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MMO's are a dying breed?

Started by Xenphir, October 21, 2013, 10:15:19 PM

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meikle

#25
QuoteHere's another mistake I think a lot of people make: WoW is not actually a bad game.

It's popular, though, so people are driven to hate on it.  I am especially fond of people who exclaim that the game is too easy, and when presented with, "How much end-game content did you do?  Hard modes?  Have you ever cleared a challenge dungeon?" and the answers are always, no, no, no.  People who have never played the content don't really have the background to comment on whether or not the game is easy or difficult, challenging or repetitive, etc, but everyone thinks they're an expert on WoW because it's so big.

It is a very easy game if you never do any of the challenging stuff, I guess.
Kiss your lover with that filthy mouth, you fuckin' monster.

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Chris Brady

Ones that impressed me more:  City of Heroes (and the only reason it's down was that the parent company, NCSoft, had enough shares bought from it by Nexon, and pretty much shuttered the office immediately). Guild Wars (the original) and DC Universe Online.

And for the record, I like SWToR because it actually is better than Vanilla WoW was, and I was there since the last leg of the WoW beta.  Unfortunately, WoW got too big for people to care and secondly, a LOT of Bioware fans feel 'betrayed' that they won't get a 'true' KoTOR 3. (No one realizes is if SWToR folds, like they wish it, the chances of seeing KoTOR 3 dies with it.  Because all the bean counters will see is no one wanting that Star Wars world anymore.)

Thing is WoW got too big and too popular, and unfortunately, corporate culture being what it is, they see success they want to copy it, never realizing that copying doesn't work.  Look at the Call of Duty/Battlefield competition.  CoD has, for the past what, 5 years?  Been top dog in military shooters and Battlefield has been a struggling number 2 for as many.

The other issue is that people in general, but gamers especially, hate change.  They'll bitch, moan and whine at the slightest new thing.

Seamus Blackley, of the Original XBox design team once polled gamers, and he found two things:  First, gamers are smart, and do research and are knowledgeable.  Second, gamers almost always want more of the same, it's why sequels sell better than new IPs on just about every front.

Are MMOs going away?  No.  That door has been open and it's open permanently.  However, is their popularity in decline?  Yes.  And have been since 2011, if not earlier.
My O&Os Peruse at your doom.

So I make a A&A thread but do I put it here?  No.  Of course not.

Also, I now come with Kung-Fu Blog action.  Here:  Where I talk about comics and all sorts of gaming

meikle

#27
I loved City of Heroes -- really, really, really loved it -- but it was a terrible game as far as actual design was concerned, with 0 interest in anything resembling class balance, absolutely no interest in end-game content that was distinct from early game content, characters who could solo content designed for 8-player teams were a dime a dozen, the game's hey-day was one of cookie cutter builds (5 dam 1 acc!  every power, every time!), the late game was one of stacking set bonuses until you were invincible, etc; it was fun, but it was fun because it was flashy and had a great paper doll editor, not because the game itself had legs to stand on.  It had a lot of really neat ideas that would have been absolutely amazing if the game were even a little bit more involved; the Mission Architect was one of the best things to hit the MMO scene ever, imo, and the degree of customization (and the decision to decouple character progress from character appearance except in a few niche areas, ie capes and glows) was genius.  I spent so much time with the City of Heroes character editor!

The game had some amazing ideas, but it also had a lot of really poor implementation.  That's really disappointing; what's weird, though, is that the game was ostensibly in the black right up until they shut it down.  As I understand it, it had become more profitable after it went f2p, and they accomplished that mostly by allowing people to buy new options (ie, the payment options weren't exactly pay to win, but there was payment-gated content.)  Content updates that were bigger than they'd been under the subscription model were being released more frequently, lots of people were playing, and lots of people were paying, and they shut it down anyway to focus on games that simply were not going to recapture the City of Heroes crowd -- namely, people who wanted a unintensive, solo-friendly, comic-book inspired, socially engaging game.  To this day I remain baffled at the decision to kill City of Heroes.  You can stick 'or' between all of those qualities, too; I don't think ncsoft has any games that really engage in the things that drew players to CoH and CoV, so they essentially gave up that portion of the MMO market.  What's weird to me is that a lot of the people involved in City of Heroes weren't even being rerouted to work on other projects; they were just laid off.

