MMORPG's are they way they are because the new generations are lazy...EVERYONE even 5 year old KIDS have cellphones...EVERYONE has access to the internet...EVERYONE is given a new car when they get there drivers...everything is soo easy and handed to them now a days they expect the same lazy routine gameplay in every mmo....why should the kids leave home if they got it good there?
This genrea is stuck in a infiniate loop....introducing "new" ideas that really arnt new at all...you cant improve on crap...and you cant change the lazyness of america.
I am late to the MMO crowd as my first game was RIFT. However, I can say this. MMO games were different than what I was told back when I was not playing. I expected one thing coming in and found a more solo-friendly social hub RPGs instead.
I don't think the genre is dead though. As Kickstarter has taught us, there is demand for games that people think are 'niche'. A demand that will make much money.
I think its human nature, the only to stop it is not to have an easy path.
I don't really agree with this when it comes to games. In games with difficulty levels, certainly not everybody plays on easy even though you would finish the game fastest and with the least stress on easy. Games like Dark Souls are quite popular. I think it shows that a lot of people want to be challenged by their games.
Problem with MMOs is because a few people want to play on easy mode that's what they have to default to because they haven't figured out a way to give different levels of challenge to different players (at least in the single player experience of MMOs).
Games like Dark Souls are fun to be sure; but, there is the "right kind of difficulty" and the "wrong kind of difficulty". Many posters here want the wrong kind of difficulty. Games that have less than ideal UIs, limited or no documentation, no tutorial and filled with trivial inconveniences which the player is required to pay attention to.
It is the easiest way to make a game "hard", but it is also the worst way to do it.
The right way to make the game hard, is to make the content hard - challenge the player. Players should be provided with a good UI, well made tutorials and documentation. Make their tools the best they can be to tackle the content, but make that content challenging. Force the players to apply their knowledge and abilities and raise the bar ever so slightly when they advance. Give them new tools and teach them new tricks along the way to keep them interested.
The classic way of making a game.
I totally agree, my one difficulty path does not mean you have to have a crap UI and no tutorials. I was thinking more along the lines of too much instant travel for example. The path would have variable difficulty at different stages, but stick with one method. For example there were two ways of getting PvP gear in SWTOR, and yes you guessed it, everyone took the easy route.
I look back at Asheron's Call 1 and realize that it had so much that pretty much no current game has. And that was back in 1999/2000.
I miss running around in a huge seamless world exploring.
I miss the danger of dying out there in the wilds and having to run back to my corpse to recover my valuables.
I miss the feeling of what we do as players having any impact on an ongoing storyline.
I miss an evolving world where from month to month the landscape changes, cities disappear and appear.
I miss twitch combat where your movement has an impact on wether your enemy hits you with his attacks and where you can effectively use terrain to your advantage.
I miss random loot that feels relevant and broadscoped.
I miss having my own cottage out there in the wilds where I can hang my trophies.
I miss killing monsters for trophies that I can give to a collector of such instead of the stupid and inane "Kill XX mobs quests".
I miss designing my own character with his own skills and attributes.
I miss being able to choose my weapons from my own taste and not because someone said that "that class cant use XXX!"
I miss researching spells on my own.
I am -SO- tired of the cookiecutter corridor-world bullshit thrown at us as Grade AAA MMO games.
And what I am the MOST tired of of is the young gamers of today which seems so INCREDIBLY entitled to everything. This and that MUST be made EASIER!
Personaly, I am hoping for a new world war so we can weed out all the DNA trash sitting around in front of the consoles and their WoW-style games. Thats how disgusted I am at the state of the MMO world. You destroyed my games you dingholes!
What do you expect.. You have all these new players who have only played wow and any features that make the game hard they dismiss. Corpse runs, full pvp, exp loss, longer grind, no Duty Finder all make these people vomit. The worst part is they have never played a game with any of t hese things in it. Yet they say it sounds awful and they want nothing to do with it.
So we keep getting these face roll solo all the way to 50 games..
