Do you guys think Ashes will be just another MMORPG or will it be something entirely different?

I believe it will be somewhere between however much I hope it to be something entirely different (mainly because I despise the MMORPG genre as it comprises of one or two unique games that don't 'feel' like a game from 2005). Despite the promising features they've told us, in my opinion, if the core gameplay mechanics is just like any other MMORPG (uninteresting combat, lack of deep exploration, being non-immersive, unexciting story and quests and in general the 'artificial' feel that most MMOs have - in which case you just click stuff to do something rather than putting an effort that emphasize the 'RPG' element), it would still be a decent game and even perhaps the best MMORPG out there but wouldn't be able to impress most of the gamers around the world and would cease to exist when a better MMORPG comes to the market and change the genre for good but this time for real.

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grisu

I think people overcomplicate this whole issue really.
MMOs in itself aren't shunned for being persistent, they are shunned for being simply bad. WoW was an amazing hit and drew 12million subs. 12 million people paying every month gesus. If Apex had to be paid even 5€ every month do you think it could have lived up to those numbers?
WoW made questionable decisions that deviated from their initial allure that effectively built up that followerbase and you can follow that with sub numbers.
There hasn't been a single mmo since then that was really good. They only ever had some good/eyecatching elements and a shitton of bad ones.

Look at SW:ToR in it's beginning and the first..2? years or so. The leveling experience was amazing, everything else was sub-standard at best with rare nuggets of good.
It was hailed as the wow killer, then the wow clone, then a weak copy of wow because that's what it was at best, a bad game copying wow. At least it had the Star Wars universe going for it, that kept people hopeful for a while.
Every game since then follows that schematic, they stand out for one reason or two some just banked on their name even, the rest is garbage/overshadowed by business practice.

There is not a single MMO since WoW till now that I consider baseline good in every category of it's content.

Those games are simply that, bad games. Granted I can't refute other reasons but before I make a judgment on that, I would like to have a good mmo to judge and compare.

Naming Apex and PUBG as outliners is well and good, but overall Battleroyal isn't that sucessfull. There are a good 50 BR games that died in a matter of days to weeks or humour a small community at best. Why? Because they are bad games, simple as that, but what the BR genre has, that the MMO genre lacks, is an overall good game.

Edit: To clarify my issue with the arguments. If Apex/LoL was on a subscription a heck less people would play it. It's not that good and especially lol has bloated numbers with multiple accounts per person. PUBG PEAKED at 3.5 million players in a day and now struggles at around 400k. Why? It's not THAT good, not a lot of people that bought it kept playing.
It was just a new genre people hoped to explore.
Servers are shit, anti hacking is garbage, content to reignite interest is nonexistent, but we got loot boxes, hurray to that!!
50 million copies sold sounds nice on paper, but play statistics are underwhelming in comparison to that.

Damokles

@grisu
I think that one of the major reasons for SWTORs downfall was that it was released in the time when WoW and blizzard were in their prime. They had absorbed too much of the casual player base. Not many people wanted to finance two or even three monthly subscriptions per month, and the truth was sadly, that most casuals already invested too muvh time into WoW to start new in anothdf mmorpg.
This lead to the death of many actually good mmorpgs, like aion and swtor, they had to switch from a monthly subscription to f2p, leading in turn to cash shops and premium membership...

grisu

That's up to everyone to decide on their own, I played both and I stand to my statement, it was a bad game that had only 2 outstanding features. Leveling experience and Star Wars universe.
Granted the dungeon design <<AT TIMES>> was interesting(not good, mind you, interesting) and HUTBALL was the best in lore battleground I have ever seen, but everything else was absolut trash in my opinion and fell years short of WoW.

Varkun

@grisu great post above pretty much sums up many of the issues and the general feeling I have towards most of the games that release nowadays. I see my guild mats jump on all of these flash in the pan games play for 2 weeks to a month them never go back to them. To me, they are just shallow copies of games I gave up playing 15 or 20 years ago. All I play now is MMO's and they have become shallow theme park rides of late, just hope Ashes can be something different and only time will tell on that one.

Wandering Mist

@Damokles So do you believe that if SWTOR was released this year, it would be more successful? After all, I believe WoW is on borrowed time and this is the best time for a new mmorpg to rise up to challenge it.

