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We are not locusts - Why the MMO genre must re-invent itself
Elikal
Member UncommonPosts: 7,912
WHAT IS A FAILED MMO?
In these days when we discuss another new MMO, words of "fail" and "downfall" are used, while others address the issue to be no issue at all, branding the critics haters. As so often, the truth lies inbetween.
Recently here and otherwise the idea came up that we gamers are like locusts, consuming content in ultra speed and thus ruining all MMOs. I think even Isabelle Parsley here didn't mean to blame the players, but I still feel the need to defend us a bit. I know I have lots of time and I spent much of it in SWTOR. So I *am* sort of the target audience of this critique. Partially this is so, as I myself have said already, because MMOs have become populated by an over average degree by people with less money and more time. And no, I don't mean to critizise anyone, I am just seeing that as a fact, a mosaic piece of the overall image.
Now many of the recent MMOs certainly can't be called failed, because that would imply a massive fall like in the case of Vanguard, Dark & Light or Tabula Rasa. Age of Conan, Warhammer and SWTOR are not failed games. And it certainly is the case that a lot of people enjoy(ed) these MMOs. But the reality remains that AoC, WAR and apparently SWTOR failed to capitalize in the expected grand and long lasting triumph. Not necessarily dethroning WOW, but all these MMOs have quick fall from grace to a relatively mediocre level very fast, which stands in stark contrast with the high profile companies, the money involved and the famous IP. In other words: these games jumped as tigers and landed as alley cats. Maybe a nice alley cat, but the contrast remains. In this, SWTOR is just the most recent example, although we may still see how it goes, I guess they can't hold their 1-2+ million subs aspirations at all! And whether or not you like SWTOR, it remains a fact that the other three pillars besides "story" are just very, very mediocre. And with EA, Bioware and Lucasarts, with so many years, so many people involved and SO much money, it is just astounding.
One of the things in all the previous "problem-MMOs", shall we say, is this: the issues were on the table way before release. In all cases of either mediocre performance or outright fail, there were enough people who brought the issues on the table. So if we see this, it is the development process itself which needs to be revised! Whatever the usual "dos and don't dos" in gaming companies involve, *something* in the paradigm how MMOs are developed must be FUNDAMENTALLY amiss, if so many years and so many MMOs lead to the same result: strawfire hype.
ARE WE LOCUSTS?
Now of course we as consumers are partially to blame. In a capitalist society that is always the case. If a product has issues, don't buy it. I recall well the time when one big paradigm shift happend. I was in EQ2, the EQ follower, and it was then the critique began to arise. People attacked SOE for "forced grouping". I never had heard that term in my time in SWG, which I had played before. Grouping was the essence of MMOs. But suddenly this term arose, banding things as "forced" and thus unwanted. And this idea began to spread that formerly unquestioned hardships were doubted. It was a sort of a "religious crisis": people stopped believing in "atonement through pain". And once this avalance had started, it was too late for the pebbles to vote. (Sorry to Kosh to steal his quote.^^)
Today we are at the lower end of this avalanche, we realize, that all those grindy hardships taken out of games have led to an accleration. And that is where I think we are not to blame to be locusts. We consume as fast as we are allowed, that is the nature of things. People can't blame us gamers, if we rush through games, if there is nothing inside that invites us to linger! SWTOR is just so extremely symptomatic for this. The often dead, sterile worlds, the lack of the many "small & animated things", the lack of real social hubs, the entire focus on story not as 4th pillar, but as the ONLY pillar. It's like with a monocultural farming, which usually invites locusts, it's not the locusts who are to blame, it's those who put up the monocultural farms! Or on our case, the developers. Sure, we gamers asked for soloability, for easier gameplay, for being more casualfriendly. But it is the task of a game company and of professional designers not just blindly to listen to customers, but to keep the system as a whole in mind. Of course customers have tons of wishes, and devs are advised to listen to that, but not blindly!