I have been playing PSo2 which isn't even really an MMO and it has a better community than any of the current mmos. Mostly because half of the stuff is in japanese and is kinda confusing. Its different so you have to learn some new things. It has a pretty long grind 3-4 months to max level. It has missions that can't be done if you don't have a decent team. So you have community.
ike Dark Souls are fun to be sure; but, there is the "right kind of difficulty" and the "wrong kind of difficulty". Many posters here want the wrong kind of difficulty. Games that have less than ideal UIs, limited or no documentation, no tutorial and filled with trivial inconveniences which the player is required to pay attention to.
It is the easiest way to make a game "hard", but it is also the worst way to do it.
The right way to make the game hard, is to make the content hard - challenge the player. Players should be provided with a good UI, well made tutorials and documentation. Make their tools the best they can be to tackle the content, but make that content challenging. Force the players to apply their knowledge and abilities and raise the bar ever so slightly when they advance. Give them new tools and teach them new tricks along the way to keep them interested.
+1 to this although I doubt any devs really seek to make games hard through bad UI or tutorial, those things are usually just bad design (or the game being so complex that it requires a convoluted UI and can't be summarized well in a tutorial - I think this only applies to strategy games though.) .
Things like having no fast travel or levelling slowly are not tedious if the game is designed as you describe. If there's constant danger of dying while running back to town and dying actually matters than it becomes part of the challenging gameplay. If it's just like Guild Wars II with a huge but pretty empty world where there's never any real danger then it's just tedious. Same with leveling - Does every fight force you to know your class and pose a real risk of dying if you do it wrong, or is it just a repetitive face roll grindfest?
ike Dark Souls are fun to be sure; but, there is the "right kind of difficulty" and the "wrong kind of difficulty". Many posters here want the wrong kind of difficulty. Games that have less than ideal UIs, limited or no documentation, no tutorial and filled with trivial inconveniences which the player is required to pay attention to.
It is the easiest way to make a game "hard", but it is also the worst way to do it.
The right way to make the game hard, is to make the content hard - challenge the player. Players should be provided with a good UI, well made tutorials and documentation. Make their tools the best they can be to tackle the content, but make that content challenging. Force the players to apply their knowledge and abilities and raise the bar ever so slightly when they advance. Give them new tools and teach them new tricks along the way to keep them interested.
+1 to this although I doubt any devs really seek to make games hard through bad UI or tutorial, those things are usually just bad design (or the game being so complex that it requires a convoluted UI and can't be summarized well in a tutorial - I think this only applies to strategy games though.) .
Things like having no fast travel or levelling slowly are not tedious if the game is designed as you describe. If there's constant danger of dying while running back to town and dying actually matters than it becomes part of the challenging gameplay. If it's just like Guild Wars II with a huge but pretty empty world where there's never any real danger then it's just tedious. Same with leveling - Does every fight force you to know your class and pose a real risk of dying if you do it wrong, or is it just a repetitive face roll grindfest?
Good luck getting the WoW crew to accept any game where you can get killed running around in open World.
Originally posted by Ashstomper Originally posted by BloodyVikingAgree with OP.I look back at Asheron's Call 1 and realize that it had so much that pretty much no current game has. And that was back in 1999/2000.I miss running around in a huge seamless world exploring.I miss the danger of dying out there in the wilds and having to run back to my corpse to recover my valuables.I miss the feeling of what we do as players having any impact on an ongoing storyline.I miss an evolving world where from month to month the landscape changes, cities disappear and appear.I miss twitch combat where your movement has an impact on wether your enemy hits you with his attacks and where you can effectively use terrain to your advantage.I miss random loot that feels relevant and broadscoped.I miss having my own cottage out there in the wilds where I can hang my trophies.I miss killing monsters for trophies that I can give to a collector of such instead of the stupid and inane "Kill XX mobs quests".I miss designing my own character with his own skills and attributes.I miss being able to choose my weapons from my own taste and not because someone said that "that class cant use XXX!"I miss researching spells on my own.I am -SO- tired of the cookiecutter corridor-world bullshit thrown at us as Grade AAA MMO games.And what I am the MOST tired of of is the young gamers of today which seems so INCREDIBLY entitled to everything. This and that MUST be made EASIER!Personaly, I am hoping for a new world war so we can weed out all the DNA trash sitting around in front of the consoles and their WoW-style games. Thats how disgusted I am at the state of the MMO world. You destroyed my games you dingholes!