@grisu I see where you are coming from but at the same time it's unreasonable to expect an mmorpg to have all amazing content across the board. More often than not mmorpgs have to focus mostly on a single element in order to stand out. Games like SWTOR and GW2 focused on the leveling, FFXIV focused on the story, and WoW focused on the end-game PvE. I would never expect WoW to be able to put in the amount of time and effort into the leveling as SWTOR did, whilst still keeping up their high quality raiding content.

Games need to play to their strengths rather than trying to make everything amazing. In the case of Ashes, it looks like their focus is in their community world-building and node systems, which is something I don't believe any other major mmorpg is really focusing on right now. If they stick to that niche they should be fine. I just hope they don't make the same mistake GW2 did of trying to incorporate WoW-style raids into a game that was never designed to support it.

Damokles

@wanderingmist If they did it right yeah. I mean... the moment i logged in last year the first thing i saw where tons of races behind a paywall...
Do it right, and they have a good game tbh!

grisu

Thats a weird way to come up with a counter argument.
It's unreasonable to expect a good game? (Never asked for amazing, but good)
Wow was across the board good and it set a standard for the themepark genre.
If you want to make an mmo you need to consider before you start that its a broader game with more moving parts. Thats the strength of an mmorpg in the first place. It can offer so much more diverse content than a laser focused game. Simply put, its a bigger game nothing else.

I dont want to go into the charing, fundamental, flaws off all those mmos that came later. Baseline is, most of them didnt even work in its own design philosophy and fell way short of the standard wow set across the board. Wow itself failed to uphold that over time adapting the philosophy "less quality way less expenses", thats how you make money. Wink wink.

Wandering Mist

grisu wrote: »

Thats a weird way to come up with a counter argument.
It's unreasonable to expect a good game? (Never asked for amazing, but good)
Wow was across the board good and it set a standard for the themepark genre.
If you want to make an mmo you need to consider before you start that its a broader game with more moving parts. Thats the strength of an mmorpg in the first place. It can offer so much more diverse content than a laser focused game. Simply put, its a bigger game nothing else.

I dont want to go into the charing, fundamental, flaws off all those mmos that came later. Baseline is, most of them didnt even work in its own design philosophy and fell way short of the standard wow set across the board. Wow itself failed to uphold that over time adapting the philosophy "less quality way less expenses", thats how you make money. Wink wink.

So here's a curious question. You say other mmorpgs fell short of the standard set by WoW, but were they really that bad compared to it? I think of games like Rift, Aion, City of Heroes, Warhammer Online, Age of Conan, etc. and really they aren't that bad compared to WoW. In my opinion, the only reason why WoW succeeded was because of the franchise it came from, and that it came first.

grisu

Short answer yes.
Rift had attrocious combat imo and as far as I remember there was some business bullshittery going on, i mean NcSoft, nice.
Warhammer was a pvp centric game while pve was neglected. Also EA quality?
Aion in the old days might have been on par in its own rights true. I personally couldnt play it. The semi realistic style while also having a char creator for monstrosities turned me off. It just gnared on me ll the time. Im also fairly certai that aion was extremely competitive it was impossible to catch up without money. Business decisions undermining a probably good game and it turned certainly p2w over time.
City of heroes is the only one that flew totally past me. No idea there.

So yeah i stand to my statement in general.

Edit: Wildstar might be the best example in that regard. It came way after wows prime. The market was technically ripe for hte taking. It was a decent enough game imo but everyone following it knows what happened. Bad managment. Bad communication with the community (aka nonexistence) and a "it will be fine we don't need to fix things" attitude. There are good games out there that failed due to other reasons, hence the "short answer yes."

Atama

The Secret World tried to do something different. Put the game in a modern, real world environment (though you are exploring the secret supernatural and conspiratorial side hidden from everyone else). Give it a gruesome and creepy horror vibe.

Add missions very different from a traditional MMO; you do have missions where you kill X number of a kind of enemy but they are part of a larger ongoing story. You also have missions where you have to stealth and avoid traps, or investigate puzzles. That might involve translating from a real ancient language, or decoding Morse Code, or cruising real web sites created for the game. But make it very much not WoW.

Being non-traditional meant they never hit it big. They didn’t sell a lot of games, nor did they get a lot of subscribers. But because they offered something different, something that wasn’t that a clone, those who played stuck around. It’s in its seventh year and still going.