WAS THE PAST BETTER?
Now the point is: we can not just return to the past. Partially because I think some see it with pink coloured glasses when thinking of UO and EQ. But also because we changed, many of us, at least. The answer can't be to simply add old hardships. Maybe some of them a bit. But by and large we must decelerate the MMOs again, and take out this every faster "gogogo" and "speedrun" mentality, by inviting the gamers to linger. Do you feel invited to stay in any of the SWTOR planets? After Balmorra, after Tatooine, do you stay there just so? No. There is nothing that invites you to stay. Anchrohead is just a city people rush through, while Bree and Rivendell remained places where people stay and linger. They don't always rush through, but they DO in SWTOR. It's a matter of design, and no one has capitalized more the fast move through quest tunnels than Bioware. I think this design is one of the most fatal flaws in SWTOR especially, as it also has been in Warhammer. People are always rushing from quest spot to quest spot, lead on a hook on the nose. Players are not invited to explore, to linger, so stay, to look around. there are no open PVP on the planets, no social hubs, nothing to do or see. You just move on from quest to quest. It is that flaw that breeds locust behavior!
And the answer was on the table. For years! Sandbox elements. It wasn't that Bioware was dumb or didn't know it. It was the clear paradigm that there "is no Uncle Owen". Or that movie type heroes are not weird aliens but humans. Heroes don't craft chairs, they don't run shops and they don't dance or make music. And as a result, people have nothing to linger around, to slow down their own gameplay. I had 2 chars in SWG a combat char and a dancer. After many hours of heroic combat and exploration, I went back to my dancer and was in some entertainer group for an hour to relax, to chat and just get away from heroic business for a while. Some MMOs have such stuff: the music and farming system in LOTRO. Or how much time I spent in LOTRO to dye various clothing sets for my daily changing whim. Or the much debated social effect of fishing and holidays, both things Bioware devs left no opportunity out to mock.
But people tire of being always a hero in a story, and now this game opens a new chapter. It's "The Revenge of Uncle Owen".
THE FUTURE
The future can't just be a copy of the past, but game developers need to rethink their development process on a VERY fundamental level, they need to question the MMO paradigms of the past, that "only pure themeparks work", and need to envision a broader approach than capitalizing on ONE strength alone. Story would have been good as one of four pillars, not as THE only pillar. Previous MMOs have made the same mistake, capitalizing only on one single strength. And that is what WOW did better: they always focussed on many different parts of their game, they reshaped their game from time to time and learned from the mistakes of others. If we want to move on beyond WOW, we must again make MMOs first and foremost WORLDS to stay in and not only pure themeparks. That concept has failed often enough to be proven a flawed concept.
It is a shame that the genre has come so far, that we must wish the fall of SWTOR. But maybe only a large enough crash can cure the game developers from the hubris that "all is well and we know better". The suggestions and critique was on the table for years! If the situation is that dire in the near future for SWTOR, there is only one to blame, and one alone. Bioware.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Comments
I love that, "The Revenge of Uncle Owen."
This whole thing is rather rambling and incoherent, but I get your message, and I agree with you - heroes are made slowly, and not everyone wants to be a hero.
The reality is that there's a secret fifth pillar in MMO's and that is called "Socializing".
SWG was my first MMO, which had plenty of socializing. I enjoyed the interactions I voluntarily participated in, and even some I need to as part of the game. When I tried EQ2 I saw people just running from one spot to the next in search of the next quest location. There were no social hubs, unless there was some coordinated event. It made the game feel lifeless.
If a game would take place socializing on the same level as combat, I think you'd see a good game. Humans afterall are social creatures. When you meet new people and enjoy participating in activites with them you're willing to gloss over multitudes of shortcomings in other areas.
Not ALL gamers are not locusts, simply the majority of people who participate on sites such as this are. Stop thinking the genre needs re-inventing because the fringes of a community say so.
Things will not change in the mmo market until people start buying games for what they are and not buying them because of who the publisher, developers, and IP are.
