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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
5 Reasons why modern mmorpg are failing
j189
Member
Hi Guys,
I was just surfing on Youtube and found this!
"5 Reasons Why Classic is Better than BFA and Modern MMORPGs"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mkOxcIb5jo
I dont agree with his statemant on APOC but i totally agree with his 5 reasons.
What do you think about this ?
I was just surfing on Youtube and found this!
"5 Reasons Why Classic is Better than BFA and Modern MMORPGs"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mkOxcIb5joI dont agree with his statemant on APOC but i totally agree with his 5 reasons.
What do you think about this ?
0
Comments
I think MMORPGs are failing because as a gaming society we are evolving/growing faster than the software can and faster than developers can put out games.
But, you know, its just an opinion.
There are literally tons of things that make classic wow just bad in terms mechanics, does World of Warcraft was THE ONE in it's time? Of course it was, but no game is going to last forever if it can't adapt itself to the market, and literally in each and every expansion of WoW people come and say "OH NO THE GAME IS DYING mumble mumble mumble" and here we are 15 years after the launch and I can assure that the servers are not going to be shut down the next week, the next month or the next year.
In MY OPINION the real reason why the MMORPG genre is stuck is the fact that companies have only dare to go one of two ways, either they want to be a WoW killer by "doing the same but better" or they want to be safe and go for a generic asian style MMORPG, with micro transactions, p2w and other stuff, and you know what? Who can blame them? We use to think that a company behind a game is just a bunch of people with computers programming and doing "game stuff" but in reality is so much more complex than that, if I where an investor for a gaming company and they present me two ideas I'm going to pick the one that leaves me more money, and if that company can't do it I'm going to seek for that that can, it's called good business.
That being said what IS is doing with AOC is something refreshing and unexpected, using literally the players money to make a good MMORPG with minimal external income is the thing that makes all of this so interesting and it could be a rule changer in terms of what the next generation of MMORPG games are based on, IF THEY DELIVER...
Sure testing may have been the primary reason, but they did still go for the monetization, so his point is still valid. They followed the BR formula for monetization.
Stopped watching after point 1 bc 20 min video...
Virtue is the only good.
We need a MMORPG 2.0 design that gets rid of endgame - designs like EQNext, Revival, Ashes and CoE.
WoW gameplay post Cata couldn't grab my attention long enough for me to care about its monetization.
That's because the game isn't designed to be played alone. Think vanilla wow sucks bc of the social aspect. Wait til you see the zerg game called Ashes of Creation, the MMORPG.
Virtue is the only good.
Its like people don't know what MMORPG means ^^
Vanilla wow might garner attention for the sake of nostalgia, but I think ultimately a new title that can leverage existing baseline systems, while providing a novel approach to gameplay and social interaction will probably win the day, this is why AoC interests me.
MMORPGs fail because they are not being designed to be the best RPG experience possible but to make money preferably the easiest way possible.
Did no one notice this guy joined literally the day before he posted?
But... I did not feel any need to watch that vid.
- Tab target (and all forms of non skill based combat)
- Grind
- Mindless Quests
- Themepark Fiesta (in the sense of lack of 'sandboxness')
- Overcomplicating the game which was supposed to be fun but now it feels like work and vice versa
The current way quests are handled is what makes them mindless. Click the guy click accept and run to where the marker says to go. Pew pew and run back. This is boring as all hell. When I leveled my mage for this expansion I had Netflix or a podcast going and didn't even pay attention to the game.
Over complication is also entirely perception. Can't have meaningful quests and be unengaging at the same time. Have to pick one.
Most of these games fail because they lack identity. Either they try to please everyone or they try to put so much in they lose what they were after to start with.
Wildstar for example had lots of fun there but was way to busy with silly stuff. "Challenge Accepted" was annoying as hell. Walk into a new area and an event starts just for you and now trying to figure it out before the timer. Eventually just ignored that stuff.
I have never played an mmorpg long enough to experience that but it sounds annoying.
why are you playing an MMO by yourself..
this is what I hate about the market now days, people for some reason have a problem with making friends and talking to people. MMOs should be about building relationships not a pissing match of who can look better than the other guy. everyone wants to be able to solo an online game, if you want to solo everything go play a single player game
It's been years since I played an MMO at seemed to me to put fun ahead of a monotonous daily quest grind.
there are those who prefer to play alone but like to be part of a community at the same time. like in runescape, there ppl do prety much everything solo. and that game has been around for ages. i am not one of them but can understand those who like to play being on the background farming or merching solo and then stand afk in town showing off theyr gear. like if you have a family with kids and a busy job and dont seek online socializing; they dont need to be typing or talking to others but still need a MMO platform. just casual play.. and they still contribute to the whole as community. personally i havnt seen this getting more or less over the years but didnt played WoW much.
