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MMORPG truly a dying genre
Lobotomist
Member RarePosts: 5,826
I used to love video games, but it all changed when I played a game called MUD. Simply a text game it had no finesse other games of that era had. But playing in a world populated by real people - it was clear to me even than : this is the future of video games, a higher state altogether. It is pointless for video games to go anywhere else.
And for long time they did. EQ , DAOC, UO ... than came WoW blew the lid off these games and opened it to the world. And everyone knew this is the way to go.
Games were made by top companies, books were written like "ready player one" - the sky was the limit.
But it failed. No need to go into details why. We all know it did.
What interest me is now.
What was once a pinnacle of gaming perfection and future of gaming. Today no professional game company want to touch.
Heck even the company that made trillions on their MMO (Blizzard) stepped out of the game and started making casual products.
Instead of AAA company like Naughty Dog or CD Project Red pushing the technological envelope to MMO,
we are left with handfull of "Indie" companies making MMOs
With low budgets , none of the resources or manpower of big companies - best they can make is mini-mmo , rehash of old formula ... or fail
Bottom line, even if those indie kickstarter funded games get released, which not all of them will. It will be far cry from what a healthy genre growth should have been.
They will most likely be the last to attempt it too.
And MMO will simply disappear as Point and Click adventures , RTS strategies etc did. Maybe to be unburied years after as nostalgia novelty for another round of kickstarters.
And for long time they did. EQ , DAOC, UO ... than came WoW blew the lid off these games and opened it to the world. And everyone knew this is the way to go.
Games were made by top companies, books were written like "ready player one" - the sky was the limit.
But it failed. No need to go into details why. We all know it did.
What interest me is now.
What was once a pinnacle of gaming perfection and future of gaming. Today no professional game company want to touch.
Heck even the company that made trillions on their MMO (Blizzard) stepped out of the game and started making casual products.
Instead of AAA company like Naughty Dog or CD Project Red pushing the technological envelope to MMO,
we are left with handfull of "Indie" companies making MMOs
With low budgets , none of the resources or manpower of big companies - best they can make is mini-mmo , rehash of old formula ... or fail
Bottom line, even if those indie kickstarter funded games get released, which not all of them will. It will be far cry from what a healthy genre growth should have been.
They will most likely be the last to attempt it too.
And MMO will simply disappear as Point and Click adventures , RTS strategies etc did. Maybe to be unburied years after as nostalgia novelty for another round of kickstarters.
Comments
One good new thinking game would kickstart the genre again (pun intended), it might take 10 years though.
Just because your standards are too high (ridiculously so) for any current game to meet, doesn't mean the genre is dying. In fact, it's flourishing, with a ton of promising titles on the horizon. Some are theme parks, some are sand parks, and some are sandboxes.
You people remind me of those global warming idiots in the 60's who screamed that we would all die by the seventies if we didn't do something. When that didn't happen, they moved our 'impending doom' up into the 90's. When that didn't happen (and the ozone hole proved to be inconsequential), they moved it to the 2020's and 2030's. Guess what's going to happen next?
The genre is fine. Oh, and so are point and click adventures. There's a ton of really good ones that were released recently, and a lot more on the horizon. Steam likely has 50 or more which were released in the last few years, even a few that were kickstarted.
TL;DR Typical gloom and doom claptrap from one of the resident 'old school' MMO players.
AN' DERE AIN'T NO SUCH FING AS ENUFF DAKKA, YA GROT! Enuff'z more than ya got an' less than too much an' there ain't no such fing as too much dakka. Say dere is, and me Squiggoff'z eatin' tonight!
We are born of the blood. Made men by the blood. Undone by the blood. Our eyes are yet to open. FEAR THE OLD BLOOD.
#IStandWithVic
That's why you feel like its dying, you arent seeing a lot of high quality mmos.
edit: but single player games are on a rise
"Everything that happens is a political act, and the only people that get to pretend otherwise are those privileged enough to not have politics impact them at all." ~Taliesin
Currently: Games Audio Engineer
You've heard what I've heard
Not much point in spending 5 years and tens of millions of dollars on something that has a dwindling playerbase.
The fact that the game industry ( at least AAA companies) is fueled solely on profit is the reason i decided to stop working in it.
If you base your product solely on getting the biggest payout, lowest common denominator starts to rule, and not long after that exploitation like mechanics.
Instead of game designers designing best gameplay mechanics for their game, they are designing mechanics that maximize dependency, addiction and spending impulses. All game mechanics are sacrificed to this.
No wonder the games quality is dwindling.
While before games were designed to be best games, today they are designed to be best impulse shops.
While we are looking for complex MMOs of before, the industry is interested in easy addictive grinds made for minimal investment and maximum profit.
I can not blame them, its business after all. But going that direction we will never see anything good again.
AAA game production?, yes.
I Quit.
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/436845/page/1 -> http://forums.mmorpg.com/discussion/436845/what-killed-mmorpgs-for-you/p1
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2316034
.............
Retired Gamer: all MMORPG's have been destroyed by big business, marketing of false promises, unprofessional game makers, and a generation of "I WIN and GIVE ME NOW" (brought to you by pokeman).
It certainly didn't help that Project Copernicus, Project Titan, World of Darkness and Everquest Next died in development.
There's no doubt that you can still make money on mmorpg's, just not enough money to justify a $100M investment that might fail. That's why indie developers are still trying to make mmorpg's and why publishers import korean mmorpg's instead of making them on their own.
This is why indies are so important - small teams fueled by what made early games so great - creativity and passion.
Large corporations stifle creativity - look what happened to giant companies - releasing polished and shiny but yet formulaic and often soulless games. Yes there are exceptions, but devs who've experiences working from early on in smaller companies have told me first hand how as the company grew into a corporation, the creativity and passion started to dwindle down the bigger they got.
Indies might lack the polish - but they got something a lot more valuable - a creative fire fueling their teams.
Just my 2c.
We had small companies putting tiny budgets into awful looking games, everquest was the pinnacle of the genre.
Wow came out and blew the world apart, everyone took notice and the mmorpg scene became the next big thing to make money from all the publshers, it was the future! All the publishers thought they could tap into this money fountain but they couldn't and have given up on this expensive and difficult genre.
Wow came and invigorated interest that was never there before, they could not replicate the success of the game and so left again.
You can thank wow for the interest all these publishers gave to us and without wow you would not have even 1% of the games we currently enjoy, the interest that was there is now gone though.
We are back to reality, the bubble simply burst. However due to that bubble we now have a huge base of games that are all running, the market has never been better for games to play.
Oh and also, it's not dying it's just at it's maximum saturation point. This genre unlike almost every other has games that are still relevant 10-20 years after they are released. In 10 years people will still be playing wow, tera and all the rest.
Give it a few years. Something will blow our minds again. It just isn't going to be in 2016 (or 2017 - though I think Crowfall could be pretty strong if the combat doesn't blow).
And I submit, your honor, that this is a good thing.
That being said, "this industry is dying" goes clear back to 2003, at least.
The corpse just keeps twitching, what will we do?
(My answer: give up on "big budget" games and wait for the products to grow smaller again.)
So now the Eastern devs have stepped up to replace the Western with their games designed for a different gaming culture. It's changed some for western players by maybe showing a little less skin on the models and forcing PVP upon people instead of making it an option since they know most western players if given the option, will stay PVE even if the game is PVP focused.
I'm not an IT Specialist, Game Developer, or Clairvoyant in real life, but like others on here, I play one on the internet.
Yes, the AAA developers are done. They've pulled up stakes and moved on to MOBA's and Hero Shooters and whatever dragon their they're chasing this year. SoE sold their shit off and Daybreak canceled the MMO they were working on. NCSoft probably won't touch the genre again after WildCrap. BioWare has their gambling site known as SWTOR, so no need for them to start over. Blizzard saw all these other MMO's failing to launch, cancelled Titan and, surprise surprise, made a hero shooter.
There are still dozens of MMO's left and dozens more being developed. The majority of which are being developed in Asia because MMO's are still alive and thriving there. Then they're imported here with cash shops that are designed to suck as much cash out of western wallets as possible.
The Western MMO developers that are left, are all poor children from Charles Dickens novels with barely two dollars to rub together. They're all standing around with their hands out begging for money on Kickstarter, "Please gamers, may we have some more? We'll give you shiny, worthless digital trinkets if you'll just help make us millionaires!"
As much as it sucks and I've said it before, crowdfunded games are the only way to get the genre / market back on track with MMO's that make sense for gamers, not for CEO's to line their pockets.
"I don't give a sh*t what other people say. I play what I like and I'll pay to do it too!" - SerialMMOist
greed
Every developer wanted a slice of the "WoW pie" and destroyed the genre to get it. One after another they turned out shitty games that resembled WoW but no one came up with anything that stimulated the players as WOW did. Then when players weren't having it, the same developers turned around and instead of looking in the mirror for their failure, they blamed the markets and player bases. They all bought into their own lies and now no one will touch this genre thinking it's dead. I say there is still a market for a real MMO. There is always enough interest in the concepts Players still want it. No one is delivering. The Pre-WoW markets made money. They didn't make WoW's money, but they made money. But now, if you can't capture what WoW had, it's labeled a failure.............whatever.
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. - Carl Sagan
Some of the old games are still around and I even spent maybe a year playing and supporting an emulator of a certain space based mmo. It brought back a lot of the joy and wonder of mmos which for me is role playing and living an alternate life in a virtual setting. In that year, some of my mmo friends reconnected through the game and started a guild, built a city, and leveled quite a few characters to max. I got my old architect back, built houses in beautiful locations, decorated, and became my characters while I tuned out the real world. It was really a lot of fun.
I would be interested in an experience like that again if mmo's return more to their roots instead of using the term mmo has a marketing ploy to garner interest.