If people see bioware they run and buy it. People see gw2 and cant wait to buy it. People are just sucker to marketing these days.
There is a logic, and that is people buy something from a company or source that they trust, enjoy or respect in some way. If you bought a Ford and found it to be a great car, why wouldnt you buy another Ford?
Developers may not need to reinvent the genre, but they do need to advance it. I remember when some development firms promised open world MMOs where the scale would come close to realism (either 1/4th scale or slightly smaller). Instead, we got instances (AO) and phasing (LOTRO and WOW) and updated graphics. Besides that, nothing has really changed about the essence of MMOs other than they keep paring down the feature list.
For me, this is why I don't play MMOs anymore because developers aren't even maintaining the old feature list, they're simplifying every aspect of MMOs to the point that there's no challenge anymore. It's funny that I put more time into singleplayer games like FO:NV and Skyrim by comparison to say TOR or FFXIV. And for my time, I get challenges, some surprises, and sometimes I cuss at the computer because I wanted to try something new (but I learned something new in the process too). But when I play an MMO it's press buttons 1 2 3 4 5 and maybe 6 and 7 if I have some oh shi- abilities. Beyond that there's no challenge, not even in PVP (open world or arenas). Dumbing games down make them less into games and more into drugs, imo. Especially when they focus too much on "phat loots" and less on experiences and exploration.
Well when we finally get a mmo that isn't easy and made for those people who only play 5 hours a week then perhaps players will not finish mmos as quickly as they are now. The mmo genre needs to stop catering to casuals.
Grim Dawn, the next great action rpg!
http://www.grimdawn.com/
Well at last the OP has stopped calling everyone here a idiot and stating he's the only intelligent person on the board. Nice to see he's checked his hollier then thou you all can burn in hell attitude that was modded out of the locast thread. Nerd rage its a very ugly thing.
Its that kind of blind loyalty that leads to these shitty games.
And i do drive i ford and its a great truck and i'll never sell it. But if i get another truck it will be a GMC because they make them better (IMO) than fords today. Just because something was better years ago i dont run like a fool and buy their next product
I guess you wouldn't even check out the competiion and just hand over your money living in the past. Then dont complain when when quality sucks.
Your logic is a bit faulty here. When I buy a car, its feature list is fixed for the most part. I can use to drive from place a to place b. It has some features which make the drive comfortable or more fruitful (radios, GPS, etc). But the core of the product remains the same: personal conveyance. Lets compare that to the evolution of MMORPGs. They started out mostly as graphical copies of MUDs with some key differences: large populations over continuous game spaces (little or no instancing/sharding) and open ended gameplay (or metagaming whichever best fits here). Now, MMOs are heavily instanced, game spaces are not continous anymore, and even the core rulesets from MUDs have been dumbed down (rather than clarified or re-rationalized). So, no MMORPGs are not even the Fords of games. Instead, we started with cars for MMORPGs, and then the manufacturer (game devs) decided to par everything down to where we just have a bicycle retro-fitted with a mower engine. Sorry, I don't want a massively single player game where I have to pay month to month or buy in-game currency/items from a cashshop to keep playing. I'll just buy games like Skyrim, Saints Row, or the latest GTA where I know I get the same core features and then some (as added value) instead.
Don't be ridiculous, he's got a good point. There are certain developers I can basically always trust to deliver an excellent gaming experience (Capcom comes to mind), but I can't think of a developer I purposely avoid because of a bad experience (except maybe Square-Enix in recent years.)
BioWare is a quality game studio. $300,000,000 is a lot of money. SWTOR should have been a mind-blowingly fantastic game. It wasn't. It damages the company's reputation for me personally. But I don't think it's totally off-the-wall to play a game made by a developer you like and expect it to be good. It's the same reason musicians have fans.
