions who still play all of the old games like EQ, WoW, Lineage, FFXI and FFXIV, DAoC, LOTRO, UO, AC, AO and the boat load of Asian games that are right out of the old school playbook.
No, WOW is no longer old school, it's evolved far from it's early roots, and it never was a very close copy of EQ, more of a loose interpretation really.
In fact most of those titles you listed as old school have changed so much from what they were, DAOC is a shell of it's former self, you have to play EMU's to get the real experience anymore.
There are a few hanger ons, EVE for one is still fairly close to it's roots, though some early vets would dispute that as well I'm sure.
But the old school is dead and gone, for better and worse the games are changing in directions favored by the majority on the market, and with any luck we'll still find some smaller indy titles to keep us going.
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
I thought this was an absolutely terrible article.
I believe it stems from an obviously faulty premise:
[quote]I thought about what makes an MMO an MMO. To me, above all, it is persistence. Not even numbers, really, but persistence. That means that it doesn’t matter as much if 10,000 people are playing a game if they do not affect the game in a persistent way.[/quote]
Yeah, that's a completely ridiculous assertion on their part. Persistence is an important aspect of MMORPGs, yes... It's impossible to have a true virtual world if everything just resets on occasion. Persistence is not a defining attribute of one.
The term "Massively" is there for a reason. It describes the "Multiplayer" part; ie. it's not just multiplayer.. It's massively multiplayer. If all that's required is "persistence", then the Persistent Worlds I played on in Neverwinter Nights would be called MMORPGs. And they certainly were not.
The author then follows up with this assertion:
[quote]I’m going to make a bet: most of you reading this do not play with the 10,000 other people on your favorite server. Most of you play with, maybe, 10 on a regular basis (your guild.) The key ingredients to the persistent world is the potential for meeting other people, and the persistence that comes from in-game systems and player interaction (not only real-time, one-to-one interaction, though.)[/quote]
Yep... another ridiculous assertion on their part, which completely misses the point. It's not about "how many people you know or may interact with". It's that there are 10,000 other people simultaneously sharing the same persistent, virtual space and whom may actually meet and interact, in any number of ways... and the experiences those encounters may bring.
It's like questioning the relevance of calling a restaurant a "Buffet", because even though there's dozens of different food items, how many of them are you really going to eat personally? It's completely disingenuous.
I don't know if the OP seriously doesn't get that.... or if they're just being willfully ignorant... but yeah... they're pretty far off the mark with that argument.
If we want to look at what makes an MMO an MMO, we don't need to go further than the first word- Massive. When all is said and done, this is the only real distinctive feature of an MMO.
...
Regardless, the MMO genre has not evolved. It has simply changed. What passes as an "MMO" now is really a Diablo style game dressed up as an MMO with a few legacy aspects. There is no such thing as a pseudo MMO. You are either an MMO or you are not.
I thought this was an absolutely terrible article.
I believe it stems from an obviously faulty premise:
[quote]I thought about what makes an MMO an MMO. To me, above all, it is persistence. Not even numbers, really, but persistence. That means that it doesn’t matter as much if 10,000 people are playing a game if they do not affect the game in a persistent way.[/quote]
Yeah, that's a completely ridiculous assertion on their part. Persistence is an important aspect of MMORPGs, yes... It's impossible to have a true virtual world if everything just resets on occasion. Persistence is not a defining attribute of one.
The term "Massively" is there for a reason. It describes the "Multiplayer" part; ie. it's not just multiplayer.. It's massively multiplayer. If all that's required is "persistence", then the Persistent Worlds I played on in Neverwinter Nights would be called MMORPGs. And they certainly were not.
The author then follows up with this assertion:
[quote]I’m going to make a bet: most of you reading this do not play with the 10,000 other people on your favorite server. Most of you play with, maybe, 10 on a regular basis (your guild.) The key ingredients to the persistent world is the potential for meeting other people, and the persistence that comes from in-game systems and player interaction (not only real-time, one-to-one interaction, though.)[/quote]
Yep... another ridiculous assertion on their part, which completely misses the point. It's not about "how many people you know or may interact with". It's that there are 10,000 other people simultaneously sharing the same persistent, virtual space and whom may actually meet and interact, in any number of ways... and the experiences those encounters may bring.
It's like questioning the relevance of calling a restaurant a "Buffet", because even though there's dozens of different food items, how many of them are you really going to eat personally? It's completely disingenuous.
I don't know if the OP seriously doesn't get that.... or if they're just being willfully ignorant... but yeah... they're pretty far off the mark with that argument.
