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MMORPG truly a dying genre
Lobotomist
Member EpicPosts: 5,981
I used to love video games, but it all changed when I played a game called MUD. Simply a text game it had no finesse other games of that era had. But playing in a world populated by real people - it was clear to me even than : this is the future of video games, a higher state altogether. It is pointless for video games to go anywhere else.
And for long time they did. EQ , DAOC, UO ... than came WoW blew the lid off these games and opened it to the world. And everyone knew this is the way to go.
Games were made by top companies, books were written like "ready player one" - the sky was the limit.
But it failed. No need to go into details why. We all know it did.
What interest me is now.
What was once a pinnacle of gaming perfection and future of gaming. Today no professional game company want to touch.
Heck even the company that made trillions on their MMO (Blizzard) stepped out of the game and started making casual products.
Instead of AAA company like Naughty Dog or CD Project Red pushing the technological envelope to MMO,
we are left with handfull of "Indie" companies making MMOs
With low budgets , none of the resources or manpower of big companies - best they can make is mini-mmo , rehash of old formula ... or fail
Bottom line, even if those indie kickstarter funded games get released, which not all of them will. It will be far cry from what a healthy genre growth should have been.
They will most likely be the last to attempt it too.
And MMO will simply disappear as Point and Click adventures , RTS strategies etc did. Maybe to be unburied years after as nostalgia novelty for another round of kickstarters.
And for long time they did. EQ , DAOC, UO ... than came WoW blew the lid off these games and opened it to the world. And everyone knew this is the way to go.
Games were made by top companies, books were written like "ready player one" - the sky was the limit.
But it failed. No need to go into details why. We all know it did.
What interest me is now.
What was once a pinnacle of gaming perfection and future of gaming. Today no professional game company want to touch.
Heck even the company that made trillions on their MMO (Blizzard) stepped out of the game and started making casual products.
Instead of AAA company like Naughty Dog or CD Project Red pushing the technological envelope to MMO,
we are left with handfull of "Indie" companies making MMOs
With low budgets , none of the resources or manpower of big companies - best they can make is mini-mmo , rehash of old formula ... or fail
Bottom line, even if those indie kickstarter funded games get released, which not all of them will. It will be far cry from what a healthy genre growth should have been.
They will most likely be the last to attempt it too.
And MMO will simply disappear as Point and Click adventures , RTS strategies etc did. Maybe to be unburied years after as nostalgia novelty for another round of kickstarters.
Comments
One good new thinking game would kickstart the genre again (pun intended), it might take 10 years though.
Just because your standards are too high (ridiculously so) for any current game to meet, doesn't mean the genre is dying. In fact, it's flourishing, with a ton of promising titles on the horizon. Some are theme parks, some are sand parks, and some are sandboxes.
You people remind me of those global warming idiots in the 60's who screamed that we would all die by the seventies if we didn't do something. When that didn't happen, they moved our 'impending doom' up into the 90's. When that didn't happen (and the ozone hole proved to be inconsequential), they moved it to the 2020's and 2030's. Guess what's going to happen next?
The genre is fine. Oh, and so are point and click adventures. There's a ton of really good ones that were released recently, and a lot more on the horizon. Steam likely has 50 or more which were released in the last few years, even a few that were kickstarted.
TL;DR Typical gloom and doom claptrap from one of the resident 'old school' MMO players.
AN' DERE AIN'T NO SUCH FING AS ENUFF DAKKA, YA GROT! Enuff'z more than ya got an' less than too much an' there ain't no such fing as too much dakka. Say dere is, and me Squiggoff'z eatin' tonight!
We are born of the blood. Made men by the blood. Undone by the blood. Our eyes are yet to open. FEAR THE OLD BLOOD.
#IStandWithVic
That's why you feel like its dying, you arent seeing a lot of high quality mmos.
edit: but single player games are on a rise
"The Society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools."
Currently: Games Audio Engineer, you didn't hear what I heard, you heard what I wanted you to hear.
The fact that the game industry ( at least AAA companies) is fueled solely on profit is the reason i decided to stop working in it.
If you base your product solely on getting the biggest payout, lowest common denominator starts to rule, and not long after that exploitation like mechanics.
Instead of game designers designing best gameplay mechanics for their game, they are designing mechanics that maximize dependency, addiction and spending impulses. All game mechanics are sacrificed to this.
No wonder the games quality is dwindling.
While before games were designed to be best games, today they are designed to be best impulse shops.
While we are looking for complex MMOs of before, the industry is interested in easy addictive grinds made for minimal investment and maximum profit.
I can not blame them, its business after all. But going that direction we will never see anything good again.
AAA game production?, yes.
It certainly didn't help that Project Copernicus, Project Titan, World of Darkness and Everquest Next died in development.
There's no doubt that you can still make money on mmorpg's, just not enough money to justify a $100M investment that might fail. That's why indie developers are still trying to make mmorpg's and why publishers import korean mmorpg's instead of making them on their own.
We had small companies putting tiny budgets into awful looking games, everquest was the pinnacle of the genre.
Wow came out and blew the world apart, everyone took notice and the mmorpg scene became the next big thing to make money from all the publshers, it was the future! All the publishers thought they could tap into this money fountain but they couldn't and have given up on this expensive and difficult genre.
Wow came and invigorated interest that was never there before, they could not replicate the success of the game and so left again.
You can thank wow for the interest all these publishers gave to us and without wow you would not have even 1% of the games we currently enjoy, the interest that was there is now gone though.
