The MMO Industry has lost its mystery

time007 · August 2016

I'll try to be non-provocative to avoid flames, but I notice a lot of complaints about any and all MMO's that are released. I think a lot of it is from old gen players like myself who played either DAOC, Everquest, or Ultima Online (pre-WoW) games.

I think a major part of this is that the mystery of all of these games is gone. There are no more secrets. How to do almost anything and everything is on forums and youtube either during beta and definitely within 2 weeks of game release.

so I think alot of gamers are missing nostalgia that comes with doing something unknown to everyone. Experimenting on your own with the only help you can get coming from people in the game itself.

During the Ultima Online, EQ, DAOC release years, there weren't forums for us to go to, and not many real life friends played MMO's because they weren't mainstream. So you were basically getting most help from other players in the game through ingame chat. No voice chat, no forums, no youtube. Maybe the occasional 40 dollar guidebook that came out a few months after release.......

There are gajillion reasons why each and every game coming out now sucks or rocks, but I think the "mystery" of finding things out yourself and relying on ingame buddies & online guildies only took out a major element of the game that can't ever be injected back into the industry.

I really don't think anyone who didnt play an mmo prior to pre-WoW days will be able to understand the fun feeling of the mystery we were able to feel (you can deprive yourself of voice chat, forums, online articles etc and try to go dark-ages all over again, but the fact that the plugged in world exists will still eliminate the mystery feeling and replace it with other feelings) (as I've tried to go cold turkey before) But of course, older gamers can feel the plugged in feeling everyone has now with youtube, forums etc so I guess we got the best of both worlds. so be happy at this point old-gen mmo gamers!

Mardukk · August 2016

Well if they didn't pump out countless linear quest hub no freedom themeparks then I would be happy. If you can't stomach being told what to do and what order to do it in then you have, P2W archeage and P2W BDO as well as Eve and games that are 15+ years old....oh boy what a selection.

Edit: I looked up everything I did in EQ and it was great even with online research.

Forgrimm · August 2016

Allakhazam had a ton of EQ info back in the day.

waynejr2 · August 2016

People documented zork loooooooooong before any of those games you listed existed. None of this should be a surprise. Many people want the path of least resistance.

frostymug · August 2016

I finally threw away the binders full of crafting recipes I typed up as I discovered them in EQ just about a year ago. One for each tradeskill. I carried that 50ish pounds through two recent moves just on nostalgia and the fact I put that much into it.

Dullahan · August 2016

Much of the mystery of early MMOs were due to the coop requirements and harsh death penalties. Everything required more of your time to both form groups and avoid or recover from a more dangerous world. When there is no penalty for snooping around in a dangerous place, it looses its sense of mystery.

New games of the current variety will never have that mystery because you can and see and do everything in short order. Its a fairly simple concept, yet the same people complaining about such things will complain if they ever have to wait to accomplish anything in an mmorpg.

http://www.wolfsheadonline.com/the-death-penalty-mechanic-and-loss-aversion-in-mmo-design/

ceratop001 · August 2016

I have to agree with everything said so far. Today's games are just plain boring. For us that have been playing games so long I think were just tired lol.

Jetrpg · August 2016

I think a lot of it was challenge. Aion had this also... like fly over to x place kill a rare.
Mobs were hard. Wow is like my anti mmo now. Why they even have levels is beyond me.

Grouroux · August 2016

For old player the time of UO, EQ, etc. is lost for ever. The mystery was for me at first the new kind of game that was MMO, to play online with tons of other players.

Now we grow up, got a life, work, kids, wife/husband... we had change more than MMO genre

For a long time I was searching for the "new UO" or the "new DAoC" and they exist, but it's not anymore a game for the kind of gamer I became.

Dullahan · August 2016

I may have less time, but the notion that MMOs don't appeal to me simply because I'm busy is false. MMOs don't appeal to me because they don't have the mystery they should have. They utilize too many tired gimmicks like quest progression. Its far too easy to solo, so they lack the social aspect. You no longer lose anything when you die, including time in many cases, so they lack the sense of reward which is a byproduct of loss aversion.

