What is it about MMORPGS that are so hard to make well nowadays?
The last MMORPG I can remember enjoying was WoW about 8 years ago, along with Runescape. Maybe it was because I had real friends to play them with?
I bought GW2 about two years ago and played it for about 3 months, maxing out my character in that time but throughout all of it it just wasn't fun. Mechanically and gameplay wise the game was more advanced that that of WoW or Runescape albeit more shallow, but it just couldn't capture my attention
Not to mention the fact that nobody really socialized in that game outside of ERP reasons.
That brings me to another point, why don't people socialize in MMO's anymore? Not that I've played them recently but that seems to be the general consensus with most people I've talked about the subject to, is it that people nowadays don't like to or is it more so that the games themselves don't require it as much?
I guess this could pass as a thinly veiled recommendation thread which I suppose it is~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
tl;dr Why are MMO's shit, is it the games themselves or the people who play them?
>>321740967
>Not to mention the fact that nobody really socialized in that game outside of ERP reasons.
People played Runescape because the community was great even though the game was just clicking on trees until they fall over.
People played WoW because friends and guilds. Even though the gameplay was just clicking on mobs and pushing 123 and sometimes 4.
All modern MMO's have been trying to improve the gameplay/story.
No one ever played WoW/RS for the gameplay or story.
>>321740967
>Why are MMO's shit, is it the games themselves or the people who play them?
Mexican_girl_offers_a_third_solution.bmp
>>321740967
I actually had a nightmare about playing GW2 last night
>>321741145
Ultima Online still has players (mostly on private free shards cause fuck paying) to this day, 20 years later, because of what you've said.
It was all about meeting people who weren't going to stick a halberd into your anus and twist just because you were there. You had to band together. Mastering skills, fighting monsters, all that shit was hard. But it was nothing like the danger other players were.
You die, you lose your shit. Simple as that. Its all on the ground and that guy that just wasted 20 regs killing you is taking it for his own.
Player owned (and customizable) houses, dungeons, an economy that was 99.5% player run, it was all based around the other player.
UO, and WoW, both got stale because it just kept adding more and more shit for people to AVOID each other with. No PVP zones in UO. LFG/LFR etc for WoW. Grind instead of long quest chains that needed friends!
And so the game got boring.
>>321740967
Because people now want short games.
They don't really have time to invest in such lengthy games. The thing with WoW is that it appeared right before that time came. Few years later, smartphones were rampant, everyone was playing shit games on it, and WoW died because their attention span became so reduced they couldn't even be arsed to join a guild anymore.
Also most MMOs only try to appear as a MMO, but really are nothing else than a shitty singleplayer game iterated a thousand times, devoid of actual reasons to play multiplayer. It's been years since we've had a real, actual multiplayer game. I think the last one was DAOC.
And then, the model is getting outdated. The action is too slow, the gameplay always the same button pushing, the world/quest structure is always the same aswell, and it became nothing but casualized grind: no more PKing, no more permadeath, no more loss of items... everything was made to make the progression steady and impossible to reverse, let alone stop, until people hit the "endgame", which is a position that simply shouldn't exist because good game design should attempt to continuously kick you out of your comfort zone and back to square one regularily.
And finally it's part pipe dream. It's mostly based on the idea that the more the merrier. But then maybe there's a limit to that.
>>321741145
The thing is I enjoyed the quest system in Runescape ALOT along with the freedom the game gave in terms of how you progress your character. With that said I haven't played in over 10 years but I imagine the game is still much of the same.
But has the community survived?
Or if not where would they go to?
>>321741163
I met alot of decent people in runescape, maybe it was because I was in my teens at the time but we had pretty decent conversations about real life and such. With that said the game in terms of mechanics was pretty shitty but the idea was great in my opinion
What is it about MMO's now that attract terrible people though? Has the genre overspecialized now so much so that it attracts the most "hardcore" and scares away the "casuals"?
>>321741196
It was okay for 5 dollars as a time sink. Feel sorry for all the people who bought at anything over that though
>>321741402
The thing about private servers is that the community is so limited and that there is always gonna be a very limited ammount of new players added to the pool. But otherwise yeah I'm fairly upset at how new games are adding mechanics to isolate players
>>321740967
they were replaced by mobas which are more addictive, easier to.brand and.monetize, easier to reach.the rewarding.part of play, quicker and REGULAR, easier to BRAND,.more viral because of twitch, and reward mastery on a more incremental way, ajd appeal to normies to some extent
its very obvious why.mmos are dead
It's almost impossible to compete with WoW. Unless you do something completely different, like Eve. You can criticise a lot of decisions and changes Blizzard made the last years, but they are sitting on 10 years of content and bugfixes, which obviously makes for a damn solid game.
Why is there no good combat system like Tales of Symphonia, Terra felt liek I was still just clicking
>>321741718
>>321741680
I guess it boils down to the fact that people have more options as to how to waste their time nowadays. Perhaps the novelty of talking to real people online has subsided too?