QuoteSomething new isn't going to have the lore draw

Really, I think it was familiarity, not lore, that did it.  WarCraft's story has been pretty dumb from the outset, no matter how much I love it.  People like me were attracted to WoW because it was letting us play in the world we experienced when we were little kids, a setting that we remained familiar with until we were adults, released by a company that had never let us down.

The Old Republic could have been the WoW killer if it had been excellent from the start, I think, because it has that same allure -- people are familiar with Star Wars, they like Star Wars, they've known it since they were children.  But it wasn't excellent from the start, and in the current industry, if you want to attract American players, you have to be better than World of WarCraft immediately.  That's the big trouble, I think: nobody can make a game that starts off better than a game with going on a decade of polish.  You can't not have an end game when you release; you can't have buggy controls.  You can't have awful PvP.  You can't release a game that is system-taxing to the degree that any of your content is unplayable by people with decent modern rigs.  You do have to be able to do the things that WoW does, and they'll have to do something new, too, to make people want to abandon years of familiarity and roots for it.

I'm not sure that anyone will be able to do that until WoW kicks the bucket.
Kiss your lover with that filthy mouth, you fuckin' monster.

O and O and Discord
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Hemingway

Quote from: Inkidu on October 22, 2013, 09:02:24 PM
The only one that did actually played out like a tactical turn-based RPG, but it was really pay-to-win.

Overall, I'm thoroughly unimpressed by just about every MMORPG. I've played about ten or fifteen up until I couldn't anymore due to internet limitations.

Then it's sort of a moot point, isn't it? It's like saying you weren't impressed with Test Drive Unlimited 2, but you don't like racing games anyway.

Inkidu

Quote from: Hemingway on October 23, 2013, 06:20:26 AM
Then it's sort of a moot point, isn't it? It's like saying you weren't impressed with Test Drive Unlimited 2, but you don't like racing games anyway.
No it's more like saying I tried to find one I like but couldn't, and therefore the genre hold no appeal for me.
If you're searching the lines for a point, well you've probably missed it; there was never anything there in the first place.

Hemingway

Quote from: Inkidu on October 23, 2013, 06:57:34 AM
No it's more like saying I tried to find one I like but couldn't, and therefore the genre hold no appeal for me.

That's the same thing! It's the same thing!

Anyway. If you like MMOs, then WoW is not a bad game. Unlike a lot of MMOs, which are. Is that better?  ;D

Inkidu

Quote from: Hemingway on October 23, 2013, 06:59:58 AM
That's the same thing! It's the same thing!

Anyway. If you like MMOs, then WoW is not a bad game. Unlike a lot of MMOs, which are. Is that better?  ;D
No it's not. Yours implies that I went in hating the genre, mine implies that I made a good-faith effort to find something and couldn't.
If you're searching the lines for a point, well you've probably missed it; there was never anything there in the first place.

Formless

Well , being a chronic gamer myself , it is bound to happen.

There's always a surge of a certain genre in video games that takes over for a few years then slowly dwindles while the new best thing comes along.

Shooters ( Because back in the 80's that's the best thing PCs could handle )

Then fighting games because one huge hit in the 90's.

RPGs been on a steady growth from the early days but their golden age was the early 2000 years.

Now you got FPS games taking over.

MMO's games were the big thing not so long ago , but now they're not. The money aspect of them is one good reason , but not the grandest one. They just had their prime and now they don't.

Hemingway

Quote from: Inkidu on October 23, 2013, 07:03:23 AM
No it's not. Yours implies that I went in hating the genre, mine implies that I made a good-faith effort to find something and couldn't.

No it doesn't. It implies that if I were to pick up a game like ... FIFA 14, and ended up not liking it, that's not at all surprising because I'm not a fan of sports games.

Quote from: Formless on October 23, 2013, 07:06:34 AM
Well , being a chronic gamer myself , it is bound to happen.

There's always a surge of a certain genre in video games that takes over for a few years then slowly dwindles while the new best thing comes along.

Shooters ( Because back in the 80's that's the best thing PCs could handle )

Then fighting games because one huge hit in the 90's.

RPGs been on a steady growth from the early days but their golden age was the early 2000 years.

Now you got FPS games taking over.

MMO's games were the big thing not so long ago , but now they're not. The money aspect of them is one good reason , but not the grandest one. They just had their prime and now they don't.