So yeah, you can be different and succeed (EVE Online was mentioned previously and is another good example). I will say now, AoC will never be the next big MMO. But if they do what they say they will and don’t screw it up, it might be around for a long time. I hope so, my lifetime sub better be worth something.

Amist

I hope Ashes of Creation will be somewhat like other MMO's

I think that there are a lot of great ideas that Ashes can pull from other games within the genre. MMO's are fundamentally very alike and whereas I would want Ashes to introduce new elements to the genre, I still think the core ideas when it comes to certain systems should be the same.Things like quests, dungeons, raids, races, classes and so on are all elements previously used in other games so to say that Ashes should be something entirely different is something I would have to disagree with.

With all new MMO's I want a different take on these fundamentals, otherwise games within the genre would be just be copy pasted off of one another

Wandering Mist

@atama touches on a good point. A lot of games (most notably AAA games) try their best to catch whatever is popular at the time for quick cash ins, but those games rarely last very long. On the other hand, a game that does something different and sticks to it is likely to be less popular at peak but will have a much more stable player-base for a longer period of time (assuming the development of the game isn't botched).

So will Ashes be the next big mmorpg? No. It's nowhere near main-stream enough for that. Does it need to be the next big mmorpg? I don't think so either. If Ashes tries to compete with the more mainstream mmorpgs like WoW, FFXIV and GW2, it will inevitably fail, but if it sticks to its niche and is handled correctly (by both the developers and the players) then it will do just fine.

grisu

The Secret World, oohh the pain... It was(is) such an amazing game. The combat tho ugh.. the combat.. It's not just bad, it's abyssmal. I played it on and off for a long time, always coming back to see more off the questing but the moment I had to use combat for an extended time I said fuck it, can't be bothered with.

Wandering Mist

@grisu They apparently revamped the combat system in Secret World Legends. Is it still abyssmal to play or have you not tried it?

Godbrithil

At the moment, it almost doesn't matter how good or bad the game is. Today's community or gamer is so incredibly spoiled and trimmed down to complaining that every game is badly done anyway. In the last 3 years a game could hardly prove itself. You can also see it on Early Access titles, it's an EA game, so you should assume that it's not finished yet and people are complaining about an unfinished game...
*at this point please use a Facepalm, thanks*

grisu

That revamp was just a a bit of updating. Imo they needed a complet revamp. It's still the same base combat, you just had more options to customize your attacks if I remember correctly.

Blackhearted

I hope the MMO will be old school at heart with modern game mechanics and graphics.

burnthefern

ravudha wrote: »

consultant wrote: »

Glad they went with six pvp classes instead of trying to balance 64 classes. That is a huge plus for the pvp community helps level the field as far as balanced is concerned. That was A really smart move on their part. Plus they have made many smart decisions.

6 PvP classes? What do you mean?

I cant speak for him, but my thought is that hes confusing the classes available for APOC Siege with the classes available for AoC. That or he meant APOC Siege and I didnt quite catch it.

Magic Man

burnthefern wrote: »

ravudha wrote: »

consultant wrote: »

Glad they went with six pvp classes instead of trying to balance 64 classes. That is a huge plus for the pvp community helps level the field as far as balanced is concerned. That was A really smart move on their part. Plus they have made many smart decisions.

6 PvP classes? What do you mean?

I cant speak for him, but my thought is that hes confusing the classes available for APOC Siege with the classes available for AoC. That or he meant APOC Siege and I didnt quite catch it.

@ravudha can't really blame him

wish they made some things clearer for people regarding the differences between APOC and MMORPG. Is it just MMO mechanics tested in a testing ground or is it more of a game in its own. Once this is clearly established it should be easier to keep people interested without confusion.

Atama

grisu wrote: »

That revamp was just a a bit of updating. Imo they needed a complet revamp. It's still the same base combat, you just had more options to customize your attacks if I remember correctly.

The combat is vastly different. It’s action combat now, no tab-targeting. They almost totally scrapped and redid all of the abilities (and most abilities that are still around from the old game work differently). Advancement is very different too; you now have levels in addition to the skills and abilities you buy with XP.

The story and missions are the same but the game itself is very different. I didn’t like it at first but then I got used to it.

If you are curious you should give it a try; it’s free to play. You may still not like it but it plays much different than before, and the biggest change is the combat.

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