in the past MMORPGs were made up of the following 4 pillars:
-community
-crafting
-exploration
-progression
over the past few years the community pillar has been lacking or downright ignored in MMORPGs. by community you should understand in-game features that promote and sustain a healthy community. such features could include player skill-interdependancy, cooperation, downtime, player-driven economy of goods and services, useful non-combat professions, player housing and cities with player management, encouraging grouping etc. etc. a solid and working community system is essential to the RPG aspect of an mmo. simply put, RP doesn't begin to exist in MMOFPS or suchlikes.
bioware is selling the "4th pillar" to be "story". which is all fair if it were not for the fact they they conviniently forgot about "community". or so it would seem since they have yet to release any features which apply to this category.
so for people who have played MMOs for some time, the notion of having an online game with thousands of people without a common goal or purpose, or without the need for each other is not considered as a proper MMORPG, but rather a MMOSPG.
That was an awesome fairy tale. I love hearing about the lives of people who lived eons ago.
Fast forward to the present and there is only 1 pillar, Progression (exploration is dead, crafting exists solely to pad progression, community has been dead for the past half decade). And quite frankly this single pillar structure seems to have done wonders for WoW.
And yes I realize there might be a few MMOs that don't follow the WoW mold, but with the exception of EVE they are all relatively inconsequential.
As the OP stated, most MMOs are almost entirely solo efforts these days.
Ok.. so they're a solo effort. Where the hell does that say that the only pillar is progression? Thats a load of crap born from the WoW mindset. Its time to grow out of it.
herein lies the issue.
you chose to believe that people who consider this game to be a single player online experience are jumping to conclusions for there will be more information about the game to come.
other people feel its only natural to have reached this conclusion since all bioware has been hypeing since they announced the game has been "story".
Comments
That was an awesome fairy tale. I love hearing about the lives of people who lived eons ago.
Fast forward to the present and there is only 1 pillar, Progression (exploration is dead, crafting exists solely to pad progression, community has been dead for the past half decade). And quite frankly this single pillar structure seems to have done wonders for WoW.
And yes I realize there might be a few MMOs that don't follow the WoW mold, but with the exception of EVE they are all relatively inconsequential.
As the OP stated, most MMOs are almost entirely solo efforts these days.
Ok.. so they're a solo effort. Where the hell does that say that the only pillar is progression? Thats a load of crap born from the WoW mindset. Its time to grow out of it.
herein lies the issue.
you chose to believe that people who consider this game to be a single player online experience are jumping to conclusions for there will be more information about the game to come.
other people feel its only natural to have reached this conclusion since all bioware has been hypeing since they announced the game has been "story".
time will tell.
This is what's known as "jumping to conclusions."