^^^ Exactly this!
Yes, this is good. Last paragraph is the best.
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
Originally posted by snoocky Agree to... i gave up on MMO's to. But enjoying the hell out of Skyrim
^This. As long as we still have decent and ambicious single players the world isn't quite lost. Just for me and the MMO market.
Skyrim is even more of a dead end for long term play ... the moment you realise you enter a world of NPC's...
Who wants to show off his stamp collection or dress to ... a puppet ?
The thing about Skyrim is, you have to "make-pretend", in exactly the same way you did as a kid playing with action figures. The world, the npcs, the story, these things provide you with an outline and framework around which you develop your make-pretend fantasy. But the moment this action on the part of your own mind fails you, you suddenly wake up to the sensation of being in an utterly empty, lonely world filled with npcs, just as you described. It is your imagination, when it is working, that prevents this feeling from taking over. (I suspect that kid playing with action figures would have had a similar sensation of the meaninglessness of it all had his or her imagination failed too.)
That is the essence of "role-playing" in my mind, this process of make-believing an epic fantasy for yourself, and it is ever as dependent on your own mind and willingness to engage in this process as it is in concrete substance of the game before you. This is precisely why older games, like Morrowind, despite being graphically much more primitive were just as compelling, because our own minds and imagination filled in the blanks.
In the "old" days of MMORPGs, the magic for me came in large part from the fact that it felt like a collective "make-pretend", a collective role-playing adventure, which in a way was far more powerful than an individual one in the manner you get from playing Skyrim. This is a very rare experience however, at least for me, to have with modern mmorpgs, and I confess I am not really sure why . . . All I can say is that this quintessential dimension of bringing your own imagination to a game -- a process which is required to make a game like Skyrim work in my opinion -- seems terrifically hard to do with modern mmorpgs, whereas it seemed natural during the old school era.
Just curious, but where is your newschool rpg lovers casualisation limit? For many oldschool players the new mmorpgs are too easy, too much on rails, don't offer enough choice and often lack immersion. Funny enough I heard the same from eg WoW fan when talking about the next step of casualisation: games like farmville.
In MMORPGs like farmville you don't need to worry about travelling or even porting. You don't need to worry about not being able to beat any of the content. No other player will be able to harm or grief you. You click a few thingies and get your reward. To me that's the next logical step in the casualisation process we saw ever since titles WoW changed the market into a casual market.
So, when will a game start to become boring for you? Is there a type of casual game where you feel completely underwhelmed? Or do you enjoy games like Farmville more then titles like WoW because they are more casual? I am not trying to troll, I am really interessted in finding out where your personal limits to casualisation lie.
I'm 29 yrs old and I played EQ1 when I was 17 yrs old. I entirely agree with you! I still play mmos , but instead of getting any progress they have gone backwards.
Sad as it is, one can't help but try to enjoy what one has. I hate EQNext's graphical choice, but so be it, I'll still try it out. I'm still waiting on Blizzard's "Titan", and I'll still enjoy every main AAA free to play, or buy to play MMO, if more people chose to go that route, the only ones I don't play are all the free to play mmo's, there are literally thousands...
I miss the old days of everything!! Old Everquest 1, Old Vanilla WoW, Old Everquest 2, and Old Lord of the Rings Online!!
How could a game that was easy to begin with get even more dumbed down and easier??
Back in the beginning there was nothing wrong with WoW, EQ2 and Lotrs. Nothing!! Now, they are all so short and quick, far to easy to level in with minimal effort. I remember when I hear that someone had leveled their cleric from 1 - 85 in 2 days on Everquest 1 several years ago, it was like omg what happened to this game??