I'm not being ridiculous. You take the first generation of MMOs and compare their modern analogs feature by feature then you'll see they're quantitatively different products. We got massively single player games today, not MMOs. The only thing that makes modern 'MMOs' massive are their budgets, nothing more. As for TOR, it just goes to show that you can put money into a large firm and get crap products (not unlike governments which are massive in their bureaucracies). Bioware just proves the old ideas of Hayek and company are right: bureaucracies always fail to capture market trends be they private or public.
You know what sucks...
10 years ago - if you had held roundtable discussions with EQ/DAOC/UO players and asked them what features they'd like to see in games in 2012... virtually none of the celebrated things you see in TOR would've been on the list.
Players wanted a more lively world... behavior for npcs... seasons... weather... places to conquer... things to build... ways their guild/group of friends could affect the world.... essentially they wanted the MMOs to be more "real."
2012.... TOR doesn't even have day/night... and 100 player pvp will give you worse lag than 2002 DAOC.
I completely agree. Honestly, when you compare the the current MMO design to a game like Ultima Online (back in 2000) the difference in complexity is staggering. Back then we had a living world to participate in with each day of gameplay holding something completely new. Today we have a straight line to run our character's solo through until we get to the end and then group with a dozen or so people to do the same content repeatedly.
We really only have ourselves to blame though. MMO consumers apparently like paying $15 a month for a shallow linear single player game that just so happens to share the same server with other people.
I won't even get started on raiding, one of the worst ideas for any game ever, in my opinion.
Edit: I'd just like to note that it's really sad that that the only game to come out in the last decade to encompass everything the early MMO gaming fans would have loved to see in an MMO is a single player game.
"There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
I am a locust... here's me on holiday in spain... good times
Dear OP,
A Themepark is a Themepark is a Themepark. Please branch out and try some different styles of MMOs and your outlook may greatly improve.
/fortunecookie
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.
Yes, you are locusts, if you buy those themepark games and even *gasp* sucscribe to them.
Stop buying them. Problem solves itself.
Well if we had a good market of mmo's to play it might be helpful. But most all mmo's released this day in age are themeparks. Unless you want to play mmofps, mmorts, browserbased, etc. But to me those are not mmo's. Sandboxes and hybrids just arent numerous. With the lack of features and enjoyment coming from them, i can see why most people are upset with newer releases. It feels like the exact same mmo with new skins and the major content is dailies, warzones, and/or raids. Gets tedious after the first 20 or so
SWG may have had some issues, may have changed due to the NGE, but all in all was a damn good mmo. I didnt have to quest, i wasnt forced into something I could go to a planet and spend a week there just looking around, hunting, etc. Crafting was intense and well worth it. The social aspect of that game was so nice. Even player cities in its prime before the mass exodus was just fun to see "neighbors" and talk to them. Take a minute or 5 and just be a community.
We need more games like this. Just rushing thru the game, the content, the world just o max out is so lame. And everyone says well i cant play sandboxes, im a casual player. Yeah thats what sandboxes are for, the casuals
Capcom lies to people for console developers to push people into buying games they canceled? I do not buy Capcom anymore for this reason.
Monster Hunter 3 advertised as a starter Rpg for PS3 cancelled 2 weeks after ps3 release. 3ds Meganman legends 3. Cancelled 1 month after 3ds release this is exactly what people are talking about being suckedf into something with false promises just to get a shallow gaming experience.
Square Enix only made 5 bad games that were rpgs so far10/10-2 amd 13/13-2 and ff14. All of their dragon quests have been great sentinals of the starry sky besides suikodenDS were my fav rpgs in the last 3 years. I even have a hard time getting involved with skyrims storyline all the time without feeling the overweling burden of grinding. wether it be a spell, OR ALCHEMY which takes freaking forever.
KotOR is a great co-op 4 player mmo until the endgame grind so this has not ruined the experiance for me as a while i mean they didnt burn me as bad as Capcoms 500+for my ps3 for a monster hunter that released for the Wii 2 years after the fact.