You're forgetting the wave of fantasy RTSs we had around the time of Warcraft 3. I miss that. I miss it a lot. People don't make good RTSs anymore, only Dota clones.

meikle

#34
QuotePeople don't make good RTSs anymore, only Dota clones.

starcraft 2?

QuoteThey just had their prime and now they don't.

Based on what, losing two million subscribers over the past two years?  MMOs are still plenty popular; FF XIV's recent reboot has been well received, people love Guild Wars 2, Neverwinter came out this year, and if you look to the east, there are tons more.  You also can't really judge MMOs by # of titles released per year because by their very nature they're meant to be ongoing commitments.
Kiss your lover with that filthy mouth, you fuckin' monster.

O and O and Discord
A and A

Inkidu

Quote from: Hemingway on October 23, 2013, 07:09:27 AM
No it doesn't. It implies that if I were to pick up a game like ... FIFA 14, and ended up not liking it, that's not at all surprising because I'm not a fan of sports games.
No, I thought MMORPGs would be cool, but after being thoroughly and consistently unimpressed I gave up.

To use your sports example:

You don't like sports games, so you're not going to like FIFA

I wanted to like sports games and ended up not like FIFA, NBA 2KX, Madden, NHL2KX, MLB The Show, etc.

Do I make myself clear?
If you're searching the lines for a point, well you've probably missed it; there was never anything there in the first place.

meikle

#36
Quote from: Inkidu on October 23, 2013, 07:16:03 AMDo I make myself clear?
You're being pretty pedantic, aren't you?  Whether or not you want "wanted" to like the genre, you clearly don't if you find literally every single game in the genre unenjoyable.

Like, I don't buy sports games because I've played them and I don't like them.  I wouldn't dream of telling people what's wrong with sports games and how to improve them within that genre because the genre does not engage me and I wouldn't know what I was talking about.  That's kind of what someone who admits liking nothing about MMOs complaining about MMO design comes across as.

I mean, what does your disliking WoW and MMOs even have to do with the subject of MMO and their success as a genre?
Kiss your lover with that filthy mouth, you fuckin' monster.

O and O and Discord
A and A

Formless

Quote from: meikle on October 23, 2013, 07:12:08 AM
Based on what, losing two million subscribers over the past two years?  MMOs are still plenty popular; FF XIV's recent reboot has been well received, people love Guild Wars 2, Neverwinter came out this year, and if you look to the east, there are tons more.  You also can't really judge MMOs by # of titles released per year because by their very nature they're meant to be ongoing commitments.

What I meant was that MMO games had their grand time before. And now some of its community moved on to something else. That never means its already dead.

The same goes with any other genre. It stays around , just not as popular as it used to be.

Chris Brady

Quote from: Hemingway on October 23, 2013, 06:59:58 AM
That's the same thing! It's the same thing!

Anyway. If you like MMOs, then WoW is not a bad game. Unlike a lot of MMOs, which are. Is that better?  ;D
I like MMOs and the WoW was a decent, but not great, game.

I am looking forward to Wildstar.  I've had the pleasure of trying it for a bit, and the mechanics were rough, but it's got promise.
My O&Os Peruse at your doom.

So I make a A&A thread but do I put it here?  No.  Of course not.

Also, I now come with Kung-Fu Blog action.  Here:  Where I talk about comics and all sorts of gaming

Xenphir

Does anyone play the 2D cuter looking ones? Or is everyone all about the 3D?

Hemingway

Quote from: meikle on October 23, 2013, 07:12:08 AM
starcraft 2?

Sort of. Starcraft 2 fails in that it's entirely built for multiplayer, while a lot of the older ones actually tried to tell good stories. That said, SC2 is still, gameplay-wise, a pretty enjoyable game. Unfortunately, it's pretty much the only example. There are a few others, mainly mediocre indie ones.

I'm talking specifically about that type of RTS, though. The Warcraft family of games. Dawn of War 2 doesn't really fit the description. Company of Heroes does, to a certain extent, but again ... fantasy! There were so many around 2000: Warcraft 3, Lords of Everquest, Dragonshard, Battle Realms, War of the Ring, Age of Mythology, ... all of the ones mentioned pretty good games, definitely not half-baked titles, and there were so many more! Wikipedia's chronology of RTSs lists some 20 released each year in the early 2000s. In 2010, around 10. In 2011, three ( one of which is a Dawn of War 2 expansion ). They just don't make them anymore! And I get that these things come and go, but ... I still think it's a shame.