It should not be possible to level 1 to 85/100 in 2 days flat ever. FF14:ARR gave out exp like it was candy, and everyone dinged max level in 1 or 2 weeks tops...
Now, that doesn't mean the game is over by a longshot, but it does take away the point of low level content and makes end-game the entire point of a game, and why doesn't the journey matter anymore?
What is the point of a bunch of non-scaling low level instance and quests , that you skip and fly by on the rush zerg to the mythical 'end-game' gear treadmill?
I'm a huge fan of scaling like in The Shadow Oddysey on Everquet 2, and games need to learn how to properly scale difficulties up!!
Oh, Vanguard I need to play more of, but I still hear of players lvling chars up to max level in one or two days flat. So, it seems that leveling is very quick there as well, if you want it to be. Of course, with no expansions and no major game updates or much of a developer crew the game is very abandoned and is hard to keep playing for any long-term veterans.
However, unfortunately, it seems to be the best mmo out there on the market today. Monster actually hurt and kill me!! OMG, I actually die, what a novel concept!
I can't believe how many encounters I can pull and never die on most mmos these days. Just AoE zerg it all down solo... Buy mercenaries even! Only problem is, vanguard has so many bugs/glitches and getting stuck in geography, and flying mounts feel very odd after the smooth polish of Everquest 2 and WoW flying mounts... There's a lot of things they needed popularity and money to fix. Expansions they could and should have had, the potential that was there, and now EQNext is just wasting that!!
Vanguard: The Saga of Heroes, is the true spiritual successor to Everquest 1, but it needed a lot of money to make it work. Way, way , way, more developers and programmers, way more effort and time, way more in the item shop even for people to buy. It suprises me, how the market shop, almost never gets anything added to it, more items = more money, but without enough of a team, they can't add much at all for anyone to buy and support the game with!
Why can't they think more about a Vanguard sequel with money and resources, a full development team on today's technology, than going the cheesy route EQNext is appearing to travel? Of course, I could be wrong, I haven't seen the game in beta or anything yet, it is probably a lot of fun, it just lost all its sense of realism.
Originally posted by snoocky Agree to... i gave up on MMO's to. But enjoying the hell out of Skyrim
^This. As long as we still have decent and ambicious single players the world isn't quite lost. Just for me and the MMO market.
Skyrim is even more of a dead end for long term play ... the moment you realise you enter a world of NPC's...
Who wants to show off his stamp collection or dress to ... a puppet ?
How about you stop showing off and just play the game for the sake of playing the game and having a good time? Dick-waving is not impressive.
For someone who claims to not be impressed with "dick-waving", you certainly spend an unusual amount of time talking about it. Hmmmmmmm...
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb
Tired of lazy and/or scamming developers. (usually both)
Maybe im just getting old. What happened to the addictiveness, the spark, the magic, the difficulty and the competition. Every single game is the exact same bullshit. They are all one month wonders with zero longevity designed for someone with the intelligence of a gnat overpopulated with people that think they are genious. What the hell happened? I remember 10-12 years ago just day dreaming on what was ahead and what this genre would become. I remember wondering how amazed we would all be. I remember wondering about how amazing the virtual worlds would be that we would all explore. I remember real difficulty and the penalties if you died or failed. The comraderie and teamwork. I remember real communities. Real friendships and relationships that carried over off the screen. Now its just a huge cesspool no matter what game you enter its total rudeness and hate.
We should be treated with more respect. We spend thousands and thousands of dollars on games and keeping our systems up to spec to stay on top and its all just full of regret now. Total waste of time and money. Tell me a game thats worth the time and i will explain how ive played it and the problems it has.
I work 40-60 hours per week, i take very, very good care of my family but i still have the night. I mostly drink beer, read forums and wonder what the fuck happened.
Sorry for the rant.
Definitely agree.... However with an increase in sandbox MMO's on the horizon things look good, that maybe soon we will have an MMO worth playing again....
