Great column, I agree. "I'm here to break the news: the hardcore playstyle is dead." Ok, maybe not entirely dead, there's always chance for some indie kickstarter project here and there, but practically yep, it's dead. And it wasn't killed by evil developers, or the money-greeding industry, simply that's the direction the masses longed for.
Have you ever stopped to consider that 'hardcore' just isn't sustainable?
Lot of folks went broke in the hourly-rates era, and Evercrack made a lot more of them jobless.
Seems like it's basically a bad idea, doesn't it? "All of our most intense, addictive-personality players; we (and their guildmasters) are going to ruin their lives. This sounds like a really sensible plan!". Everyone knows the horror stories, some even true, of the borderline personalities that went way over the top with their pursuit of 'hardcoreness'.
Shovel some dirt on that grave. And count your blessings that you weren't among the lost and discarded.
What?
It's player want to be HARDCORE. It's not game made them become HARDCORE. Those player who cant play with lot time or want to spend time on MMO should be purged. Because they want to play and convince developers to make game for THEM not us.
It's all god damn casual players fault that make this genre look like child's world. Just because they want to play and want to be fair with HARDCORE players who spend a lot time on MMO that they cant beat it.
This world is not fair and they are asking to make it fair. That's why HARDCORE is dead and why F2P is so popular now.
My friends discussed going back to FFXI while waiting on FFXIV and at first I thought "heck yeah" but then as I thought about it I realized that as much as I love FFXI I don't think I could go through all that again. It was work. Granted I enjoyed it when I did it but to do it again...uh no thanks. I also don't want to wait around for hours just making or finding a party. I want to play when I log in.
I agree though that there needs to be a balance between old school and current MMOs. Most current MMOs are not deep at all or think that simply putting a gear grind will make their game more hardcore. Old School MMOs were not accessible and required you to give up a lot of your life if you wanted to do just about anything in the game.
Currently Playing: FFXIV:ARR Looking Forward to: Wildstar
I don't believe "hardcore" is dead...but only because I don't accept what the term "hardcore" has become.
I don't consider the guy who puts down hundreds of dollars on make believe goods a "casual" by any means. In fact, the whole pull of cash stores is counterintuitive--even absurd--to anyone other than a full blown MMO hardcore junkie.
It makes no sense for normal people who don't play MMOs to contemplate why someone would want to pay money additional for things like a hat, or effects. But for us--and only us--it makes perfect sense.
The definition of hardcore, to me, is really simple: you like the game so much, you are willing to do anything and everything to feed it money and feed yourself on it. And if you really look at the genre, it hasn't really discouraged this sort of consumer behavior. If anything, they've double-downed on it.
The difference, to me, is how concentrated, achievement-oriented and stimulative the games are today, versus the old days. In the old days, you could log on, hang out for two or three hours just chatting at the bar, log off and feel like it wasn't a waste of time. These days, if you aren't fighting MOBs every second you are logged on, there's no reason to even be logged on.
If anything, the games have become more hardcore, if you look at it in that way. They have, because it gives you what the hardcore achievers want to the exclusion of everything else: everything that isn't questing for loot and XP every second has been taken out.
__________________________ "Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it." --Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints." --Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls." --Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
I don't want that old times back! 10 years ago, sure, it was great. Now I have a full-time job. )) Mmos should not turn into experience for jobless people or schoolboys.
Originally posted by Chieftan The learning curve and scraping together of every piece of copper was fine. Not being able to build up a solable character outside of a select few classes was my #1 problem with Everquest. The survival and gradual character building aspect is a gameplay style I'm starting to miss again.
your problem was that you couldn't build a soloable character in an MMO ? did I read that right?
I sometimes make spelling and grammar errors but I don't pretend it's because I'm using a phone
...And a wonderful dismissive glance over to EVE, the most hardcore game out there currently. Take all of those WoW clones and let's look at their subscription numbers before they went FREE TO PLAY.
Oh, wait a minute they have under 1 M subscribers...what's that EVE has 500K subscribers?
WHAT? This can't be correct, how can a HARDCORE SPACESHIP as your avatar game have as many or more subs than a casual WoW clone?
What? EVE is NOT free to play?
OMG my head just esploded!