We are back to reality, the bubble simply burst. However due to that bubble we now have a huge base of games that are all running, the market has never been better for games to play.
Oh and also, it's not dying it's just at it's maximum saturation point. This genre unlike almost every other has games that are still relevant 10-20 years after they are released. In 10 years people will still be playing wow, tera and all the rest.
Give it a few years. Something will blow our minds again. It just isn't going to be in 2016 (or 2017 - though I think Crowfall could be pretty strong if the combat doesn't blow).
And I submit, your honor, that this is a good thing.
That being said, "this industry is dying" goes clear back to 2003, at least.
The corpse just keeps twitching, what will we do?
(My answer: give up on "big budget" games and wait for the products to grow smaller again.)
So now the Eastern devs have stepped up to replace the Western with their games designed for a different gaming culture. It's changed some for western players by maybe showing a little less skin on the models and forcing PVP upon people instead of making it an option since they know most western players if given the option, will stay PVE even if the game is PVP focused.
I'm not an IT Specialist, Game Developer, or Clairvoyant in real life, but like others on here, I play one on the internet.
Yes, the AAA developers are done. They've pulled up stakes and moved on to MOBA's and Hero Shooters and whatever dragon their they're chasing this year. SoE sold their shit off and Daybreak canceled the MMO they were working on. NCSoft probably won't touch the genre again after WildCrap. BioWare has their gambling site known as SWTOR, so no need for them to start over. Blizzard saw all these other MMO's failing to launch, cancelled Titan and, surprise surprise, made a hero shooter.
There are still dozens of MMO's left and dozens more being developed. The majority of which are being developed in Asia because MMO's are still alive and thriving there. Then they're imported here with cash shops that are designed to suck as much cash out of western wallets as possible.
The Western MMO developers that are left, are all poor children from Charles Dickens novels with barely two dollars to rub together. They're all standing around with their hands out begging for money on Kickstarter, "Please gamers, may we have some more? We'll give you shiny, worthless digital trinkets if you'll just help make us millionaires!"
"I don't give a sh*t what other people say. I play what I like and I'll pay to do it too!" - SerialMMOist
greed
Every developer wanted a slice of the "WoW pie" and destroyed the genre to get it. One after another they turned out shitty games that resembled WoW but no one came up with anything that stimulated the players as WOW did. Then when players weren't having it, the same developers turned around and instead of looking in the mirror for their failure, they blamed the markets and player bases. They all bought into their own lies and now no one will touch this genre thinking it's dead. I say there is still a market for a real MMO. There is always enough interest in the concepts Players still want it. No one is delivering. The Pre-WoW markets made money. They didn't make WoW's money, but they made money. But now, if you can't capture what WoW had, it's labeled a failure.............whatever.
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. - Carl Sagan
Some of the old games are still around and I even spent maybe a year playing and supporting an emulator of a certain space based mmo. It brought back a lot of the joy and wonder of mmos which for me is role playing and living an alternate life in a virtual setting. In that year, some of my mmo friends reconnected through the game and started a guild, built a city, and leveled quite a few characters to max. I got my old architect back, built houses in beautiful locations, decorated, and became my characters while I tuned out the real world. It was really a lot of fun.
I would be interested in an experience like that again if mmo's return more to their roots instead of using the term mmo has a marketing ploy to garner interest.
Cant blame you too.
I too only post very rarely, and browse this site out of boredom and force of long since redundant habit
"If I offended you, you needed it" -Corey Taylor
When a 6 year old outgrows their childish toys, it is the child that has changed but the toys stay the same.
With MMOs the reverse is true. We (players) have stayed the same but the toys have changed.
Also, clearly a lot of people have moved on. Some of us have simply quit playing modern MMORPGs because they've changed so much from what they were that the enjoyment we used to find can no longer be found. We still hang around on forums like this in the hopes that we can influence future MMOs or simply reminisce about past games we enjoy.
Others have managed to adapt and find enjoyment in the new style of MMORPGs. Thats great for them and I'm happy for them. I tried my best to adapt as well, but modern MMORPGs just don't do it for me - they are trivially easy and I hate the trend towards action combat.
As for the general theme of the thread, I both agree and disagree.
In pure statistics, the OP is wrong - there are more MMOs, more players and more money than at any point in the genres history. Genre can't be dying if the genre is bigger than ever before.
In terms of developers in the market, the OP has a point - western AAA devs have pretty much abandoned the genre and we have no new AAA MMORPGs in the pipeline that we're aware of. That shows a lack of confidence in the genre in the west and a lack of new releases will only worsen the situation short term. Longer term, its all just cyclical. We'll soon have a big gap in the market in the west and eventually a AAA dev will step in to fill the void, make a ton of money thus sparking the next round of cash grabbing.
In terms of creativity, the OP has a minor point, but this is purely subjective. The first 10 years of MMORPGs was all about exploring possibilities, trial and error and creation of fundamental principles for the genre. The second 10 years has been about refinement - there have been far less "big ideas" but tons of smaller features and improvements.
In terms of the future, I simply believe we are in a slump, but a temporary one. The themepark MMORPG has burnt itself out - there are too many of them that the playerbase is too spread out for AAA devs to think it worthwhile building new ones. Other types of MMO haven't yet had much success, so we're limited to indie devs. However, AAA console devs have started moving into the MMO realm (Destiny, The Division) and whilst we've yet to have an actual MMO, they're moving that direction. This will only be a good thing for the genre as the console devs bring new ways of thinking and new ideas into the market to replace the stagnant themepark MMO.