Right now there are a lot of older mmorogs still up and running. Part of me celebrates that. I like the idea that I can always go home.
But I have to believe that game makers take these games into account in assessing how well the market space is being serviced. Maybe if more old mmorpgs went inactive, new ones would appear. Or maybe not. But I think it's worth discussing.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
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Is that the reason New World keeps being delayed, since the project is so huge it is hard to hold the team together?
I'll be looking forward to seeing what develops in the new systems you mentioned briefly.
The world is going to the dogs, which is just how I planned it!
and I guess they did that...it's called Fortnite......We just didn't like the direction it went.
The game today costs as much as it did on launch day, $15 a month.
Any new game today can do the same exact thing. Don't think you are going to be a WoW killer as that will never happen. Many have tried, yet WoW is still King of the MMORPG landscape. Manage expectations for the game. Under promise and over deliver. Slow and steady wins the race. Remember, WoW started as a relatively small game and 270,000 units sold. If Blizzard can do it with WoW, anyone can.
For starters, single-player games have a much longer history. While a lot of people don't still have the hardware needed to play old console games, a lot of them are still available via emulators. Companies like Capcom and Square have been re-releasing some of their older games on Steam.
Additionally, single-player games tend to remain playable forever, which isn't really true of MMORPGs. It's not just that MMORPGs will sometimes pull the plug. It's not even that group content can become unplayable if the playerbase is too small. Often game developers make changes with the intent of altering or adding top end content without particularly caring how it affects lower level content, and that can leave the lower level content in an unplayable state. People mention WoW above, but a new player who wants to start WoW today very nearly can't, as the lower level content is a mess, and apart from paying a lot of money for a boost to high levels, he'll have to slog through a very long string of awfulness in order to reach the little bit of content that the developers still maintain.
Where you make it sound like that same kind of situation for a developer is a person sentence.
So in that vein, what you said was very informative, something I personally never even thought about, or looked at from a very different lens.
Thank you for this insight.
I understand your perspective but I am very sad for the future of MMORPGs because this reasoning is what is making their development rarer. New games aren't going to be developed by large companies not in the vein we saw in the beginning of this genre.
Honestly, the concept is hard to wrap my mind around in this day and age where all you hear is over saturated work forces, and companies requiring more and more experience to land an entry position job...
So when Wow came out and made money,everyone jumped on the bandwagon,when Zombie games made money we got tons of them.When BR's began making loads of money again everyone jumped on the bandwagon.
When Dota and LOL's were making it big others saw that and jumped on the bandwagon.
Just like Wow was a huge turning point in the industry ,Fortnite might also be THAT GAME.You see Epic stopped developing Fortnite,stopped developing at least 2-3 other games just to focus on joining the BR movement.
Point being it is not only older games but the rehashing of the same gimmicks.
Starcraft 1...2,Warcraft 1..2..++,Daiblo 1...2...3 +,there is no risk to create a new IP and if they do create a new IP it will copy a current trend/gimmick.
Survival games came out in drones,tons of them,tcg's all seem to arrive around the same 2 year period.
There is of course the possibility that after 30 years of gaming developers have simply run out of ideas,run out of gimmicks.So when they ran out of ideas for gamin,they turned to ideas on marketing,the money side,loot boxes,"seasons","cosmetics""full cash shops""card packs" ,selling ships,selling GTA$$$,ISK etc etc.
So this is a phase,the sad part is that i don't see it getting better,the next phase will again be some gimmick to make money,while NOT bettering our games.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
The next money phase seems to be control of where we play our games and who gets a cut of the profits.Microsoft was trying to corner the entire market and why Sweeney created a controversial article on the subject.
Now we see these big businesses all jockeying for the new CLOUD wave,streaming services and once again<NONE of this gives us better games,if anything worse quality trying to play them or wearing some clunky VR machine on your head.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Some of my peers have over 35 years in, some within the same Tech group for more than 20.
So I can't really relate to the ideas of devs fearing being trapped.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
The difference now is we can take a few minutes, watch a youtube video, and have a pretty good idea of what we are getting into.
Different expectations.....
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
This is exacerbated by MMOs all moving to similar playstyles and revenue models (revenue dictates a lot of gameplay). So when you finish with one MMO going to another seems rather deja vu.
MMO land became saturated with MMOs by 2005, since then it has been a lot harder to make an impact on the genre. You have to have a fantastic brand like Elder Scrolls or Star Wars, and you have to appeal to all the players who are not really like gamers of old. Some might say its not a genre for old men.
Ah... but see, if a game wants , my money, they best cater to what I find enjoyable, yes?
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
In my career I recall working 432 hrs unpaid OT in one year in transportation engineering, multiple 14 day crunches of 12 to 14 hr days, 6 days a week in telco, endured several years of mandatory 50 hour (minimum) work weeks and clocked more 60 hr weeks (all on salary of course) than I care to think of.
Toxic envs? Check. Bullying got so bad at my office during one crunch I suffered a good old fashioned nervous breakdown, now a days called stress disorder or some such, took me well over the year to recover and I still suffer from anger mgmt issues because of it.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
There are many games I want to play but when I watch the youtube video I realise it is too hard. Then whatever interest I had is gone. I should be thankful that I am not spending the money on it thanks to the youtube video.
I would not have been able to play PSO2 if not for the summoner class.
I want the old games because at least I can still play them.Lot of the new ones are way beyond my ability to manage the action combat.
Just saying.
I just started to play DDO again (made in 2006) and, while chatting, topic turned to why we were all playing a 14 year old game as opposed to a newer game.
While many answers were said, there was a more uniform agreement that we play it because the game is "deep". It gives us all the ability to play the way we want to play, with a huge amount of options, and styles, and abilities that all matter.
And while as anything organic goes, yes the topic of updating the game came up, basic ideas of just a graphics update and some of the more modern systems of cosmetics, which, were much talked about and embraced.. but then the idea of all the "mistakes" they made, and I say "mistakes" because some people loved those features and some hated them, and lo, it turned into a match of fussing about what was good and bad.
Anyway.. I think if Given the Choice between playing a remastered Old Game, or some new Game, I would be far more inclined to give a remastered game a chance if I liked it the first time around, so much so I would even be inclined to willing to "Pre-order" to support the remastering process.
This makes me believe that there is a huge subset of gamers (perhaps the aging/older demographic) that is in fact excited at the prospect of playing a remastered or spiritual successor of a game they loved.
To be fair however, it is not the majority, because when I look at Star Citizen, with how much it made vs a title like Paneton, it seems rather obvious more people are looking for the new shiny, but that does not discret the legion of gamers that are looking for that nostalgic resurgence.
Just my observations.