Like it or not the industry standard is to break 500K subscribers. This line is getting blurred with free to play.
The "casualization" of MMOs has more to do with psychology and instant gratification and aversion of loss than any type of gameplay or lifestyle. But that is far outside the scope of this narrow, WoW based, assumptive, poorly edited article.
I am sure you could make an equally hardcore game as the games of yore and get just as many players as you would have back then.(which is not very many)
I'm not sure how you can call that dead now, if it wasn't dead back then. It is simply that online gaming in general has become more alive.
It is a niche. It has always been a niche. Comparing a hardcore MUD to something like WoW is kind of silly, they are two completely different things designed to appeal to different people.
Great article. I do believe hard, challenging, and massive raids can happen again in online games but we just need to remove the time and synchronous requirement.
Originally posted by Attend4455 Originally posted by ChieftanThe learning curve and scraping together of every piece of copper was fine. Not being able to build up a solable character outside of a select few classes was my #1 problem with Everquest. The survival and gradual character building aspect is a gameplay style I'm starting to miss again.
your problem was that you couldn't build a soloable character in an MMO ? did I read that right?
In Everquest. Not the same thing as having a character in WoW or even EQ2.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Man, i really want to respond to this article, but its a post i've typed 1700 times already and frankly im just tired of it. The rose colored glasses argument is getting really frickin old. The reality is WOW is the ONLY succesful MMO that has released. Period, end of conversation, every single one after has flopped rather magnificenty and then ended up with sub numbers less than EQ1 had at its height.
So, that leaves us at a cross roads. CLEARLY we can't continue on the path we have been, which has been the ultra casual, solo friendly story driven "mmo" (which defies logic, but whatever). So, options are, 1. Try what was old and maybe it will be embraced. 2. Try something completely different and hope it works (see EQ:Next) or 3. Kill the genre off altogether.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
Originally posted by GameByNight Why is it that EVE only has half a million players and not ten times that? Because players coming in today expect the precedent that WoW set to be met.
Please, don't forward WOW players to EVE, we don't want them. -unless as cannon fodder-
You can't compare WOW to EVE.
WOW can have 100000000x more members, you get to play with a max of 1k on a server, EVE is 1 massive server.
WOW is about being addicted to epic items "omgwtfzor I must raid because I need that armorset complete roooarrr".
EVE is about domination and let's face it, it's not a arcade mmo, death has concequences instead of just doing a run from the graveyard.
+ EVE doesn't have farmville and tamagotchi fights there......+ we don't want to play female fantasy chars pretending them to be our girlfriends.....
So if that all puts me into a minority spot within the MMO community that puts a 10y old MMO still growing against a mindles boring MMO losing customers........fk ya, happy to be a EVE nerd!
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
Originally posted by Artiss2k CCP dont fail us now, I'm hoping World of Darkness fills that hardcore void for us.
WoD isn't going to be a "hardcore" game in the old UO/Everquest sense. It's going to be about player interaction.
However, it probably will be "hardcore" in the EVE sense; that the game will never just tell you that you're awesome; if you want the rep, you'll have to actually be awesome
From the almighty Crushbone Mace, to the Journeyman Boots, up to the Class Epic Weapons (and the insane quests involved to get them).
I also remember being a young Barbarian and foolishly falling down the false bottomed tree stump.....
Yes, those games were brutal (corpse run anyone?) but there was also parts which are needed in this day and age.
Games like WoW "USED" to have the epic quests for the classes, like the Hunter having to solo kite giants to earn his epic bow and anyone else helping reset the quest.
Then they ruin it 6 months later with low level drops far exceeding the quality of those epic items. Games don't have to be brutally hard to be fun, however, dumbing it down for the gimme crowd HAS had a detrimental effect on the genre
I am twenty six years old as of Saturday, and I have been playing games since I started UO at eleven eand played Everquest and Daoc. I was on this site looking for a new game with a friend today because we both can't find anything worth playing like the old days. It's sad. I can't stay on any one game for more then a month or two. I always find myself going back a free uo server and it is getting old. I would love to play a game like Eq or Daoc again. As crappy as it sounds this article was a crummy but true thing to stumble on today. Games just are not what they used to be and that is fine but at the same time it would be nice to have some hardcore games out there.
