Everquest was my first MMO and I still remember how awed I was by the game, I stumbled around a bit and didn't really know what I was doing, but I learned the basics from that experience and became hooked. Then I played (imported from Japan) Final Fantasy XI and it pretty much took over and dominated my MMO experience. Only yesterday I heard a few tracks from the soundtrack (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFfWB7sirrU) and I felt that old yearning to go back to Vana'diel and recapture those moments, the friends I made, the struggles and triumphs... however I know it doesn't exist anymore and its hard to accept, sad I know, but thats how powerful an MMO can be.
What a lot of you WoW guys (and more recent games) are feeling now is what happened to us, the previous MMO generation. While you were all enjoying your golden days of WoW, the older games where declining, SWG had its moments but it was always on the ropes, and we couldn't join in the WoW madness because it wasn't the experience that the previous generation came to love, it was a completely different animal. It felt so fast to me, so twitchy and with shallow rewards that when coming directly from FFXI, a game that had one of the most shallow progression gradients in an MMO, whose very core design feature was in cooperation and community - WoW in comparison felt like a gimmick and simply not to my taste.
In any other genre having two drastically different types of games would be fine and I'd love it for its sheer variety. However because WoW single-handedly brought people to the genre, it created it's very own brand of MMO to the point that people, when they thought about MMOs, thought of a fast paced, quest based, solo friendly open world. Not the community centric, cooperation based gradual profession of the previous games. This transformed the genre into something completely different from how it started out.
The main problem with the genre, from a production point of view, is that it takes so much time and effort to create a game that investors and money men, as a consequence, ultimately have too much say on the project. As opposed to another genre where the costs are more bearable, investors are more willing to allow free creative design to developers. But in the case of MMOs pressure leads developers to try to make a game that casts the widest market net possible, making gameplay that is as open to every play style possible. It leaves the experience very shallow and stale. It's always a short loved experience and it's why the clone games of the genre will always, ALWAYS fail in comparison, because they cant provide the novel experience.
After FFXIV, which I've tried going back to on 3 separate occasions (mostly because a few friends play it) I've simply given up on the genre. As long as developers continue to create experiences for everyone and don't focus on a set experience and play style then I'm staying away from it. The money I've wasted trying out these new games in order to recapture those early games is ridiculous.
Err bit of a rant sorry
This topic always gets me yapping.
