The rotten legacy of the AAA MMO

[olivier renault]

The games industry seems to be all about imitate rather than innovate these days.

No one wants to take risks. The publishers see another successful game and try to copy it.

It's caused a lot of stagnation and underwhelming games of recent times imo.

If you're budget is 50-150 millions, or even more for MMOs (wasn't $300 million being bandied around for Destiny? Crickey!), with a 5 year development plan, and huge logistics, then you'd be right to be cautious.

Hell even Destiny is totally bland and generic (The Avatar of Video Games?), even though it looks competent and has some potential in its core mechanics.

It's the curse of AAA gaming. The innovation comes from risk takers, meaning indies, or smaller scale projects, who can afford to fail, and eventually trickles up. And usually, the original ideas get dissected , marketed, and re-shaped so much it looks nothing like the original, to fit a wider audience.

Blizzard or Valve have got so much money, they'll probably be the next large scale innovators, or at least bringing innovations to the mass market. Valve if they can be bothered, Blizzard if they have kept their balls after the Activision assimilation.

 

[zola25]

The issue for me is that MMO's generally lean towards RPG style games. I like my RPGs to be a deeply immersive single player experience. Each time I've tied an MMO I've found that immersion is shattered by other players being present.

I understand why people like them, they are just not for me.

Back OT: I think the OP is spot on.

 

[FlamBango]

There is no challenge these days, no risk , all reward.

Rift for example, originally i thought it was one of the better "modern" mmo's But look at it now, they're giving out instant level 60 characters. Wtf is the point of the game!

Im a bit spoiled coming from the originals of UO and EQ 1 i guess but modern MMO's are a complete joke. Hardly any game in any of them and totally defeating the point of the original vision of having a world to play in and level up in. The player base are half to blame as theyre only interesting in the end game. The whole game mechanic is condensed down to playing a spreadsheet, you dont have the stats then youre not getting in. You dont have the gear to get those stats, get the credit card out and then youre one of the gang again.

 

[drunkenmaster]

Difficulty is something absolutely lacking from mmo's these days.

There is a grindfest... working to level but fighting hard opponents, risking dying, failing missions, etc. Then there is the grindfest, where nothing is a threat, it's entirely boring, there is no reason to care if you die, there is no challenge, it's JUST a time sink, not a time sink and a challenge.

Lotro used to be really hard, there were dozens of solo quests which could only be done above level, where it would vary a little by class and group content solo.... even massively over level a lot of it could be hard and on level a lot of the smallest group quests could be disgustingly hard if not impossible. 18 months later(if that) and the small group quests became soloable, the solo content became painfully easy for any class. It went from a really great world with challenging content and a reason to actually group up, find people you enjoyed playing with to a game in which you could go 1-60 without ever talking to another person, with no reason to group for any content, with people then being less willing to do the main group content.

Wow has for the people who play, raid content at the end of a game in a world they feel was interesting and they feel a part of. With newer MMO's that go the easy/boring mode way, they feel like it was boring to get to end game, then the raid content feels pointless as they don't feel part of the world or the community within it.

With too many MMO's having the dwindling numbers and scrapping servers, moving people around or leaving them on unpopulated servers, making it a pain to move characters they'd spent months/years playing with. These are all things that just add to that lack of feeling like being part of that world(server) and not really feeling that want to do end game content.


Stupid thread though..... really want to play City of Heroes again, loved that game. How they went from COH to Champions Online/Startrek online, getting everything utterly wrong in both and losing all the charm, style and fun from COH I don't know. They managed to lose everything that made COH great, ruin everything else, and add new crap that was awful

 

[Rroff]

There's been some movement to buy the source code from NCSoft directly but I don't think that includes character data. I'm not sure I want to start again from scratch. The main thrust seems to be gaining the IP from NCSoft and licensing the name out.

Would never be the same heh - my L50 char had several veteran rewards and "grandfathered" stats i.e. could still perma run hasten/RA right upto when the servers closed which wouldn't be possible on a new char.