UO,Shadowbane,SWG,Darkfall,MO,Wurm Online,Secretworld,GW,GW2,PotBS,LotR,Atlantica Online,WWII Online,WoT,Battlestar Galactica,Planetside2,Perpetuum,Fallen Earth,Runescape,WoW,Eve,Xsylon,Dragon Prophet, Salem
Not sure how many people here are old enough to remember when the first Nintendo hit the US...but quickly after it hit the market was over-flooded with an abundance of crap games and the gaming industry as a whole rock-bottomed.
The market was flooded because everyone wanted a piece of the cash cow that was gaming.
We are in the exact same scenario right now with MMOs and gaming in general. There are 3-4 models that have been proven to make money...and hundreds of companies and corporations are trying to figure out how to milk money out of those models.
One day, someone or some company will create a new model...something we've never seen or tried before....but it's going to be a good long while.
The problem is that good games are made by gamers that want to make the best games possible. Unfortunately, the gaming industry is no longer a place where small indie companies like that can have the freedom to build what they want.
If their idea isn't to copy WoW or any other generic themepark, they will get no funding from banks or investors...and then they are turned to kick-starter....which I personally think is a scam/fad that will die out relatively soon (hopefully).
Tired of lazy and/or scamming developers. (usually both)
Maybe im just getting old. What happened to the addictiveness, the spark, the magic, the difficulty and the competition. Every single game is the exact same bullshit. They are all one month wonders with zero longevity designed for someone with the intelligence of a gnat overpopulated with people that think they are genious. What the hell happened? I remember 10-12 years ago just day dreaming on what was ahead and what this genre would become. I remember wondering how amazed we would all be. I remember wondering about how amazing the virtual worlds would be that we would all explore. I remember real difficulty and the penalties if you died or failed. The comraderie and teamwork. I remember real communities. Real friendships and relationships that carried over off the screen. Now its just a huge cesspool no matter what game you enter its total rudeness and hate.
We should be treated with more respect. We spend thousands and thousands of dollars on games and keeping our systems up to spec to stay on top and its all just full of regret now. Total waste of time and money. Tell me a game thats worth the time and i will explain how ive played it and the problems it has.
I work 40-60 hours per week, i take very, very good care of my family but i still have the night. I mostly drink beer, read forums and wonder what the fuck happened.
Sorry for the rant.
Yeah the mass appeal of one type of MMO caused the printing press to chase a piece of the pie. There are glimmers of hope on the horizon, at least seem like it. You have to count at least five years forward from when it was clear copying WoW wasn't going to produce the payday hoped for. That was about 2010 IMO so about 2015+ is when we should really see the "next batch" of MMOs. And as was said already, MORPGs are coming into their own as well.
As far as how hard the content is... that is farther point of hope unfortunately but still there non the less.
There have been so many flop games(I count retention rates,player base, bugs,polish, content, features) from both themepark and sandbox. The sandbox tittles are all Indie shittastic games that are underfunded, lack clear goals, and lazy developers. The themeparks are just rehashed garbage chasing after hte WoW dollar.
Scamstarter looks like it a new way to take players money without the middle man; I hope I am wrong. However a few promising titles look to be on the horizon with them. SoE with Eq-next looks like it could be promising, but at any rate could usher in more AAA sandbox mmorpgs, but more than likely the game itself will be horrible and ruin the franchise; like they did with Planetside 2.
----------------
The thing is at least for myself and I think many veteran players is; we don't want outdated combat. I believe we want fps magic/range and mount and blade/Age of chivarly melee combat. Also we want features most old sandbox mmorpgs had such as; housing, territory control, full loot, meaningful impact on the virtual world, great crafting, being able to skill and use items you want, with no cookie cutting builds, ect ect.
I think most of us however don't want extensively long grinds to the point of taking years; but we shouldn't have a character completely max in 3 months before expansions, either. WE WANT NEW STYLE FPS COMBAT, BUT OLD SANDBOX FEATURES/CONTENT, IMMERSION, AND GAME IMPACT.
Darkfall online was the closet to that I seemed to get; but the problems with the game, lack of sandbox and incompetent developers, along with the failure of Unholy wars made me quit. So here I am playing Old school runescape(Sucks i have to grind), until something good comes out.