If we want to look at what makes an MMO an MMO, we don't need to go further than the first word- Massive. When all is said and done, this is the only real distinctive feature of an MMO.
...
Regardless, the MMO genre has not evolved. It has simply changed. What passes as an "MMO" now is really a Diablo style game dressed up as an MMO with a few legacy aspects. There is no such thing as a pseudo MMO. You are either an MMO or you are not.
Bingo.
thats all nice and dandy. But from most posts you will deduce that most posters have many many additional conditions.
because once you GOT real MMO (GW2, some encounters require minimum of 80 people 115+ preffered) where lot of stuff revolves around massive you get this:
- it doesnt have trinity
- it doesnt have skill bloat
- it doesnt have "progression"
- it doesnt have quest hubs
- it does have quest hubs
- crafting is irrelevant
- OMG you have to craft to get best stuff
....
....
....
So yeah, its really NOT problem with massive or multiplayer or online. because you have game that fits that perfectly.
I don not see the market as evolving i see it aiming for cheaper ways to make a game ,then find a niche marketing campaign that makes it popular.Look at that super simple browser game,we have seen a ton of them and nobody cares abou them,yet some dev spent 40 million on an actress to help promote it.
H1Z1 used Adrienne Curry to promote their game,she doesn't even play it.
So rather than make better games that people want to play,they rely on simple marketing and a small risk to lose.
You are NEVER going to get a great game from crowd funding because a game MUST be designed from the ground up and have a solid plan for it's entire design.You cannot simply wing it as you get money,that is a SLOPPY design going no where.
So how can you design a triple A game with a budget you don't know??Answer is you cannot,so you start with a budget build and market that with promises of great things to come.
MMOS are aiming for the simplest of design approaches now,like instances,and flagging pvp,nothing that takes any effort to design or has any place in an open world,more like min i games with no purpose.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Getting kind of tired of hearing people calling GW2 an MMO when it isn't. Yes, there are lots of other people on the servers. Truth is... so what. You don't have to talk to npc's or to other players at any time because all quests are automatically gained by walking around, and you automatically group so it doesn't matter. It is one of the least MMO MMO's that I've ever played.
Comments
One variation I nick-named MSOTSG + embedded multiplayer.
Massively
Single-Player
Online
Task-Driven
Storyline
Game
with embedded competitive and cooperative multiplayer mini-games.
I didn't coin the term with intent on being insulting. It was simply an observation at the time.
Guild Wars 1 was the future !!!
MMOs have been invaded by marketing... I would be surprised if we don't see overt advertising of products in game soon... I mean really, if Twitter and Facebook can get the MMO giant to incorporate their products into their game, who's to say Kellog's or Budweiser aren't far behind.
No, that's not Mead you are drinking it's Red Bull. That tasty gruel over there is a nice big bowl of Cheerios... gluten free of course... don't forget to add a nice helping of pre and post-biotics.
If you call that evolution, then the genre is indeed doomed.
And you said it, 'more' features, more bleh, more meh, more colors and fx and wow factor to get you to buy in. (I think peacocks do this to get a mate) LESS content, story, difficulty, excitement, addictiveness, replayability as anyone who quits a game after 3 months and chucks it into a cardboard box with all their other games can tell you. To evolve something needs to improve, get more intelligent, more useful, better. How do you consider taking a concept that worked for what it is and adding in a third leg, a larger forehead or an extra appendix? The games are cheaper to make because they are FAR shorter in content and story with FX/UI platforms already in use. PVP requires little or no other effort because the models are already made but it does draw in players. The problem is there are alot of colorful birds out right now and companies want quick cash now, not over 2 or 3 years. If we stopped buying into this kind of de-evolution they'd make better games and considering how many crowd-funded or indie games are popping out right now at least someone is listening and seeing what I see.
First PC Game: Pool of Radiance July 10th, 1990. First MMO: Everquest April 23, 1999
I kind of agree with the author. Persistence is pretty much the main component of an MMO. I think there were other games before MMO's that had it, but they weren't massive. There are many FPS games now that are trying to emulate the persistence, such as Day Z. They just aren't massive with multiplayer though.
The author mentioned SL, but that game is old now. It had the potential to change the MMO genre, but developers never seized that potential. An MMO that has user-generated content will be the next big thing. User-generated content is the true sandbox people are waiting for, where players can create their own gear, scripts, A.I., buildings, textures, etc. It's already happening to some extent, with Landmark and Neverwinter, but they are still limited.
I just don't see this genre evolving though. It's actually stagnant, if we're talking about the core components of it. These MMO's are all focused on combat, leveling, and stats. They are not focused on virtual sandbox environments such as SL. If the genre wanted to truly evolve, it would move beyond developer-generated content.