Originally posted by LonestryderMake time or don't, but don't take away from others so that you don't feel bad about not prioritizing your hobby time for MMOs. Others do.
First of all, others do not. The article "The Death of Hardcore" is all about it, right?
Obviously you have plenty of "hobby time", so you can do many different things and choose from them. Well, I can't do that. All my free time, "hobby time" and eating time included, is 3 hours per day (4 hours max if I go to sleep late). Waiting for party for 3 hours and then going to bed understandably leads to frustration. Frustration leads to anger, anger leads to misery, misery leads to quitting the game. 10-hour hardcore camping is simply impossible now. So yeah, sometimes life interferes with "hobby time". Still it doesn't mean I wish to avoid mmo games altogether. I like them!
Originally posted by LonestryderMake time or don't, but don't take away from others so that you don't feel bad about not prioritizing your hobby time for MMOs. Others do.
First of all, others do not. The article "The Death of Hardcore" is all about it, right?
Well, he's a little unnecessarily belligerent, perhaps.
But I wonder what % of users find their lives unchanged by the addition of children to their families, for instance.
And what % are just giving away face-time with their kids that they'll never get back.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
I don't want that old times back! 10 years ago, sure, it was great. Now I have a full-time job. )) Mmos should not turn into experience for jobless people or schoolboys.
This assumption is complete BS.
I didn't have much time for games when I was going to school, because I was either in school, or playing outside with friends. Now that I'm older, have a family and professional job, I have way more time for specific hobbies, since I don't play pickup stickball games on the street anymore.
I'm so tired of hearing the argument that, now that we're older, we don't have time.
BS
Make time or don't, but don't take away from others so that you don't feel bad about not prioritizing your hobby time for MMOs. Others do.
Yeah that argument gets really old. People seem to forget that the average age of an EQ1 player was 27 years old. Other games like LOTRO was 31 years old.
So are we to assume that 90% of the EQ playerbase were all just homeless slackasses that sat in their parents basements playing EQ all day? Im sure they'd like to but the reality is otherwise.
I was 17 when i started playing EQ and i can assure you i was the minority< BIG TIME. It took my 19 year old friend constantly having to vouch for me just to get into a guild and prove i wasnt a snot nosed little shit.
Guess what, jsut about everyone of the people i encounter would regularly have to "log off to go to work" or "log off to spend time with the kids", etc.
People who work full time have families and kids, etc, also have leisure time, and if some of them chose to spend it on MMO's that was their prerogative.
None of those people begrudged the college students who were online 7 hours a day, or the single working guys who could play from 530pm to midnight 5 days a week and all day sat or sunday. There was no pervading sense of jealousy like their is now.
Now all the entitlement babies have to cry when someone has something better than them, cus its not fair in their eyes. It makes me sick.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
Originally posted by Hrimnir Yeah that argument gets really old. People seem to forget that the average age of an EQ1 player was 27 years old. Other games like LOTRO was 31 years old.So are we to assume that 90% of the EQ playerbase were all just homeless slackasses that sat in their parents basements playing EQ all day? Im sure they'd like to but the reality is otherwise.I was 17 when i started playing EQ and i can assure you i was the minority< BIG TIME. It took my 19 year old friend constantly having to vouch for me just to get into a guild and prove i wasnt a snot nosed little shit.Guess what, jsut about everyone of the people i encounter would regularly have to "log off to go to work" or "log off to spend time with the kids", etc.People who work full time have families and kids, etc, also have leisure time, and if some of them chose to spend it on MMO's that was their prerogative.None of those people begrudged the college students who were online 7 hours a day, or the single working guys who could play from 530pm to midnight 5 days a week and all day sat or sunday. There was no pervading sense of jealousy like their is now....
Post of the day. Well done old sport!
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon. In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
Comments
Has a ton to do with the expansion of the midsection.
just saying... "back in the days" the only raids we had were vanern, DF and a dragon per realm
there surely were some pros to the old days, but i doubt i want em back....
on the other hand, i wonder... you are 26? so you've been "hardcore" mmoing with like 12 years or even less? shesh, kids those days.
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
What?
It's player want to be HARDCORE. It's not game made them become HARDCORE. Those player who cant play with lot time or want to spend time on MMO should be purged. Because they want to play and convince developers to make game for THEM not us.