Comments
Skyrim is even more of a dead end for long term play ... the moment you realise you enter a world of NPC's...
Who wants to show off his stamp collection or dress to ... a puppet ?
MMORPG's are they way they are because the new generations are lazy...EVERYONE even 5 year old KIDS have cellphones...EVERYONE has access to the internet...EVERYONE is given a new car when they get there drivers...everything is soo easy and handed to them now a days they expect the same lazy routine gameplay in every mmo....why should the kids leave home if they got it good there?
This genrea is stuck in a infiniate loop....introducing "new" ideas that really arnt new at all...you cant improve on crap...and you cant change the lazyness of america.
I am late to the MMO crowd as my first game was RIFT. However, I can say this. MMO games were different than what I was told back when I was not playing. I expected one thing coming in and found a more solo-friendly social hub RPGs instead.
I don't think the genre is dead though. As Kickstarter has taught us, there is demand for games that people think are 'niche'. A demand that will make much money.
I totally agree, my one difficulty path does not mean you have to have a crap UI and no tutorials. I was thinking more along the lines of too much instant travel for example. The path would have variable difficulty at different stages, but stick with one method. For example there were two ways of getting PvP gear in SWTOR, and yes you guessed it, everyone took the easy route.
^^^ Exactly this!
What do you expect.. You have all these new players who have only played wow and any features that make the game hard they dismiss. Corpse runs, full pvp, exp loss, longer grind, no Duty Finder all make these people vomit. The worst part is they have never played a game with any of t hese things in it. Yet they say it sounds awful and they want nothing to do with it.
So we keep getting these face roll solo all the way to 50 games..
I have been playing PSo2 which isn't even really an MMO and it has a better community than any of the current mmos. Mostly because half of the stuff is in japanese and is kinda confusing. Its different so you have to learn some new things. It has a pretty long grind 3-4 months to max level. It has missions that can't be done if you don't have a decent team. So you have community.
+1 to this although I doubt any devs really seek to make games hard through bad UI or tutorial, those things are usually just bad design (or the game being so complex that it requires a convoluted UI and can't be summarized well in a tutorial - I think this only applies to strategy games though.) .
Things like having no fast travel or levelling slowly are not tedious if the game is designed as you describe. If there's constant danger of dying while running back to town and dying actually matters than it becomes part of the challenging gameplay. If it's just like Guild Wars II with a huge but pretty empty world where there's never any real danger then it's just tedious. Same with leveling - Does every fight force you to know your class and pose a real risk of dying if you do it wrong, or is it just a repetitive face roll grindfest?
Good luck getting the WoW crew to accept any game where you can get killed running around in open World.
Yes, this is good. Last paragraph is the best.
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
The thing about Skyrim is, you have to "make-pretend", in exactly the same way you did as a kid playing with action figures. The world, the npcs, the story, these things provide you with an outline and framework around which you develop your make-pretend fantasy. But the moment this action on the part of your own mind fails you, you suddenly wake up to the sensation of being in an utterly empty, lonely world filled with npcs, just as you described. It is your imagination, when it is working, that prevents this feeling from taking over. (I suspect that kid playing with action figures would have had a similar sensation of the meaninglessness of it all had his or her imagination failed too.)
That is the essence of "role-playing" in my mind, this process of make-believing an epic fantasy for yourself, and it is ever as dependent on your own mind and willingness to engage in this process as it is in concrete substance of the game before you. This is precisely why older games, like Morrowind, despite being graphically much more primitive were just as compelling, because our own minds and imagination filled in the blanks.
In the "old" days of MMORPGs, the magic for me came in large part from the fact that it felt like a collective "make-pretend", a collective role-playing adventure, which in a way was far more powerful than an individual one in the manner you get from playing Skyrim. This is a very rare experience however, at least for me, to have with modern mmorpgs, and I confess I am not really sure why . . . All I can say is that this quintessential dimension of bringing your own imagination to a game -- a process which is required to make a game like Skyrim work in my opinion -- seems terrifically hard to do with modern mmorpgs, whereas it seemed natural during the old school era.