Simply put, the people making MMOs aren't doing it right.

Grouroux · August 2016

You are thrue, but if today you release a game like UO or DAoC like they start, most of the actuals players will be lost, waiting for the quest icon and all theses things.

I think we also need to consider all the mystery part of the world that is lost with google map, wikipedia, smartphone, etc... Who want to be lost today ? Who want to discover by himself ?

In some way it remind me tourism. You can discover a really beautifull place, hidden, just few local ppl, etc... Then you came back 10 years later and there is many hotels, many tourists who want to discover the same hidden place, but in fact the magic and mystery is lost for ever. And it's even worse for the people who discover the place at the begenning.

As a MMO creator i'am trying to discover new hidden place, with magic and mystery, but ppl always ask me for a hotel and smartmaps to never be lost!

time007 · August 2016

Dullahan said:

Much of the mystery of early MMOs were due to the coop requirements and harsh death penalties. Everything required more of your time to both form groups and avoid or recover from a more dangerous world. When there is no penalty for snooping around in a dangerous place, it looses its sense of mystery.

New games of the current variety will never have that mystery because you can and see and do everything in short order. Its a fairly simple concept, yet the same people complaining about such things will complain if they ever have to wait to accomplish anything in an mmorpg.

http://www.wolfsheadonline.com/the-death-penalty-mechanic-and-loss-aversion-in-mmo-design/

I agree completely with this. My memories are coming back to me and I remember Allakazam. But Allakazam didn't tell you how to spec and major handhold for you. you could look up quest, rewards, and items, but again, it wasn't always there or accurate or had pictures. It definitely wasn't a 1080p, 30 minute video guide to anything. I think specs and builds were an even bigger mystery you had to solve on your own, that or get into a really good guild and ask that 1 really good guy of that class. That or befriend someone of your class and ask them. If i remember back then, people weren't super forthcoming with the gear they used and what spec they were much less giving you a full on breakdown of where to get each piece and how to spec each point.

Even then there was zero respecs so good luck. I don't think the word "respec" came into existence until sometime between 2005-2008 hahah.

time007 · August 2016

Xodic said:

Grouroux said:

For old player the time of UO, EQ, etc. is lost for ever. The mystery was for me at first the new kind of game that was MMO, to play online with tons of other players.

Now we grow up, got a life, work, kids, wife/husband... we had change more than MMO genre

For a long time I was searching for the "new UO" or the "new DAoC" and they exist, but it's not anymore a game for the kind of gamer I became.

I once thought that I may be the problem, that maybe I no longer enjoy the things I once did. I thought that perhaps I'm the guy yelling at the neighborhood kids trying to jack my 8-tracks. Unfortunately, that's not the case for me.

I come from D&D roots. You know, that thing nerdy kids did in the basement every weekend. It's what parents blamed when their kids brought a battle axe to school... It's the thing that caused the Satanism scare throughout middle class white suburbia. It was the foundation for those dramatic and often times hilarious moments that resulted from an intoxicated Dungeon Master's obsession with well-endowed dwarven females.
It's what influenced almost every single game listed on this website. It's what outlined and defined character advancement through experience, levels, attributes and abilities. It created the first persistent playable world via campaign books and paper character sheets that you had to take home and guard with your life. It's what created, expanded or defined the classes, races and beasts that we see in most games and is almost single handedly the source of how we perceive them - some were originally created and some were expanded on to the point that the same characteristics are still seen today in movies, games and books.

The mythology and lore that has been created throughout the years by dozens of writers are second to none. We're not talking about freelance writers that submit quest entries to Blizzard, no, we're talking people like 22 time New York Times best-selling author R.A. Salvatore and the likes. The literary influence is so powerful that almost every modern day fantasy author credits D&D for inspiring their work, including Game of Thrones' George R. R. Martin. Even Tom Hanks got is start from a D&D themed movie Mazes and Monsters.