It's all god damn casual players fault that make this genre look like child's world. Just because they want to play and want to be fair with HARDCORE players who spend a lot time on MMO that they cant beat it.
This world is not fair and they are asking to make it fair. That's why HARDCORE is dead and why F2P is so popular now.
A voice of reason, thank goodness.
My friends discussed going back to FFXI while waiting on FFXIV and at first I thought "heck yeah" but then as I thought about it I realized that as much as I love FFXI I don't think I could go through all that again. It was work. Granted I enjoyed it when I did it but to do it again...uh no thanks. I also don't want to wait around for hours just making or finding a party. I want to play when I log in.
I agree though that there needs to be a balance between old school and current MMOs. Most current MMOs are not deep at all or think that simply putting a gear grind will make their game more hardcore. Old School MMOs were not accessible and required you to give up a lot of your life if you wanted to do just about anything in the game.
Currently Playing: FFXIV:ARR
Looking Forward to: Wildstar
I don't believe "hardcore" is dead...but only because I don't accept what the term "hardcore" has become.
I don't consider the guy who puts down hundreds of dollars on make believe goods a "casual" by any means. In fact, the whole pull of cash stores is counterintuitive--even absurd--to anyone other than a full blown MMO hardcore junkie.
It makes no sense for normal people who don't play MMOs to contemplate why someone would want to pay money additional for things like a hat, or effects. But for us--and only us--it makes perfect sense.
The definition of hardcore, to me, is really simple: you like the game so much, you are willing to do anything and everything to feed it money and feed yourself on it. And if you really look at the genre, it hasn't really discouraged this sort of consumer behavior. If anything, they've double-downed on it.
The difference, to me, is how concentrated, achievement-oriented and stimulative the games are today, versus the old days. In the old days, you could log on, hang out for two or three hours just chatting at the bar, log off and feel like it wasn't a waste of time. These days, if you aren't fighting MOBs every second you are logged on, there's no reason to even be logged on.
If anything, the games have become more hardcore, if you look at it in that way. They have, because it gives you what the hardcore achievers want to the exclusion of everything else: everything that isn't questing for loot and XP every second has been taken out.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
I don't want that old times back!
10 years ago, sure, it was great. Now I have a full-time job. 
)) Mmos should not turn into experience for jobless people or schoolboys.
your problem was that you couldn't build a soloable character in an MMO ? did I read that right?
I sometimes make spelling and grammar errors but I don't pretend it's because I'm using a phone
...And a wonderful dismissive glance over to EVE, the most hardcore game out there currently. Take all of those WoW clones and let's look at their subscription numbers before they went FREE TO PLAY.
Oh, wait a minute they have under 1 M subscribers...what's that EVE has 500K subscribers?
WHAT? This can't be correct, how can a HARDCORE SPACESHIP as your avatar game have as many or more subs than a casual WoW clone?
What? EVE is NOT free to play?
OMG my head just esploded!
Like it or not the industry standard is to break 500K subscribers. This line is getting blurred with free to play.
The "casualization" of MMOs has more to do with psychology and instant gratification and aversion of loss than any type of gameplay or lifestyle. But that is far outside the scope of this narrow, WoW based, assumptive, poorly edited article.
I am sure you could make an equally hardcore game as the games of yore and get just as many players as you would have back then.(which is not very many)
I'm not sure how you can call that dead now, if it wasn't dead back then. It is simply that online gaming in general has become more alive.
It is a niche. It has always been a niche. Comparing a hardcore MUD to something like WoW is kind of silly, they are two completely different things designed to appeal to different people.
Great article. I do believe hard, challenging, and massive raids can happen again in online games but we just need to remove the time and synchronous requirement.
Werewolf Online(R) - Lead Developer
your problem was that you couldn't build a soloable character in an MMO ? did I read that right?
In Everquest. Not the same thing as having a character in WoW or even EQ2.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Man, i really want to respond to this article, but its a post i've typed 1700 times already and frankly im just tired of it. The rose colored glasses argument is getting really frickin old. The reality is WOW is the ONLY succesful MMO that has released. Period, end of conversation, every single one after has flopped rather magnificenty and then ended up with sub numbers less than EQ1 had at its height.