Just curious, but where is your newschool rpg lovers casualisation limit? For many oldschool players the new mmorpgs are too easy, too much on rails, don't offer enough choice and often lack immersion. Funny enough I heard the same from eg WoW fan when talking about the next step of casualisation: games like farmville.
In MMORPGs like farmville you don't need to worry about travelling or even porting. You don't need to worry about not being able to beat any of the content. No other player will be able to harm or grief you. You click a few thingies and get your reward. To me that's the next logical step in the casualisation process we saw ever since titles WoW changed the market into a casual market.
So, when will a game start to become boring for you? Is there a type of casual game where you feel completely underwhelmed? Or do you enjoy games like Farmville more then titles like WoW because they are more casual? I am not trying to troll, I am really interessted in finding out where your personal limits to casualisation lie.
You are not alone, I too kind of no longer find the motivation for MMOs.
Been there, done that, moved on.
Vanguard was a great MMO, but I lack the motivation to continue playing.
You are not alone, I too kind of no longer find the motivation for MMOs.
Been there, done that, moved on.
Vanguard was a great MMO, but I lack the motivation to continue playing.
How about you stop showing off and just play the game for the sake of playing the game and having a good time? Dick-waving is not impressive.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
I'm 29 yrs old and I played EQ1 when I was 17 yrs old. I entirely agree with you! I still play mmos , but instead of getting any progress they have gone backwards.
Sad as it is, one can't help but try to enjoy what one has. I hate EQNext's graphical choice, but so be it, I'll still try it out. I'm still waiting on Blizzard's "Titan", and I'll still enjoy every main AAA free to play, or buy to play MMO, if more people chose to go that route, the only ones I don't play are all the free to play mmo's, there are literally thousands...
I miss the old days of everything!! Old Everquest 1, Old Vanilla WoW, Old Everquest 2, and Old Lord of the Rings Online!!
How could a game that was easy to begin with get even more dumbed down and easier??
Back in the beginning there was nothing wrong with WoW, EQ2 and Lotrs. Nothing!! Now, they are all so short and quick, far to easy to level in with minimal effort. I remember when I hear that someone had leveled their cleric from 1 - 85 in 2 days on Everquest 1 several years ago, it was like omg what happened to this game??
It should not be possible to level 1 to 85/100 in 2 days flat ever. FF14:ARR gave out exp like it was candy, and everyone dinged max level in 1 or 2 weeks tops...
Now, that doesn't mean the game is over by a longshot, but it does take away the point of low level content and makes end-game the entire point of a game, and why doesn't the journey matter anymore?
What is the point of a bunch of non-scaling low level instance and quests , that you skip and fly by on the rush zerg to the mythical 'end-game' gear treadmill?
I'm a huge fan of scaling like in The Shadow Oddysey on Everquet 2, and games need to learn how to properly scale difficulties up!!
Oh, Vanguard I need to play more of, but I still hear of players lvling chars up to max level in one or two days flat. So, it seems that leveling is very quick there as well, if you want it to be. Of course, with no expansions and no major game updates or much of a developer crew the game is very abandoned and is hard to keep playing for any long-term veterans.
However, unfortunately, it seems to be the best mmo out there on the market today. Monster actually hurt and kill me!! OMG, I actually die, what a novel concept!
I can't believe how many encounters I can pull and never die on most mmos these days. Just AoE zerg it all down solo... Buy mercenaries even! Only problem is, vanguard has so many bugs/glitches and getting stuck in geography, and flying mounts feel very odd after the smooth polish of Everquest 2 and WoW flying mounts... There's a lot of things they needed popularity and money to fix. Expansions they could and should have had, the potential that was there, and now EQNext is just wasting that!!
Vanguard: The Saga of Heroes, is the true spiritual successor to Everquest 1, but it needed a lot of money to make it work. Way, way , way, more developers and programmers, way more effort and time, way more in the item shop even for people to buy. It suprises me, how the market shop, almost never gets anything added to it, more items = more money, but without enough of a team, they can't add much at all for anyone to buy and support the game with!
Why can't they think more about a Vanguard sequel with money and resources, a full development team on today's technology, than going the cheesy route EQNext is appearing to travel? Of course, I could be wrong, I haven't seen the game in beta or anything yet, it is probably a lot of fun, it just lost all its sense of realism.
OP i feel the same
For someone who claims to not be impressed with "dick-waving", you certainly spend an unusual amount of time talking about it. Hmmmmmmm...
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb
Definitely agree.... However with an increase in sandbox MMO's on the horizon things look good, that maybe soon we will have an MMO worth playing again....
UO,Shadowbane,SWG,Darkfall,MO,Wurm Online,Secretworld,GW,GW2,PotBS,LotR,Atlantica Online,WWII Online,WoT,Battlestar Galactica,Planetside2,Perpetuum,Fallen Earth,Runescape,WoW,Eve,Xsylon,Dragon Prophet, Salem
Not sure how many people here are old enough to remember when the first Nintendo hit the US...but quickly after it hit the market was over-flooded with an abundance of crap games and the gaming industry as a whole rock-bottomed.
The market was flooded because everyone wanted a piece of the cash cow that was gaming.
We are in the exact same scenario right now with MMOs and gaming in general. There are 3-4 models that have been proven to make money...and hundreds of companies and corporations are trying to figure out how to milk money out of those models.
One day, someone or some company will create a new model...something we've never seen or tried before....but it's going to be a good long while.
The problem is that good games are made by gamers that want to make the best games possible. Unfortunately, the gaming industry is no longer a place where small indie companies like that can have the freedom to build what they want.
If their idea isn't to copy WoW or any other generic themepark, they will get no funding from banks or investors...and then they are turned to kick-starter....which I personally think is a scam/fad that will die out relatively soon (hopefully).
Blame it on WoW.
The rest couldn't touch it and you were hyped over your ears for 8 years to find something better.
And all you got were unpolished scams and promisses that were never even realistic.
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Simple.
Yeah the mass appeal of one type of MMO caused the printing press to chase a piece of the pie. There are glimmers of hope on the horizon, at least seem like it. You have to count at least five years forward from when it was clear copying WoW wasn't going to produce the payday hoped for. That was about 2010 IMO so about 2015+ is when we should really see the "next batch" of MMOs. And as was said already, MORPGs are coming into their own as well.
As far as how hard the content is... that is farther point of hope unfortunately but still there non the less.
There have been so many flop games(I count retention rates,player base, bugs,polish, content, features) from both themepark and sandbox. The sandbox tittles are all Indie shittastic games that are underfunded, lack clear goals, and lazy developers. The themeparks are just rehashed garbage chasing after hte WoW dollar.
Scamstarter looks like it a new way to take players money without the middle man; I hope I am wrong. However a few promising titles look to be on the horizon with them. SoE with Eq-next looks like it could be promising, but at any rate could usher in more AAA sandbox mmorpgs, but more than likely the game itself will be horrible and ruin the franchise; like they did with Planetside 2.
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The thing is at least for myself and I think many veteran players is; we don't want outdated combat. I believe we want fps magic/range and mount and blade/Age of chivarly melee combat. Also we want features most old sandbox mmorpgs had such as; housing, territory control, full loot, meaningful impact on the virtual world, great crafting, being able to skill and use items you want, with no cookie cutting builds, ect ect.
I think most of us however don't want extensively long grinds to the point of taking years; but we shouldn't have a character completely max in 3 months before expansions, either. WE WANT NEW STYLE FPS COMBAT, BUT OLD SANDBOX FEATURES/CONTENT, IMMERSION, AND GAME IMPACT.
Darkfall online was the closet to that I seemed to get; but the problems with the game, lack of sandbox and incompetent developers, along with the failure of Unholy wars made me quit. So here I am playing Old school runescape(Sucks i have to grind), until something good comes out.
MurderHerd