There is no new life or blood. The Battle royale is a good idea and can bring more people in, publishers and developers have to try new stuff to bring different people in. If you stick boring tab targeting combat in a game and release it today with only that, no one new would play. It's too much money and investment to risk trying new stuff with the genre, and most games are instantly compared with the likes of WoW or anything. The community of MMORPG games to me seems desperate for anything and eastern companies seem to be ruining the genre even more. I just see Pay to Win cash grabs through everything, even with a more popular mmorpg BDO I tried. I had to stop playing because I didn't want to pay money for pets to collect stuff. That's one small example but companies just try to make anything harder to get any money from you. I'm hoping Intrepid can modernize then genre and help bring in new people, everywhere I go it seems that there are NO new people. Wherever I go to see MMORPG news it's old veterans of the genre waiting for the next big thing or still playing WoW and hopping between new releases hoping it will rival blizzard. Either way Ashes looks great, It's GRAPHICS ALONE will most likely bring in new people, since things like RUNESCAPE or WoW can turn new people off just from the looks.
I used to play swtor. In the flashpoints (dungeons), there are cutscenes with a story for the flashpoint. People would often skip the cutscenes (fair if you have done them before). But would complain if others didn't do it. Not taking into account, that it might be their first time there.
I think that the normal leveling experience, doing the standard quests, you should be able to do on your own, if you are on the level with the quest. Then there can be elite quests for group content, dungeons. You can still team up for the social experience and make it easyer. I'm a casual gamer.
I have tried in vanilla wow, where i'm in 2 guilds, (with different chars, of course). But i still can't find a group for a specific dungeon. Elite quests i can't find a group for... etc
How about people just downvote his video if he just came here to get views
1. Monetisation - There is a good point here and corporate greed definitely plays a part. In my opinion the biggest reason why so many games are sloppy are because of pre-orders. So many people pay full price for a game that isn't even finished, which means the developers are no longer under pressure to produce a good produce. After all, they already have the money, so why bother putting in the effort?
On top of this you have the fallacy of exponential growth, which is where the idiots with more money than sense (the investors) demand that the newest game in a franchise makes more money than the game before it did. Money is not infinite which means eventually you will reach a point where a game cannot make more money than the previous game did. These **** don't seem to understand this concept and throw a tantrum whenever I game sells "below expectation" resulting in things like this:
https://www.investors.com/news/technology/click/black-ops-4-sales-disappoint-activision-investors/
Quite frankly it's pathetic that a game that is literally the carbon copy of the previous game in the franchise can make $500 million in 3 days and yet the greedy little shits still aren't happy with that. Moving on before I lose my goddamn mind.
2. Power Creep - I find it amusing that this is a reason given when Vanilla WoW absolutely DOES have power creep in it. If you have full "tier 2" armour on your character there is no reason for you to go back to either Blackwing Lair or Molten Core. That content is effectively made useless to you as an individual.
What the guy actually means is the way retail WoW deals with "seasonal content" and catch-up mechanics. I haven't played retail WoW since the beginning of this year, and yet I could resubscribe to the game, log back in and within 2 hours be able to do the latest pieces of content without needing to do anything that came before the latest patch.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this system. The disadvantage as noted in the video is that your progress is reset so often that you can quickly lose interest in what is happening. I know a lot of players have quit WoW for this very reason. The advantage though is that it allows you to immediately catch up with your friends who kept playing while you were gone, and not miss out on the latest content.
FFXIV has the opposite problem. In order to play the latest expansion content you need to have done every other piece of story content before-hand (or pay £60 to skip it all). That is a hell of a lot of hours of what is effectively a very boring story. I did the slog all the way to level 50 with the expectation that I could then go into the next expansion. NOPE!! Even though I was the correct level to start the expansion I had to do another 100 story filler quests before I could move on.
https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/Seventh_Astral_Era_Quests
This completely turned me off and I quit the game because of it.
3. PvE and PvP separation. I can kind of see the logic to his argument here but.......in practice it doesn't work. When you forcibly put 2 groups of players together (pvp players and pve players) there will typically be a lot of friction. And quite frankly, if I want to play an mmorpg and mostly ignore the opposing faction (let's be honest, the reasons given for the war were never really explained in the mmorpg - they hate us, we hate them, that's it), then why am I not allowed to do that? Who are you to say that my way of playing the game is "wrong"? Anyway, I've played games where PvP players are forced into PvE, and vice versa and it never ends well. Moving on.
4. Difficulty - First of all difficulty is subjective and relative. There are things that I find very easy that other people find very hard, etc. Second, there are different kinds of difficulty. Magic The Gathering and SC2 are both difficult games, but for different reasons. Going back to Retail WoW, the reason why it is "easier" than Classic WoW is because of how Blizzard tried to handle difficulty. Back in WotLK Blizzard made changes to certain classes to make the game flow better, which inadvertently lowered the difficulty. Then in Cata Blizzard tried increasing the difficulty again, but did it so suddenly that most of the players (particularly though who only started playing in WotLK) couldn't cope. They hit a brick wall on the 5-mans, complained on the forums and so Blizzard reduced the difficulty.
