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2004 was wayyyyy better
delete5230
Member EpicPosts: 7,081
Back when I found my first mmo, it was amazing to me. I had no one to talk to about it, I had to figure out everything on my own.
I remember talking to the Electronics Boutique guy on what I had to do to play World of Warcraft.
" Not worth it " was his reply !.......Expensive video card and ram, " don't do it "......Here is a FPS game and a Console you should buy. Well, I didn't buy anything and I went home depressed 
After a few hours of pacing around my house like a crazy nut, I decided screw him !......I went off to a local Circuit City and got ripped off on a cheap video card, 512mb ram and a copy of World of Warcraft 
I played the crap out of this game for months ( not going into detail ). As much as I loved it, I decided to expand my horizon's and switched to Dungeons and Dragons Online, my first few days I hated it. I made myself a healer and shortly into it I found I was needed by others....What a great feeling, people asking me to do stuff and dungeon crawling. Another best time in gaming !
Later EQ 2, LOTRO, and Vanguard ( after it was fixed a little better ).
Now here is my point :
One day I sat back and figured this could only get better. So much advancement in computers and game technology, the future looks so good !!!...........Then Warhammer !..........YES, this will be the game of games !.......The commercials the videos and podcast !.....It's here, the industry is really advancing, just like I imagined
Well, No !......It was crap. Small zones, instanced battle grounds where everyone had to go to get ANY experience. You were actually forced to do this, developers made it that way to keep players out of the broken RvR.
Such a disappointment, ALONG WITH EVERY OTHER MMO EVER MADE !.......NEVER EXPECTED THAT !
edit,
From around the Warhammer time. A major turn took place. Something greedy !!!!.......Developers took technology and used it to their advantage.
- Deeper world instances
- Tunnel vision game play ( carrot on a stick )
- Trickery in Cash Shops, to a well thought out degree.
- Fast leveling with the clam people asked for easy. But WAY LESS CONTENT.
Vanilla World of Warcraft is Large ( est 2004 )...... 3x larger than anything recent......I know first hand, I'm playing it now.
Comments
I has the confuse.
Also WAR was not a bad game, it was just a bit under-cooked RvR PvP was really fun when it worked (it often became fort Nascar.. but not always.) and it actually had a decent story hidden in there.
Bright Wizards (and to a lesser degree Sorcs) where down right broken for a ong time tho.
Beyond that i think the MMO market if a victim to it´s own sucsess, players demanded bigger, better looking and with more player at the same place and time... BUt at the same time demands came that it had to look bettre and also every game should do something new and innovative... and all this for 12$ a month.
Then again.. Back in 04 CoH was released... Sp you might have a point =P
This have been a good conversation
By 2009 / 2010, the market had matured. WoW had established a route to success and so publishers pushed developers to follow the same route to success. There was more money flowing to developers and more MMOs being developed, but creativity was (and still is) stifled by the publishers in an effort to reduce the risk to their investment.
This is exactly the same process that happens in all entertainment art forms. A new market is created, the market experiments wildly until a successful paradigm is established, investors flood the market following the paradigm until either the market crashes or someone takes a risk, is successful and changes the paradigm.
In the MMO world, we're currently waiting for the paradigm shift away from themepark / f2p. It may never come: there is always the risk that other mmo designs can just never be as popular as themeparks. We may have to wait a long time for that "special" designer to come along and design a revolutionary mmo. We may just be waiting for a big publisher to be willing to take that risk and invest in something unconventional. Or, we may just have to wait until an indie dev manages to pull off the impossible: creating a revolutionary mmo on a shoestring budget.
I'll wait to the day's end when the moon is high
And then I'll rise with the tide with a lust for life, I'll
Amass an army, and we'll harness a horde
And then we'll limp across the land until we stand at the shore
Now come the time where people start praising how vanilla Wow is so great and why there is no mmorpg like that now.
I bet 10 years from now people will talk about how great ESO, FFIV, GW2 is.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
The OP is right about one thing though, MMOs shifted from persistent open world games with limited loading screen to instanced story-based games or just plain "lobby games" where you are teleported to content.
*They don't all agree on which one...
While there where/are games that come close they either have a particulair graphic/visual style I don't really like, might be isometric and I am also passed that, or it's of very low quality. Or developers choose to put PVP as it's main course.
With SWG I had so many choices, some day's I choose to go out hunting with ingame friends/guild members, but due to odd game time hours I loved the game because I still could do allot of things regardless if anyone was online. And I could be very solo yet incredible active socially ingame.
Currently enjoying Fallout 4, it's a game that grants me that gaming freedom I seek in online worlds,at the same time feel a connection to the world. And that's within a singleplayer game. I really would like this feeling playing a MMORPG again.
By their definition, MMOs all died and new games take their place.
"The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth" -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Authored 139 missions in Vendetta Online and 6 tracks in Distance
Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!
(Akiraosc)
Well personal opinions aside WAR did a lot of good things (not saying it was first with them or that it did it flawless) like oped group quests and the way they tried to weave kill quests in to the natural progression. The crafting system was also kinda fun to tinker with as a distraction while one waited for other stuff.
But i guess that the fact that RvR was supposed to be the big thing.. and it not really working as intended a lot of the time... It was destined to fail.
This have been a good conversation
Everything advaced, just not you. Youre still playing the same game from your childhood that kept you from advancing.
i am a rpg nerd. i need immersion. currently im fully immersing myself into witcher 3. devs said many times that gothic was their inspiration too (like havin no level scaling and shutting off maps with stronger enemies, although that felt even more natural in gothic). tw3 is like a modern gothic, if you like it pls gothic gothic a try.
but hey, i never understoood the fun of counterstrike too. or even mobas (i played dota 2 242h to judge it for myself). or how could anyone play UT more than a LAN party. or arena shooters like CoD or the garbage thats moba shooters (overwatch).
so have fun.
There always seems too be a MMO that i can get hooked on and feel like the days when i first started playing EQ WoW and ffxi to bring me back in the genre again. Doesn't matter what year it is.
Fewer people constantly railing on about how terrible everything was, in-game and out, and every title wasn't backlit with Negativity Blacklights.
Plus CoH, of course.
I would argue that a lot of older MMOs did transition from open world MMO to be more instanced over the years and some quality of life features altered the way people play them to behave as if they were lobby games. Does a MMO stop being a MMO because the players play them as if it they were a lobby game? I mean, GW2 waypoints allow you to pick "à la carte" the events you want to do, but you don't have to play the game that way...
Of course there are also exception. For example, LoTRO which is very instance story based despite having a huge open world and few instant travel options (last time I played which is like 2 years ago). It is one of the most immersive MMO out there from my personally experience (probably helps that I like the lore). The Shire is probably my favorite MMO zone too. The funniest in all of this is that LoTRO wasn't my first MMO (that's DAoC) and played it for the first time a year after it was converted to F2P...
I am more than happy to go along and call these lobby games MMOs. It is not like the label means a lot anyway.