Stupid thread though..... really want to play City of Heroes again, loved that game. How they went from COH to Champions Online/Startrek online, getting everything utterly wrong in both and losing all the charm, style and fun from COH I don't know. They managed to lose everything that made COH great, ruin everything else, and add new crap that was awful

Does make you wonder, was a lot of changes to the company infrastructure, etc. though a lot of the reason for closing was to force people to buy their newer games too which backfired spectacularly...

 

[Malevolence]

Personally, I'm hoping that when Black Desert is released it's even half as good as it looks.

 

[No1newts]

I've gave up on the mmo industry.

Will never but one again unless it gets universal praise and has a large playerbase at least 6 month after release. GW2 covers the odd urges I still have but had enough of false promises and average rushed products.

 

[KautoStar]

Neocron was the best MMO I have played (I played wow since release)


Neocron is free now but is still buggy although it still has a core community who love it.

Yup I was addicted to Neocron big time. Best mmo I have played despite all its flaws, bugs and synchronizing

When wow came out I made a rougue to lvl 20 then went back to neocron, nothing has replicated the fun combat and op war scene since.

 

[Nemeses]

I don't really agree I think these games would have being made regardless of wow.

 

[jamiehavok]

I don't really agree I think these games would have being made regardless of wow.

yes the games would have been made at least some of them, but a few of them would have been more group based and less instanced until another company came up with the idea to make their game uber solo friendly outside dungeons, take everquest 2 which was released just before wow, that started off very group based, no instancing, loads of mobs roaming around in packs in the open world which were impossible to solo, or "double up arrow" mobs which were on there own but still impossible to solo at a point they still gave xp. the dungeons were open and had people competing for named mobs thats spawned there etc, it had people in grind groups and shouting for groups 24/7 to grind or quest, it was realy fun, fast forward 6 months after wows release they cut all the group mobs out of the open zones and made virtually everything soloable, ended up going back to ffxi where i could group again!

 

[bemaniac]

what was wrong with Wildstar again? I keep going back to it lol

 

[Newbie007]

what was wrong with Wildstar again? I keep going back to it lol

It doesnt have 50 bazillion subs or something?

Regarding the OP's original point, I dont think subseqent triple A MMO releases have been terrible. They have always been generally a perfectly fine example of the genre. The problem is that people are expecting MMOs to have WoW LK numbers, and nothing will ever ever pull in 12 million+ subs. WoW was an anomoly, a perfect storm.

I think ToR was the last MMO that was in dev in the 'golden' period, games that are being released now were started 2011 ish anyway.

Half the problem with MMO's and the sub based variants is that 'new blood' isnt attracted to the genre or will go to the f2p element, mobile gaming and MOBA's like LoL, DOTA 2 etc. New gamers have a huge amount of choice that just wasnt around back in 2003/2004. With no (or minimal) influx or new subs to offset the cancelled subs, numbers shrink and those that are left get older and have less time to sink into the game and so ease of use creeps into the genre, things like LFR and 'welfare epics'.

The RPG element of MMORPG is a thing of the past too, developers dont tend to approach new titles with that in the fore front of their minds and generally when a new game does inovate or tries to approach a certain section of the gaming population they will tned to find the high numbers the publishers crave just isn't there.

Add into the mix that 'f2p' and 'micro transaction' are still dirty words amongst certain sections of gamers and new games dont stand much of a chance. Take ToR for example, its pulling in approx 1.5 million players with 500,000 paying subs (disclaimer - paying sub numbers pulled from my ***) but because it has a f2p element gamers call it a failure, or GW2 still in the top 3 for concurrent users I believe but because it essentially a f2p title its a failure. Gamers are snobs!


Will you see a return to the pre vanilla WoW days? (bear in mind even old skool WoW was deemed easy by older MMO players as it didnt have xp loss, and had easy travel etc) - no, publishers just wont back a developer that wants to go down that route. EQ:N was potentially the last chance so to speak but even SoE decided it wasnt 'profitable'.

There is a huge array of MMO's out there though so essentially just find one *you* enjoy and play that.