This basically comes down to bad implementation of difficulty. If you want to increase the difficulty you need to do is GRADUALLY, and Blizzard aren't the only ones to fail at this. FFXIV, Dark Souls 3 and TERA have all made similar mistakes in their gameplay. In the case of Dark Souls 3, they literally throw you in at the deep end with a boss in the first 5 minutes. Now this is fine some veterans of the series who are familiar with the combat, but anyone knew to the games will hit a brick wall and likely quit. Of course, the beauty of an mmorpg is that if you are struggling to do a piece of content on your own, you can easily find others to help you (in theory).
5. Lack of Multiplayer - The theory here is that putting difficult mobs in the open world forces players to seek help from other players. This increases the social aspects of the game and allows the community to flourish. This is something Classic WoW does very well, whereas Retail WoW doesn't. That said, there are times when this concept is taken too far. In FFXIV as you level up you have mandatory dungeons that have to be completed before you can progress through the story. Since the levelling process is directly linked to the story, there is literally no way of skipping this.
This sounds great in theory, as it allows players to get used to doing group content while levelling. The problem is if you are, like me, levelling up a dps class and playing during off-peak times. The result was me sat in a dungeon finder queue for over an hour just to get into a dungeon. That's an hour of me literally sitting in game doing NOTHING. That is what I like to call PISS-POOR GAME DESIGN.
So yes, encouraging players to seek help through multiplayer is great for the social aspects of the game, but you should still give players the option to at least level up entirely solo.
Phew, that's that. All in all, a very mixed video. Some decent arguments but a lot of the time they have just missed the mark. I also find it amusing that the guy in the video talks about games he has never played, which is a sure-fire way to lose any
If you don't have a sense of accomplishment or progression you lose the reason to play. Most people are not interested in playing the Wallet game.
Formerly T-Elf
There were tons of different MMORPGs, but they all died out because WoW had this strong, already established fanbase.
Blizzard was just too early for the other MMORPGs to compete with, while being new enough to incorporate better graphics then already established MMORPGs. Other MMORPGs came months or years later, but WoW had already absorbed too many casual players.
No casual player wanted to pay two subscriptions at the same time, and they already invested time into WoW. They didnt want to fall behind other people, and decided to keep playing WoW even though they were interested in other titles.
Don't forget the "pay-to-skip" shit. Why make interesting and fun gameplay when you can make boring gameplay and then get players to pay to skip past it.....
If players are paying money to NOT play your game, you've done something seriously wrong in my opinion.
this is why i stopped playing a certain title. I paid to skip past the MSQ so I could hopefully enjoy the game with less restrictions. I realized I was paying to skip the MSQ on top of expansion cost and subscription fee
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Over the years, I've slowly come to realize that the games-as-a-service paradigm needs to cater to veteran players and keep them engaged with hordes of new content, and regrettably, a lot of grinding. As a result the on-boarding process for new players is almost always long and awful. But these games still need new players in order to survive, since a lot of veterans eventually get burnt out, or just get bored. Luckily some games are good enough/popular enough that a few new players will stick through the slog to end-game, just to play with their friends or experience the fun parts that they've seen on Youtube/Twitch.
That's not a terrible state of affairs; the games stay afloat, primarily on the backs of their established community. But from the outside, the games just seem old or tedious or elitist etc.. And since most good MMOs have reached that stage in their life, the genre as a whole seems pretty meh as a veteran player looking for something new or a new players looking for something accessible. (And more accessible MMOs are not designed for quality or longevity.)
The only way to avoid this problem, is to revamp the whole game regularly. Rewrite skills and mechanics. Make new content and places to explore (obviously). Delete old content. Put new players and veteran players on the same level (there are multiple ways to do that, but I don't wanna get too nitty-gritty). Give players of all levels something actually novel to dive into. And for the love of god, pay minimal attention to the people who decry every change to their favorite class/grinding spot.
Again, to be clear, change is necessary to keep veterans interested, and to generate hype for prospective new players. So change as much as the budget allows. New mechanics/systems/classes are no more expensive than new content/zones, so why do we see so little of the former? Heck, I know it's extreme, but I wouldn't be upset if a developer had the gall to delete an entire class, to make room for new ones. Evolve the game, don't just make new cookie-cutter content.
I admit, that sounds scary for veterans in a persistent game, where they expect to build up strength/wealth/skill and keep it for years. Lets be honest though, end-game treadmills already do that partially. They just make your old power-level irrelevant without actually stripping you of anything. (The community needs to stop buying into that facade, btw.) And doing the same stuff over and over, even using your favorite class/abilities on different content, will eventually get old and boring. (Side-note: Alt-friendliness is sooo important for this reason. It's an easy step towards what I'm advocating, without any risky, radical changes to the game.)
I mean, I'm not sure how obvious all of this is. It should be pretty damn evident based on the number of players who say they're looking for a new game to play, or are actively hopping from between popular MMOs.
And yet publishers/developers always seem hesitant to remove old content, or rework core-gameplay elements and/or classes. Instead they always try to fit new content in the massive framework they've built up over the years, changing as little as possible. It's overly restrictive and safe, and leads only to stagnation and boredom.