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What made an MMO "click" for you?
Marzzo
Member, Leader of Men, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Do you have any memories of what made your favorite MMO click for you? When did you realize, or why did you realize this was a game that you loved?
For me it was probably in WoW when me and a bunch of friends managed to siege an enemy city and hold it for an hour before slowly being overwhelmed one by one.
For me it was probably in WoW when me and a bunch of friends managed to siege an enemy city and hold it for an hour before slowly being overwhelmed one by one.
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My favourite game that had some of the best crafting and open world feel was Vanguard for me.
Edit.
AOC has by far the most potential to blow all of the games I have played before out of the water if the team are able to bring all of their concepts to reality.
All the boys in my neighbourhood were playing it as well as many boys from many highschools in the city.
Real life friends adventuring for the first time virtually. Until then it was player 1 and player 2 on PS2, stage by stage only 2 boys would finish the game.
With L2 it was 10+ boys playing all together or against others. Open world, interaction with anything, freestyle exploring instead of being led by a questline.
AoC clicked to me because it promises to bring back open world, as opposed to the other mmorpgs that made the genre instanced 'stages' in the form of dungeon runs. Select from a screen while you are at a city, loading screen and there you are, inside a stage. Both PvE and PvP.
What made the difference between love and boredom was the atmosphere. In beta I rolled a dwarf and started in the Blue Mountains. Everything was dour, bland, shades of brown and grey. There were few NPCs and they were uninteresting. I just got bored.
Later, when I gave it another chance I rolled a hobbit who starts in the Shire. It was like a totally different game. Everything was bright and green, there were NPCs just living their normal lives, it felt like a cozy and warm place. Quests involved things like delivering mail or helping a beekeeper fight off a bear. It was like a living world I would want to be in. Later, when I gained enough levels to go explore the world it felt so amazing to go from a quiet place with small problems to an epic adventure fighting horrors in exotic places, terrifying caves and forests, even blatant hellscapes.
If it wasn’t for trying another character on a whim I likely would never have gotten into that game. It’s amazing that what may seem like superficial and unimportant features in a game can mean the difference between a great time and a chore.
I learned that I could theoretically stunlock someone for more than minutes by handling all my stuns and incapacite abilities.
I spent most of my time in Wow outside of Ogrimmar dueling and pushing my technique to the limit.
-Cdr management.
-Disminishing return management.
-Depth in timing.
-Finesse in execution.
-Broad in quantity of skills.
-Moving around the enemy.
Every duel was a challenge of knowledge about skills, strategy, decision making and timing.
No other class could stunlock, and few rogues could shuffle cdrs and DR.
There was knowledge and finesse.
That game required knowledge - WoW required being able to read a dozen tool tips.
While true, WoW had neither.
Shallowest, simplest MMO combat to date.
McDonalds has also dominated it's industry.
It's easy to find a better burger though.
Again true.
However, in the case of both above examples, the only people that would think they are the best are people that have never tried any other examples in their respective catagory.
If you know something is not better, and someone tells you of something in that same catagory that you have not tried, best you not make comments on it until you try it.
This is something you did do.
Yes, yes we get it you don't like WoW.
Saying it has never required any sort of finesse or knowledge is elitist snobbery. It took me a crap ton of practice and work to get my Rogue DPS to be up to par in endgame WotLK. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in an MMO.
Frankly, I think that the person who puts words into other posters’ mouths that they never said is the one who should refrain from further comment.
WoW has it's good points - it has always been the most polished MMO on the market.
However, one can't really argue the fact that over the course of its existence, WoW has gone to great pains to reduce class build options and complexity, while other games have gone to great pains to increase it without overloading players at any one point
It is at the point now where no one can look at WoW and think that it takes knowledge and finesse in comparison to any other MMO.
WotLK was the last expansion it could be claimed to not be massively behind other games in this specific regard.
MMO publishers figured out that lowering themselves to appeal to the lowest common denominator can open them to a wider audience, and potentially get more customers. It’s also what has changed the industry from mostly being subscription-based to being free to play with microtransactions and often pay to win consequences.
I guess we all need to hope that AoC avoids that fate. Hopefully it can succeed by being different, and being better.
Both EQ games are as complex and deep as ever. While it may be possible to look at the population in those games as proof that developers need to dumb their games down, I would argue that the fact that both games are still live and still getting regular full expansions says otherwise - with EQ having a total of 26 expansions to date and EQ2 having 16. At 21 and (almost) 16 years old respectively, and based on the troubles of the parent companies these games have had since Sony sold them, the fact that they are still going does say there is a place for a more complex, deep game.
It is the fact that both EQ games have stuck to their ideal of being a game that takes time to excel at that sees me talk about both of them here (and in other places) often. Both games deserve far more credit than they are given, even if just for the fact that they refuse to dumb themselves down.
The main reason I am even looking at Ashes as a potential game to play is because there are a number of develoeprs in the team that worked on EQ games - including one or two key people.
I don't find that odd at all, to be honest.
I would rate Runescape as one of the top 10 MMO's out there - I rate it higher than EQ, and much higher than WoW (surprise to no one there).