So how the hell did we end up here? Two terrible MMORPGs and a movie that even shock therapy couldn't make you un-watch (Marlon Wayans, seriously?) . Judging by their latest game releases, one in particular, it won't be long until the entire franchise is unrecognizable. Another legend following the footsteps of mainstream mediocrity.
If the era that we're in can force something that has been the pillar of fantasy for over 40 years to change this drastically - then there is no stopping the momentum of current game design. MMORPG was once a genre of escapism and sociable adventures. It wasn't me that was left behind the times, it was the ass holes graduating from business school cashing in on what was once an untapped market. Money is easily attainable by anyone who is willing to lower themselves to pick it up, and these people have no problems bending at the knees and they'll ruin everything you let them get their hands on. I still enjoy the fundamentals of what the RPG in MMORPG stand for, the problem is the developers only see MMO$$$.
It got a little ranty...
tl;'dr
Has anyone seen my stapler?

bro, you are speaking my language. I didn't play D&D tabletop, but I read many many of their books, and also loads Forgotten Realms and Warhammer novels. I definitely feel the loss of escapism and social adventures comment. I remember being in dungeons with ingame only friends with no videos to bail us out as we were hounded by mob after mob and, back then we didnt call them elites, did we call them bosses, I can't remember anymore. We called them "purps" or "oranges" if i recall.

I think alot of the older gen guys get into arguments on here with other players, well everyone gets into arguments on here, over super specific aspects of games that people nowadays just accept as common place or "its just the way it is" and if you revile those things, such as "auto-run to quest objective" or "pointer arrow" you are ostracized.

I've even had long time friends from old games that are now like "i dont want to xyz anymore" "I want to be at endgame in 2 weeks and dont want to level for months anymore". So if my old school gaming friends have fallen to the "current creature comforts/ease of use" state we have in MMO's now, I guess I can't be upset with gamers who have only known things as the way they are now and therefore get upset when you challenge the "creature comforts" we have in MMOs nowadays.

Grouroux · August 2016

Even i'am a old MMO player like you, I don't think all old MMO was a good experience. I love DAoC, but for me levelling was horrible, so stupid in a MMO. UO gave us all bases to make greats MMO, with sandbox elements, free building, PvP base on player ability, free build based on a skill use progression, and lag

Unfortualy, most of the MMO after UO choose to follow the path of solo RPG, with levelling and quest (remember it was no quest in UO). It's a non-sense in a MMO world where we need never ended things.

Maybe if MMOs lost their mystery it's because they (most of them, I don't know all MMO) are build on bad gamedesign ?

Dullahan · August 2016

Grouroux said:

Even i'am a old MMO player like you, I don't think all old MMO was a good experience. I love DAoC, but for me levelling was horrible, so stupid in a MMO. UO gave us all bases to make greats MMO, with sandbox elements, free building, PvP base on player ability, free build based on a skill use progression, and lag

Unfortualy, most of the MMO after UO choose to follow the path of solo RPG, with levelling and quest (remember it was no quest in UO). It's a non-sense in a MMO world where we need never ended things.

Maybe if MMOs lost their mystery it's because they (most of them, I don't know all MMO) are build on bad gamedesign ?

I agree with your sentiment, except regarding leveling. Even UO had leveling, it was just skill levels instead of character levels. Levels are an important part of creating the framework necessary for scaling up challenge and achievements. People need some form of progression to provide personal and cooperative goals in a massively multiplayer game.

DKLond · August 2016

The genre hasn't lost much, it's just that developers haven't been innovative and ambitious enough with it. Mostly due to the publisher model, I'd say - as it's a very risky genre to experiment within. Why? Because it's incredibly complex and expensive to make a game with an inherently demanding feature-set, like any MMO must have.

Star Citizen is the only game on the horizon that might actually change things.

ShavaKa · August 2016

I agree, mystery is lost. Scarcity and over abundance, the loss of rarity, also those mechanics instilled to subtly push you into the in game store and the social sharing/data mining have taken away "immersion", that feeling like you're part of the game and thanks you for playing.

The MMO today feels like a heartless product/telemarketer, it doesn't care if you're playing or dying - it's what I would call a gentrified product of market ingenuity - it's far from what it was and knows it. But the advertising looks great, all the hype - this game is going to be big because 10 corporations gave it a 8/9/10 and 500 awards. Plus all the reviews out there that make us all warm inside and laugh and cry... Oh man.

Let's look at the job market - people with degrees need jobs and the over saturation of skilled workers has created a lackluster diluted version of what we once knew as an artform, for the illustrious information age of corporate imperialism. In the era of start ups it's more about the investment side rather than the experience of what you're buying or the skills spent learning how to please the corporate masters behind the proprietary knowledges of college pre-slavery careers.

Kickstarter - This is the era of scams, plain and simple - will you be conned? Who's next? What's next? The formula sells.

And if it doesn't all work out, there's always free to play, and the special hat that looks cool for 1450 SPs (Scam Points). Or that pigeon mount for buying the collectors edition - or that signed copy with the founder badge for backing so and so game company... I give up.

The End? *shrug* The end of something - the end of a legacy!

Axehilt · August 2016

time007 said:

I'll try to be non-provocative to avoid flames, but I notice a lot of complaints about any and all MMO's that are released. I think a lot of it is from old gen players like myself who played either DAOC, Everquest, or Ultima Online (pre-WoW) games.

I think a major part of this is that the mystery of all of these games is gone. There are no more secrets. How to do almost anything and everything is on forums and youtube either during beta and definitely within 2 weeks of game release.

so I think alot of gamers are missing nostalgia that comes with doing something unknown to everyone. Experimenting on your own with the only help you can get coming from people in the game itself.

During the Ultima Online, EQ, DAOC release years, there weren't forums for us to go to, and not many real life friends played MMO's because they weren't mainstream. So you were basically getting most help from other players in the game through ingame chat. No voice chat, no forums, no youtube. Maybe the occasional 40 dollar guidebook that came out a few months after release.......

There are gajillion reasons why each and every game coming out now sucks or rocks, but I think the "mystery" of finding things out yourself and relying on ingame buddies & online guildies only took out a major element of the game that can't ever be injected back into the industry.

I really don't think anyone who didnt play an mmo prior to pre-WoW days will be able to understand the fun feeling of the mystery we were able to feel (you can deprive yourself of voice chat, forums, online articles etc and try to go dark-ages all over again, but the fact that the plugged in world exists will still eliminate the mystery feeling and replace it with other feelings) (as I've tried to go cold turkey before) But of course, older gamers can feel the plugged in feeling everyone has now with youtube, forums etc so I guess we got the best of both worlds. so be happy at this point old-gen mmo gamers!

Er, your post was correct right up until the end.

Mystery is a big factor to games being enjoyable.
Early MMORPG players enjoyed the mystery of early MMORPGs.
But critically, new MMORPG players enjoy the mystery of modern MMORPGs. These games are still mysteries to these players specifically because they're new players. So not only are these players able to understand that fun feeling you felt in early MMORPGs, they're literally experiencing that same feeling right now with modern MMORPGs.

WOW (or any more recent MMORPG) is still a giant intimidating behemoth to anyone unfamiliar with the genre. The websites don't prevent these games from being mysteries -- to a player starting from scratch there's a staggering amount of info they have to learn (and that info is mystery; a mystery is just a fact you don't know yet.)

For that matter, WOW redoes nearly all its rotations almost every expansion, so its core gameplay is a fresh mystery almost every time.

SEANMCAD · August 2016

Solution is what Elite Dangerous is doing lately with community events

ApexTKM · August 2016

Sorry guys, your not going to see the shock or suprised factor in games if you played the same ones over and over again for years just not going to happen, every idea has been put out, I wouldn't even have the shock factor if they went back using the old mmo formula. Just not there anymore, just like when you were 5 years old, can't go back. People don't have the mystery factor anymore in all the games in general for playing every type of game for so long but you can't let that effect your enjoyment in video games.

Gamer54321 · August 2016

I don't quite agree with this notion of MMO's not having a mystery to them.

As a gamer IT IS YOUR responsibility of not go reading through cheat lists and other spoiler filled web pages, for whatever game you are playing.