>>321741823
I'm not sure. Most of my friends and people I talk to don't really "enjoy" the game per se, but they continue on because it's what they know and nothing else is really out there
Are there any American/Western studios out there that make MMO's or has that market been completely snuffed out by Koreans/Blizzard?
>>321741402
In classic runescape you could walk into any bank and see 40+ players talking and trading, on trade servers you would see at least a thousand.
Then they introduced an auction house system and all the banks became completely empty.
No more trade deals, no more partnerships, no more hiring lower level players to gather low level resources for you, no more networking to find the crafters you need.
Just walk up to the grand exchange and get whatever you want without saying a word.
This is why MMO's failed.
>>321741683
>But has the community survived?
Nope. RS has a fraction of its player base, and no one talks outside of clan chat.
>Or if not where would they go to?
I wish I knew.
>>321741981
Classic brit bank.
At any given time you'd see 10 to 50 to 100 people in the area. Some would be hocking wares. Some would be scamming, pretending to and try cheat you with an item that was worth less. Some would be thieves that had trained pickpocketing and would wait for you to withdraw items from your bank and grab your shit.
Going to brit bank as a 85 (out of 100 skill) tamer and asking the guy who would stand there with mares and dragons on display for a baby drake so you can start seeing income from all this work you put into taming..
It was a massive MULTI PLAYER game.
And then they added new lands in paid expansions, with new banks and the population spread thin. And then they added item insurance, and there wasn't really a need to buy shit since you never lost shit. And so on.
WoW did a lotta the same shit. It did it way more mainstream but it made the same mistakes.
>>321741683
Fortunately with UO and private servers, there's one big one with 1000+ players, and several niche ones (high roleplaying etc) with a few hundred, and then some really low end ones. So if you want the experience it's still there.
>>321741834
Never played but I don't think MMO's can rise above "clicking" in regard to combat. ARPGS like Dark Souls would be nice but unfeasible due to lag and such~ Not to mention the fact that every implementation I've seen is terrible (e.g. Tera)
With that said I think that MMO's shouldn't focus on combat but rather socialization and questing/mechanics.
A game that does this really well is Dungeons Dragons Online which has an excellent questing system which actually forces most players to communicate rather intricately and also the requirements for specific classes for dungeons. This also contributes to the socialization because you NEED some classes which is why you want to make friends with people who are good at said classes and so on.
Knowing all that, the game is rather difficult and unforgiving which understandably scares away alot of people.
It's also a shame though that they sell questlines individually.
>>321742423
The thing is if the game doesn't add content lots of people would get upset and die etc. etc. So its a hard balance to achieve and I don't think I've seen one really implemented well. Not sure about EVE since I don't have enough autism levels to try and play but DDO comes close sorta and only in the dungeon aspect.
>>321742423
>Some would be scamming, pretending to and try cheat you with an item that was worth less.
One of my favorite parts of RS. I fell for it when I was new, and I tricked a lot of people the same. Its not like they beat you because they had a higher level then you, it was a fair contest and you lost because of your ignorance or you let your greed get the better of you.
I wish I knew about MMOs during the UO days. Sounds like something I would have loved.
>>321741981
>making all my early game money as an Ess runner for runecrafters
truly the best of times
>>321743023
>killing cows and selling the hides to crafters
>leveling up your combat/prayer and making enough to get decent gear
>>321742662
EVE is a funny game. They add space to it and new places to go, but do so when the game is just too fucking crowded to breathe. And it retains the importance of hub regions without locking them in DLC/expansions.
UO did not do it so well. But it's more subtle than "New lands = more people spread out = less people playing together".
The nuance is, for UO, splitting the world into two mirror images. One that allowed PVP anywhere except cities and one that did not allow it anywhere. Suddenly people went to do their grinding and money earning where they could not be hurt and then took throw away characters to pvp zones.
WoW has a similar issue that I touched on. The repeated watering down of end game content to make it accessible to more players, and the implementation of ways for those players to meet and access that content without having to join guilds.
People become little islands to themselves. There's no reason to talk to each other. There's no need to get involved. You're more or less self sufficient. And slowly the 'massive' part of MMO diminishes. Yeah, there are a lot of people connected but hardly any are interacting. And so an MMO declines.
And that's the secret. That's all you have to do to make a very successful MMO. Get a lot of players interacting with each other. EVE, Second Life, UO, whatever. They come in dramatically different forms but they're extremely successful because they respect the core principle of the genre. Players interacting with players.
>>321742423
Good fucking times. UO was the best mmo ever created. Just being able to sell houses and goods on Ebay.
im on the fence about buying
>>321743578
its awful and I cant think of a single person who plays it.
>>321743578
It's okay. But not more than that.
It has a rich lore and such.
But playing archer is really disappointing and the fights kinda suck...
I played it for around 20 hours. Also, stupid as I am I bought the xpac for literally playing 1 hour.
Not worth the money, even with discount.
Hoping this turns out well