So, that leaves us at a cross roads. CLEARLY we can't continue on the path we have been, which has been the ultra casual, solo friendly story driven "mmo" (which defies logic, but whatever). So, options are, 1. Try what was old and maybe it will be embraced. 2. Try something completely different and hope it works (see EQ:Next) or 3. Kill the genre off altogether.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Please, don't forward WOW players to EVE, we don't want them. -unless as cannon fodder-
You can't compare WOW to EVE.
WOW can have 100000000x more members, you get to play with a max of 1k on a server, EVE is 1 massive server.
WOW is about being addicted to epic items "omgwtfzor I must raid because I need that armorset complete roooarrr".
EVE is about domination and let's face it, it's not a arcade mmo, death has concequences instead of just doing a run from the graveyard.
+ EVE doesn't have farmville and tamagotchi fights there......+ we don't want to play female fantasy chars pretending them to be our girlfriends.....
So if that all puts me into a minority spot within the MMO community that puts a 10y old MMO still growing against a mindles boring MMO losing customers........fk ya, happy to be a EVE nerd!
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
WoD isn't going to be a "hardcore" game in the old UO/Everquest sense. It's going to be about player interaction.
However, it probably will be "hardcore" in the EVE sense; that the game will never just tell you that you're awesome; if you want the rep, you'll have to actually be awesome
Give me liberty or give me lasers
Think about the other places in the world where the word "accessible" is used then read this thing again and have the same chuckle I did.
If hardcore is dead what does that make everyone else? LOL
I also fondly recall my time in Norrath.
From the almighty Crushbone Mace, to the Journeyman Boots, up to the Class Epic Weapons (and the insane quests involved to get them).
I also remember being a young Barbarian and foolishly falling down the false bottomed tree stump.....
Yes, those games were brutal (corpse run anyone?) but there was also parts which are needed in this day and age.
Games like WoW "USED" to have the epic quests for the classes, like the Hunter having to solo kite giants to earn his epic bow and anyone else helping reset the quest.
Then they ruin it 6 months later with low level drops far exceeding the quality of those epic items. Games don't have to be brutally hard to be fun, however, dumbing it down for the gimme crowd HAS had a detrimental effect on the genre
League of Legends Referrals!!
http://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=52a7e1952d8d9300145085
First of all, others do not. The article "The Death of Hardcore" is all about it, right?
Obviously you have plenty of "hobby time", so you can do many different things and choose from them. Well, I can't do that. All my free time, "hobby time" and eating time included, is 3 hours per day (4 hours max if I go to sleep late). Waiting for party for 3 hours and then going to bed understandably leads to frustration. Frustration leads to anger, anger leads to misery, misery leads to quitting the game.
10-hour hardcore camping is simply impossible now. So yeah, sometimes life interferes with "hobby time". Still it doesn't mean I wish to avoid mmo games altogether. I like them!
Well, he's a little unnecessarily belligerent, perhaps.
But I wonder what % of users find their lives unchanged by the addition of children to their families, for instance.
And what % are just giving away face-time with their kids that they'll never get back.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Yeah that argument gets really old. People seem to forget that the average age of an EQ1 player was 27 years old. Other games like LOTRO was 31 years old.
So are we to assume that 90% of the EQ playerbase were all just homeless slackasses that sat in their parents basements playing EQ all day? Im sure they'd like to but the reality is otherwise.
I was 17 when i started playing EQ and i can assure you i was the minority< BIG TIME. It took my 19 year old friend constantly having to vouch for me just to get into a guild and prove i wasnt a snot nosed little shit.
Guess what, jsut about everyone of the people i encounter would regularly have to "log off to go to work" or "log off to spend time with the kids", etc.
People who work full time have families and kids, etc, also have leisure time, and if some of them chose to spend it on MMO's that was their prerogative.
None of those people begrudged the college students who were online 7 hours a day, or the single working guys who could play from 530pm to midnight 5 days a week and all day sat or sunday. There was no pervading sense of jealousy like their is now.
Now all the entitlement babies have to cry when someone has something better than them, cus its not fair in their eyes. It makes me sick.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Post of the day. Well done old sport!
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon.
In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit