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2004 v. 2014: The State of the MMO Genre
Zaiel12
Member Posts: 12
List of MMOs back in the day.
Dark Age of Camelot, Ultima Online, EVE Online, Everquest(2), World of Warcraft, Asheron's Call, Star War Galaxies, Final Fantasy XI, Phantasy Star Online, City of Heroes,Anarchy Online, Ryzom, Ragnarok Online, Linage 2 etc..
Coming into the turn on the millennium we were creating a new genre of gaming. The vision of bringing your table top Dungeons and Dragon games and your text based MUDs into elaborate 3D graphical adventures. And oh boy was it amazing. Most of the games I mentioned need no introduction. We know the everlasting impression Ultima Online will have on the genre and sandbox aspect of it. DAoC is the PVP king. EVE is still going strong for its massive space battles and complex economy. Everquest players have stories of adventures for a lifetime. Final Fantasy XI brought in the JRPG element and one of the first huge license.
Adventure was hard, and the loot was a true reward. The battles were massive, and nothing but skill could beat them. Player interaction was real. You had to earn and fight for everything, even that one level you gained could have been days..weeks..months in the earning. World of Warcraft was good!
2014
Fast forward ten years.
Dungeons and Dragons Online, Lord of the Rings Online, Rift, Warhammer Age of Reckoning, Star Wars the Old Republic, Age of Conan, The Secret Word, Final Fantasy XIV, World of Warcraft, TERA, Guild Wars (2), Star Trek Onine, City of Champions, DC Universe Online, NeverWinter, Defiance, etc..
Tens years later of what I would consider the Gold Age for the MMO, we are treated to lack luster huge title games that fail to deliver. World of Warcraft turned into a money machine, games weren't released for months before they were dead RIP Asheron's Call 2, Matrix Online. Some game hung in there by the skin of their teeth like DDO, LotRO, WAR, swtor, AoC, TSW. They player base were full on the first month launch crowd, people buying it retail and not resubscribing cause other options were betters. Games were rush to the finish line cause the MMO could make the big bucks. Final Fantasy XIV the most famous of these. Lets launch a half assed game from Square Enix a successor one of the giant MMO game of all time. SWTOR killed Star Wars Galaxies and instead we lost a great sandbox game to a single player game were you could watch other people play around you. Combat got a upgrade like TERA and Neverwinter but ill stick with tab targeting if combat is consisting for minimal ability usage. Guild Wars 2 killed the subscription period, it also ruined what the MMO was about community and the urge to keep people playing.
So here is my rant, its plain and simple. Today a MMO releases and we sit here and ask how long until it fails, and then months down the road we see these go free to play, or their current free to play models get overhauled. It is in a sad state. The Developer doesn't consider the enormous niche market out there that wants to play a 2014 version of Dark Age of Camelot or Everquest. The Publisher want fat wallets. They see World of Warcraft works so they copy/paste the format to their creation. IF THIS IS THE STATE OF THE CURRENT MMO WHY IS NEARLY EVERY GAME I MENTIONED UNDER 2004 STILL SUBSCRIPTION BASED, MAKING CASH, HAVING LIVING BREATH ALBIET SMALL COMMUNITIES.
These games coming out are garbage. We need a truly great MMO to be made.
Comments
It's because we all have ADD so we don't stick with a game for a long enough time or we forget and it falls off the face of the planet. I do agree though that the MMO's that have been released recently and boring and fragile. The launch of FF14 was horrendous but it seems that some followers kept in touch with the game and it's because more successful. In my opinion you need to be dedicated to a game in order to love it or you'll get bored and move onto another one.
What happens when you log off your characters????.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQhfhnjYMk
Dark Age of Camelot
Main Game: Eldevin (Plat0nic)
2nd Game: Path of Exile (Platonic Hate)
IF THIS IS THE STATE OF THE CURRENT MMO WHY IS NEARLY EVERY GAME I MENTIONED UNDER 2004 STILL SUBSCRIPTION BASED, MAKING CASH
I like how only 4 of the games in the 2004 list still have subs only whereas 3 of the ones in 2014 list have subs and yet he makes this claim. Also, love how he included WoW in the 2014 list again to take a piss at but EvE mysteriously disappeared.
Your point about ADD is interesting.....I think it's partially correct, and I'd like to build on that...
One of the issues is the new MMO audience / player base. Blizzard made an explicit effort, with WOW, to lower the learning curve of traditional MMOs, and remove many of the barriers to entry that kept casual gamers out of games like UO, EQ & DAOC.
Keep in mind, the folks that were playing the "old school" MMOs were generally older, and specifically sought out the kind of gaming experience MMOs provided for (long term, high commitment gaming experience). People playing UO were not also moonlighting in single player console games, or other casual entertainment.
The massive MMO audience that we have now, playing casual MMOs, also get their entertainment from other casual sources (social media games, mobile games, single player games). The former CEO of Blizzard Activision said a few years ago that WOW was in competition with games like Farmville. He wasn't saying the games were similar, but that the target audience of WOW & the target audience of causal entertainment is similar.
So I don't think it is ADD necessarily, but a MUCH different audience that isn't beholden to one primary source of entertainment. Again, partially due to MMOs going casual, but also because there is FAR more competition in the market.
Another possible factor (which is sort of related to new MMOs being more casual based) is the community. I played Ultima Online & Lineage 2 a few years longer than I would have otherwise if I hadn't made real connections & friendships with people in the game. If I were playing those games solo (relatively speaking), I would have been board to tears and quit much sooner.
Very true....and I think WOW is a good example. As I mentioned previously, the head of Blizzard / Activision make a statement about WOW having to compete with Farmville.
As WOW began to age, and subscriber base starts to move on, the direction these games have taken has been a race to the bottom, in terms of making things more casual, streamlined, and palatable for more folks with less time to spend in game.
Another reason we haven't seen more traditional type MMOs is because the audience is just too small to support the kind of production & polish that gamers come to expect from MMO games.
If it takes 100 million to pay for a MMO that has a spit shine polish, sophisticated network engineering (phasing, cross server queues, etc) and world class orchestrated soundtrack (all things to help differentiate themself from the competition), you'd never be able to break even, muchless generate a significant profit if your game appeals to a niche audience of a couple hundred thousand (instead of the more mainstream casual MMO audience of 10s of millions)
If those golden mmorpg are so good, you should still be playing right now.
Guess what mmorpg people are still playing right now? World of warcraft.
C'mon....try harder than that.
If EA did not fundamentally change the soul of Ultima Online, and the community was still there, I'd still be playing.
If Sony did not fundamentally change the soul of SWG, and the community was still there, I'd still be playing.
If NCSoft did not run Lineage 2 into the ground, and left it to the China farmers, I'd still be playing.
In all of those cases, the publisher significantly changed (or neglected major issues) in their games, due to market pressure & perceived opportunity to tap into a larger playerbase.
I'll also point to the millions of players that are playing classic / retro versions (as private servers) of many of those games. Unfortunately, in most cases, those experiences end up not meeting the mark because of poor support, poor server performance / uptime, and frequent wipes from the indie developers maintaining those servers.
What millions of players lol? As far as i know, the divine SWG EMU has been known to peak at 2K players. lol Millions playing on private servers.
The people who want to play these classic MMOs are a minority and a very niche one at that. Don't kid yourself. The reason devs don't make them is because they know this. Even SWG in it's peak was way way below 500K subs (the lowest point of subs of the "bad" MMO SWTOR). Just drop this topic.
Repopulation and EQN (upto an extent) are your only chance to show your point about the demand for Sandbox style MMOs.
You forget to tell that some ready play the golden game for many years , there are limit how long a chew gum can be chewed , though you can chew it more than new product sweet candy , it still limit of time before it lost sweet taste.
World of Warcraft released in 2004, to date we have seen four major expansions. Each one raised level cap, and added much more content. When the new content came into the game the old content became nothing. Raids from level 70 became nothing, the gear you worked so hard for years to earn was replaced by stuff you would other wise throw out. The old content serves no purpose in the game, other then leveling, maybe a few mounts and pets, and nostalgia. Final Fantasy XI release state side 2003 and has seen much more major expansions and add ons however; old content was salvaged. Just because Dynamis's drops became dated there was still use to go in, even if it was 3 people instead of 60. Same goes for EVE, sure you get 2 free expansions yearly, but they add to the game world not take away. Each expansion from WoW has taken away just as much content that it has added. So if you really know what you are talking about you know that Vanilla WoW and Mist of Pandaria WoW are two entirely different beasts. Okay still the same game, same cities, same boring ass classes, and same mediocrity that plagued it from the start. But the stupid shit like earning your mount at level 40 and 60 for massive amounts of gold at the time, or doing class quests on druids to get your shapeshift abilities. All the stuff that made Vanilla WoW the success it was is gone in the wayside to accommodate the casual gamer with $15 in their pocket each month.
Sorry but the idea the "millions" are playing on private servers is just ridiculous. I don't have exact numbers obviously but from what I've heard the most popular private servers get maybe 1000 people each playing at once. That's why most companies turn a blind eye to them and don't put up legacy servers of their games themselves. It's not worth their investment.
A lot of gamers are shallow and follow the herd from game to game. If SWG or those other old games had ever been really popular with a huge group of players they wouldn't have been changed. The reality is companies often change games to try to attract new gamers because the many of the old ones have left. Sure companies often also were affected by WoW syndrome and ruined perfectly good games in a vain attempt to get millions of subs but the fact that many players were leaving their games to go to WoW or some other newer game only encouraged them to do that.
Sucks for the people that really loved that gameplay and stuck with those games but don't make it out that companies sabotaged their own hugely popular games just for the lulz.
Lesson is if you really love a game think twice about unsubbing just because some new shiny is out.
I never said anything about traditional sandbox MMOs being in higher demand than modern casual MMOs.
It's common sense....there are more people that have real life stuff that get in the way of long gaming sessions (school, homework, work, cook dinner, walk the dog, etc) than there are folks that are able to dedicate several hour gaming sessions to MMO games that do require more time commitment (traditional MMOs)
I'm just pointing out that there IS a void (and an opportunity) in that market...even if it is only several hundred subs. CCP seems to be doing quite well with EVE, and its approx 300k subs.
Why? Because they kept their costs down & understand who their target audience is.
To the point of the millions playing private servers, there are. To be clear, I'm not saying any single private server has millions of subs....I'm saying in total (Lineage 2, WOW, UO) they amount to the 7 figures....with most of the top servers for each of those games sporting 2-3k unique logins a day. (despite all the negative issues with private servers I listed above)
The SWG private server project is something entirely different than the private servers for L2, WOW & UO. They had to build the SWG private server nearly from scratch (so they wouldn't get sued), enlisting amateur developers, over the course of several years of development...with all of the features still not in place.
So if EVE can make it on 300k subs....and the private server population for those 3 games are in the 7 figures (total).....there is plenty of opportunity for a well designed game that appeals to those traditional type of MMORPGs.
Because changing the level and gold at which you get a mount equates to adding whole new maps and classes and quests, right? Just further shows how bad your comparison is. Maybe that's why it's being ignored by everyone except for a bunch of us.
Lol again with the 7 figure numbers. Okay, i will humour you. Point me to a source then which proves your 7 figure point.
I will be impressed if you can even point me to a 6 figure source, let alone the 7 which you are saying.
Thats the beauty of dynamic player driven endgame content, which was more prevalent in the older MMOs. Because the human element is unpredictable, its never the quite the same over time...and keeps things relatively fresh. Also, the tighter knit communities in these types of games keep things interesting enough to hang around.
The developer driven model (see WOW) on the other hand DOES lose it's flavor quite fast, and requires constant work on the developers part to crank out new dungeons, zones, quests to hold people's attention...but face diminishing returns once players figure out the quests they are running at level 90 are the same they were running at lvl 9.
Its fine to like the older MMOs. But they were not superior games - just different.
Modern MMO = Old School MMO - gear gated end game - level grinding - random chance of death (wandering NPCs) - abusive rare mob hunting - crappy graphics - forced grouping.
Its basically the same game experience - its just been streamlined nowadays. You might not like it but developers think there is no market for the oldstyle game. Since Pantheon hasn't even made its kick start goals - I tend to agree.
Computer science and computers are very similar to how they were 10 years ago - so we essentially get the same kind of games across genres. They just have a fancier sheen of paint and sometimes they are streamlined. If this is a problem you will have to find a different hobby..
There are two problems with your rant.
1) You consider it a genre, not a platform. When looking at MMO as a platform, the evolution, diversity and breadth becomes far more evident.
2) You create a rather circular argument as you only look at the MMORPG portion of MMOs and then rant that they are all the same.
You also present the disposition of the people on these forums as if they were any indication of the majority. With that, you present the all too common assumption that all these new MMOs are failing, when most of the new NA/EU titles are doing rather well here and the Eastern titles are kicking ass over there.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Arguing this point with you is not worth my time to provide you verifiable proof. This is purely anticdotal, based on my experiences over the course of years playing several different private servers for those games.
Quite frankly, I don't care if you agree with me...I'm just adding my two cents in on this topic. I'll cede the point that 7 figures might be on the optimistic side, but the point still remains. There are enough people interested in classic versions of these games (specifically the classic MMO play style) that give me confidence that there is enough people to support a well built traditional MMO.
The reason EA & WOW have turned down launching classic servers is because of the cost related with having to maintain different versions of the game....these publishers aren't just working on WOW, UO & L2.