A related point, would be for game devs, that should know better than to trivialize the issue that arise from modern communications online, in which game secrets aren't really secrets for long, SUCH THAT, basing the core game mechanics on secrets, is a bad idea, if poorly done. Presumably, there would be work around solutions to make secrets work in a game.

Horusra · August 2016

time007 said:

I'll try to be non-provocative to avoid flames, but I notice a lot of complaints about any and all MMO's that are released. I think a lot of it is from old gen players like myself who played either DAOC, Everquest, or Ultima Online (pre-WoW) games.

I think a major part of this is that the mystery of all of these games is gone. There are no more secrets. How to do almost anything and everything is on forums and youtube either during beta and definitely within 2 weeks of game release.

so I think alot of gamers are missing nostalgia that comes with doing something unknown to everyone. Experimenting on your own with the only help you can get coming from people in the game itself.

During the Ultima Online, EQ, DAOC release years, there weren't forums for us to go to, and not many real life friends played MMO's because they weren't mainstream. So you were basically getting most help from other players in the game through ingame chat. No voice chat, no forums, no youtube. Maybe the occasional 40 dollar guidebook that came out a few months after release.......

There are gajillion reasons why each and every game coming out now sucks or rocks, but I think the "mystery" of finding things out yourself and relying on ingame buddies & online guildies only took out a major element of the game that can't ever be injected back into the industry.

I really don't think anyone who didnt play an mmo prior to pre-WoW days will be able to understand the fun feeling of the mystery we were able to feel (you can deprive yourself of voice chat, forums, online articles etc and try to go dark-ages all over again, but the fact that the plugged in world exists will still eliminate the mystery feeling and replace it with other feelings) (as I've tried to go cold turkey before) But of course, older gamers can feel the plugged in feeling everyone has now with youtube, forums etc so I guess we got the best of both worlds. so be happy at this point old-gen mmo gamers!

Where the heck were you. Lore Sites were forums dedicated to EQ, AC, AC2, DAoC, EQ2. Coord system in AC gave you guides to all grinding locations, dungeons, and best loot spots. There was not mystery except for the first day a new patch came out. After that you just did a search on a forum and there was the walkthrough.

ApexTKM · August 2016

Gamer54321 said:

I don't quite agree with this notion of MMO's not having a mystery to them.

As a gamer IT IS YOUR responsibility of not go reading through cheat lists and other spoiler filled web pages, for whatever game you are playing.

That doesn't change the fact that people played the same type of game for years so there is no mystery anymore, people know what to expect now. Unless we can inhabit other planets irl I dont think theres any new ideas that will blow us away.

Deivos · August 2016

"For that matter, WOW redoes nearly all its rotations almost every expansion, so its core gameplay is a fresh mystery almost every time."

...did you really just equate flavor of the month builds to a renewed sense of "mystery" in a game? The core gameplay doesn't change, the basic mechanics of most all abilities very rarely change, they simply get rebalanced for a most optimal high-end that barely impacts most regular play in the first place. That's the kind of change most people can ignore unless they are trying to be highly competitive. Even with being competitive in their nature, the unknown factor only extends as far as reading a tooltip and trying the abilities out a few times for performance.

That is a distinct lack of mystery.

ApexTKM · August 2016

Just for laughs and giggles I wouldn't mind WoW doing a NGE and copying off of SWG for once. That would be game changing, Kappa.

Amathe · August 2016

For so long as there have been internet games, there has also been an internet. You have always been able to look things up. I played some of the early mmos and there was ample information available then on how to do practically anything.

Plus, you don't have to look anything up today. You can play any mmo you want and never check any spoiler/strat sites.

The mystery that has been lost is the immersion. When I played Everquest I was a ranger looking for the orc castle in the mists of Greater Faydark forest. As a WoW player, I am "grinding" my Saberstalker faction for an "achievement."

When mmos were new to me, I was immersed, meaning I was able to suspend disbelief and experience a virtual world as a character in that world. Now I am just a video game player.

The more mmos you play, and the longer you play them, the more they become routine and the less you experience them as the character you created for that purpose.

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