 

[No1newts]

yes the games would have been made at least some of them, but a few of them would have been more group based and less instanced until another company came up with the idea to make their game uber solo friendly outside dungeons, take everquest 2 which was released just before wow, that started off very group based, no instancing, loads of mobs roaming around in packs in the open world which were impossible to solo, or "double up arrow" mobs which were on there own but still impossible to solo at a point they still gave xp. the dungeons were open and had people competing for named mobs thats spawned there etc, it had people in grind groups and shouting for groups 24/7 to grind or quest, it was realy fun, fast forward 6 months after wows release they cut all the group mobs out of the open zones and made virtually everything soloable, ended up going back to ffxi where i could group again!

It's a fallacy to blame vanilla WoW for the changes, later TBC/early Wrath? Certainly, but vanilla WoW whilst solo able was a horrific chore if that's what you chose to do. Even early zones like the Murloc camp in Elwyn were a tedious mob dodging death trap in Vanilla never mind the later zones!

Yes you could solo early WoW but it took you ten times as long and you got **** gear and a torrid time.

 

[Newbie007]

It's a fallacy to blame vanilla WoW for the changes, later TBC/early Wrath? Certainly, but vanilla WoW whilst solo able was a horrific chore if that's what you chose to do. Even early zones like the Murloc camp in Elwyn were a tedious mob dodging death trap in Vanilla never mind the later zones!

Yes you could solo early WoW but it took you ten times as long and you got **** gear and a torrid time.

The quest involving getting the medallians off the 2 dead guards was hellish, those murlocs came in packs of 3 and had a huge aggro range and were a nightmare to kill.

Didnt they do a top 5 killer of players in a PvE enviroment just as Cata hit and the No 1 Killer of players was the level 14 Defias Mage in Westfall (closely followed by Nefarian), that deadmines precurser quest chain was a royal pain - but also great fun. The whole risk/reward thing I suppose.

 

[Orcish-Horde]

Difficulty is something absolutely lacking from mmo's these days.

MMOs hid to much behind small and large group content and dress it up as difficulty. Level solo to max level and hit a content brickwall, team up or stop playing. Only thing difficult about MMOs is finding X ammount of people that are not watch TV or doing something else when playing.

 

[No1newts]

The quest involving getting the medallians off the 2 dead guards was hellish, those murlocs came in packs of 3 and had a huge aggro range and were a nightmare to kill.

Didnt they do a top 5 killer of players in a PvE enviroment just as Cata hit and the No 1 Killer of players was the level 14 Defias Mage in Westfall (closely followed by Nefarian), that deadmines precurser quest chain was a royal pain - but also great fun. The whole risk/reward thing I suppose.

It was torture in a fun way

 

[Malevolence]

The quest involving getting the medallians off the 2 dead guards was hellish, those murlocs came in packs of 3 and had a huge aggro range and were a nightmare to kill.

Tell me about it. Doing is solo at low-level was a nightmare. By the time you'd taken a few out to clear a path the first ones had re-spawned and aggroed.

 

[Curunen]

I've gave up on the mmo industry.

Will never but one again unless it gets universal praise and has a large playerbase at least 6 month after release. GW2 covers the odd urges I still have but had enough of false promises and average rushed products.

Fortunately I my journey into mmos started and ended with GW2 (I regret having never got into GW1 when it was at its prime), so I feel very lucky to have avoided most of the rubbish.

I still play casually for the living story, but don't enjoy playing wvw or pvp anymore.

Regarding Destiny - I'm not surprised to see it turn out as it has, and at least that's one less thing for me to care about being on PC.

 

[Dr Delphi]

Neocron was the best MMO I have played (I played wow since release)


Neocron is free now but is still buggy although it still has a core community who love it.

+1 I've never really left Neocron since the original Beta, not had time much these days but still in contact with most of the devs and the CEO. Watch this space for more details about a new version - which seems to be in the vein of rather than a Neocron 3.

 

[Xordium]

Plemty of MMOs before WOW. In fact for many of us WOW was the worst thing to happen MMOs - poor character generation, totally themepark, cartoony style graphics. For me it was an awful game although I came to looking for a home after SWG was messed up and I lasted all of 3 days before moving on to Vanguard and EVE. I get why some people like it but plenty don't and the gaming devs spent that long copying it for other projects they kind of forget the demographic who hate this type of MMO. Fortunately we are getting better games through now but we need more that break away from what were even then derivative mechanics.