I wouldn't say evolving, I'd say devolving. MMO's are delivering less and less than they used to.
When EQ2 was released, it had everything you could possibly want in a game. Now as the game grew, it added even more, but when it was released, it wasn't just a theme park with one click crafting, raiding and pvp. It also had hundreds of armors and weapons, excellent housing (you could place anything in the x,y,z axis including upside down and anywhere in the room, even partially into the ceiling and floors and through the walls), and even collections. I could spend hours and hours just decorating my house, meaning customization was excellent. The only thing it didn't have was the ability to change the color of your armor and weapons as you choose and create new designs for them. The game even has an extremely easily searchable broker where most don't (Rift has one of the worst broker/auction houses that I've ever seen, and ESO doesn't have one at all).
Name a single game online right now released in the last ten years that you can do all of that with. Even LOTRO's housing totally sucks. I bet you can't name even one. And the game companies are trying very hard to convince us that this is the way things are supposed to be and trying very hard to pretend that they don't know better. And their stubborn refusal to do as we ask is whats causing MMO's to begin having alot of problems where they spend millions in development, last a couple years, and then start to fail.
#1------Doing what everyone else does and getting financially decimated.
#2------------Then making quasi mmo's because you can't ,don't know how, or are afraid to innovate a true mmo.
That is where much of the industry decision makers are.
Guess what is going to happen to the # 2's ?
You are right. MMORPGs need to die, but not so that it can finally move forward as you suggest. They need to move back to their roots to become these great worlds of danger and wonder that they once were.
I see on the WoW EU forums there is a thread now of players posting their selfies from the new in-game feature. Please tell me that is NOT what you mean with moving forward. Please...
Thanks for perfectly illustrating my point.
First you say that MMOs have to regress 15 years(in a topic about evolution, which is hilarious) so they can be "virtual worlds" then you complain about people having fun.
Are you in some way offended by people having fun? Is fun not allowed in these "virtual worlds"?
If fun isn't allowed in what you would call an MMORPG, then Yes, MMORPGs need to die.
Look I'd agree SWG is the pinnacle of what I want in an MMO, however to claim the genre is dead because it hasn't expanded on that pinnacle is too subjective to be true, or IMO even said...
To evolve is to change, so in that the OP is correct.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Yah, thats hilarious, "MMOs need to regress 15 years just so they could do it ALL over again so in 15 years we could have topics how MMOs need to regress 15 years....again"
I thought this was an absolutely terrible article.
I believe it stems from an obviously faulty premise:
[quote]I thought about what makes an MMO an MMO. To me, above all, it is persistence. Not even numbers, really, but persistence. That means that it doesn’t matter as much if 10,000 people are playing a game if they do not affect the game in a persistent way.[/quote]
I'm confused here because he appears to be using different definitions of "persistence" in his examples.
The author then follows up with this assertion:
[quote]I’m going to make a bet: most of you reading this do not play with the 10,000 other people on your favorite server. Most of you play with, maybe, 10 on a regular basis (your guild.) The key ingredients to the persistent world is the potential for meeting other people, and the persistence that comes from in-game systems and player interaction (not only real-time, one-to-one interaction, though.)[/quote]
This is one of the major problems with the "MMO" industry today. Play with 10 other people on a regular basis? When I played Everquest 1, DAOC, early WoW, Shadowbane, or one of the other MMOs I played in the "past era," I played with FAR, FAR more than 10 different people on a regular basis. I still keep up with more than that many people from EQ and WoW. Playing with this few players on a regular basis is something I view as laughable in an MMO. Our raids were frequently ten times that. I played with hundreds of different people regularly in Everquest. The same goes for early WoW. In Vanilla, my PvP squad totaled up to around 30 some odd people. My guild had somewhere over 120 active players. I was had friends in other guilds I played with regularly and that brought me into contact with a lot of members of those guilds.
If we want to look at what makes an MMO an MMO, we don't need to go further than the first word- Massive. When all is said and done, this is the only real distinctive feature of an MMO. It is possible to play an MMO like a co-op game or a single player game. I've yet to play one that did not have that capacity if a player wanted. Going 100% hand in hand with the massive aspect is how this qualitatively impacts the game's community. Counter Strike has a community. Halo has its community. LoL, DOTA, HoN have their communities. Diablo has its community. And so forth. Unlike many of these games and the genres they represent, an MMO community develops inside the game and around and because of the game play. One does not have to participate in this community, but it is this community aspect of the MMO that really sets it apart from other genres.