******Back on topic KotOR was worth the 59.99 as a 30 day experience ive spent mor emoney for games that lasted not even half the time. All of the halo I beat in less then 3 days a piece the only 2 i loved the online play with was the original and reach.
The whole problem with these types fo mmo are that the ccompany is like i want them to be able to get to the cap fast and somone else says why? The developer says so we wont have to work as hard. Everything in SWtoR was done half backed. Copied Skills, Bought Engine, Out of contry artists. All they did was put it together and trow some voices on it. I have no clue why it took so long for this game to release.
Are you drunk? This post is confusing.
Are you saying SWTOR sucked but you would still buy bioware games because they make a lot of money and you trust them?
Thanks for proving my point. I see now why marketing is more important than making good games.
MMO locusts is a great way of describing a big part of MMO players. Maybe not "us", but many are.
And I have near-zero hopes of the genre re-inventing itself. It has derailed too far to go back to any sense.
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
I have to largely agree with the OP. The genre needs some changes, and among those much needed changes "more voiceovers" is nowhere to be seen. There are stil a few MMO's on the horizon that do things differently. TOR is mostly trying to do what WoW did, only they came up short.
MMO's that have nothing worthy of the name end-game shouldn't let players get to cap in 5 days. What are they thinking? Worlds with more depth is what we need, not empty shells you rush through to cap. That's something you won't make cost-effectively if you only stay in a zone for a few levels which you go through in a matter of hours, only to never return there with that toon.
Games that defie existing conventions, that's what the genre needs. Lets hope some of those games are successful enough to get the industry to stop making the same old mistakes over and over.
hey look another "omg sandbox will fix everything!" thread
how original
What the OP said is true for the most part, but honestly I think that most of the blame goes to the consumers and not the devs themselves. When you make a game, you want to make money. In the gaming industry, it's obviously a common fact that doing something innovative can end up turning into a complete loss. It's too risky.
This is why I think free to play games are making so much money even though they clearly lack a lot of things(But they also spend a LOT less money to make a game). The MMORPG genre is a simple copy/paste process, while sugar coating one aspect or the other. However, the core game play hasn't changed. This is probably one of the main reasons why MMORPG isn't considered to be a serious genre. NOTHING IS REALLY NEW! Seriously, think about it. What type of rpg do mmorpgs resemble the most? Turn based RPGS just with online multiplayer attached.
BW did half of what makes a good RPG. They made a GREAT story with voice acting, but they simply copy/pasted the other half and sugarcoated it, which would be the core gameplay.
Right now, the MMORPG genre is stuck where console rpgs were. No innovation. Fear of failing and losing a ton of money.
Look at what single player rpgs are doing compared to mmorpgs. Sure a good amount of people hated FF13, but I personally loved it, and I'm not alone. FF13 did well in sales/reviews and a lot of people did indeed love the new ideas SE is trying to implement in it's core gameplay. Look at Skyrim. So many things you can do, so much freedom, so much immersion! Sure some skills were a bit of a grind, but that didn't stop people from enjoying it. It even got a perfect score and did remarkably well in the asian market.
What developers of major game companies need to be doing is looking at all the different types of rpgs that are having good success with new ideas, and recreate the mmorpg genre into something new. They need to STOP BEING AFRAID, but that can sometimes be asking for too much when the world economy isn't doing so well at the moment.
After all thats said and done, I'm pretty sure that the MMORPG is going to turn into an all out free to play market. To be quite honest, you usually see more innovations and fresh concepts more from free to play games faster than you would in a major game like SW:TOR. Sure, free to play games can be broken via cash shop sometimes, and they usually lack high end graphics, but oh my god. When I hear people talk about how the companion system in SW:TOR is so new and fresh, it makes me cringe cause the companion system was already implemented in previous free to play games already for several years now. Maybe not as detailed, but when it comes down to it, it's nothing new. New to major games like SW:TOR, but not to free to play.