It has been a long time since I've played a game that had this. As to why games stopped having this, we could speculate all day: the elimination of raiding (40 people is the absolutely minimum for me to consider anything a raid), the de-emphasis on guilds, excessive catering towards casuals, lack of content (or ease of content- could be related to strategies and guides becoming more and more prevalent online), movement away from "trilogy" play styles or just players becoming less reliant on other players, difference in the characteristics of gamers in the latest generation, etc.
Regardless, the MMO genre has not evolved. It has simply changed. What passes as an "MMO" now is really a Diablo style game dressed up as an MMO with a few legacy aspects. There is no such thing as a pseudo MMO. You are either an MMO or you are not.
Edit: I do not mean that these new "MMOs" are bad games. I've enjoyed playing many of them. They just are MMOs.
Yet WoW is old school, as much of its gameplay is derived from EQ1 and as are the types of content and many of its systems and mechanics. The fact that so many still play WoW still shows how popular old school content is today. We are merely waiting for someone to take up the torch and make something old school that is worth playing. Lord know, the crap that has come out recently is hardly palatable to the new school, let alone the combined millions who still play all of the old games like EQ, WoW, Lineage, FFXI and FFXIV, DAoC, LOTRO, UO, AC, AO and the boat load of Asian games that are right out of the old school playbook.
Sorry, but I'm not buying. There are real MMOs still... and they are also evolving,
And there are also a lot of genre bent FPS, RTS and lobbies of all types posing as MMOs aided and abetted by the gaming media simply because, from the media;s perspective, they want growth and more games to cover so they get more hits and traffic.
I've heard the "I don't play with all 10,000" rationalization for lowering the bar on the definition used to justify calling a 4 person, 15 minute RTS in a MOBA an MMO... "after all", the saying goes "there are more than 10,000 possible players I could play with."
For me to think of it as a real MMO, there has to be some core game play elements, even if they're rare, that bring 100s of those players together to participate in a shared event... massive PVE or PVP events as seen in GW2... massive PVP battles as seen in ESO... it's something that has been there since the genre was defined by UO, EQ and AC almost 20 years ago.
It's those massively multiplayer moments that define the genre much more so than permanence, world change or a huge pool of potential group or scenario players that only come together in controlled small numbers.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Let's be honest here, pure video gaming died with the Dreamcast. People turned away from visual memory units, the first console with online gaming, and a diverse library of games. And embraced a console that played DVDs instead. The last of the old gaming gods drew it's last breath and faded away.
I agree. MMOs have DEVOLVED, not evolved. These once complex online societies have been dumbed down beyond recognition.
Underrated post
Waiting for:
The Repopulation
Albion Online
No, WOW is no longer old school, it's evolved far from it's early roots, and it never was a very close copy of EQ, more of a loose interpretation really.
In fact most of those titles you listed as old school have changed so much from what they were, DAOC is a shell of it's former self, you have to play EMU's to get the real experience anymore.
There are a few hanger ons, EVE for one is still fairly close to it's roots, though some early vets would dispute that as well I'm sure.
But the old school is dead and gone, for better and worse the games are changing in directions favored by the majority on the market, and with any luck we'll still find some smaller indy titles to keep us going.
"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
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"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
thats all nice and dandy. But from most posts you will deduce that most posters have many many additional conditions.
because once you GOT real MMO (GW2, some encounters require minimum of 80 people 115+ preffered) where lot of stuff revolves around massive you get this:
- it doesnt have trinity
- it doesnt have skill bloat
- it doesnt have "progression"
- it doesnt have quest hubs
- it does have quest hubs
- crafting is irrelevant
- OMG you have to craft to get best stuff
....
....
....
So yeah, its really NOT problem with massive or multiplayer or online. because you have game that fits that perfectly.
I don not see the market as evolving i see it aiming for cheaper ways to make a game ,then find a niche marketing campaign that makes it popular.Look at that super simple browser game,we have seen a ton of them and nobody cares abou them,yet some dev spent 40 million on an actress to help promote it.
H1Z1 used Adrienne Curry to promote their game,she doesn't even play it.
So rather than make better games that people want to play,they rely on simple marketing and a small risk to lose.
You are NEVER going to get a great game from crowd funding because a game MUST be designed from the ground up and have a solid plan for it's entire design.You cannot simply wing it as you get money,that is a SLOPPY design going no where.
So how can you design a triple A game with a budget you don't know??Answer is you cannot,so you start with a budget build and market that with promises of great things to come.
MMOS are aiming for the simplest of design approaches now,like instances,and flagging pvp,nothing that takes any effort to design or has any place in an open world,more like min i games with no purpose.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Evolving?
Is that what we are calling it?
Well........ok.