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Gregz

Arcane
Joined
Jul 31, 2011
Messages
8,511
Location
The Desert Wasteland
If this genre is dead or completely stagnant...

Having recently shopped the MMORPG scene (SWTOR, Wildstar, GW2) I have a few opinions on this topic.

In the late 90s - early 00s we saw the industry transition from brick-and-mortar, bought in a box, single-player RPGs to MMOs. It was a gold rush, and LOTS of people lost, a few people did pretty well, and ultimately WoW came out on top and crushed the competition, and held that spot for ~10 years.

Now, in the 00s to 10s transition, there's a terrible trend called 'F2P'. I have personally spoken with, at length, a person who spent $30,000 USD on a single MMO. I didn't believe him, so then he showed me proof. The entire industry is once again being forced to reinvent itself. The results are awful as you've seen. Quality is poor, paid progression is becoming standardized, and everything that gave a player prestige and respect in the previous generation of MMOs is now available by credit card. WoW is rapidly imploding right now from this very phenomenon, but they don't care because they are losing the $15/month players; not my buddy spending 30k.

Ultimately I think the F2P -> P2W model will fail, but out of the ashes something we haven't seen will emerge. A solution that brings players back. The industry needs to collapse first though, and it hasn't quite completed that transition. It may take another 5-10 years. After that, expect something really fresh and new to emerge.

In the meantime, stick with good kickstarter games, or you can always go back in time to the private/custom MMO servers that don't include the recent monetized expansions.

Here's a more eloquent description of why you are seeing such rapid decline:



tl;dr Chinese gold farmers uncovered a market, MMO producers have successfully monetized and legalized it, and that's what's destroying the integrity of online gaming as we used to know it.
 
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Joined
Jul 7, 2015
Messages
254
Location
Norfolk
I feel in the future MMOs will get more prominent as they continue to integrate with social media and our digital lives. If you haven't read Snow Crash give it a read, it only makes sense (to me) that we've been on that path for a while now.
 

Veelq

Augur
Joined
Jul 13, 2012
Messages
191
For me the big picture is : oversaturation of non-innovative themeparks + no sandboxes ( popular ones ofc ).
 

Bester

⚰️☠️⚱️
Patron
Vatnik
Joined
Sep 28, 2014
Messages
11,006
Location
USSR
I'm a bit surprised that nobody's trying to fill the gap of good mmos, but I'm sure it'll happen eventually.

Although WoW could be considered a clear decline when compared to older mmos, it still had most of the stuff that was required from a good MMO. And it had 8 million players in the Vanilla days. And all those 8 million people currently have nowhere to go, they're certainly not still in WoW. They're after a more "hardcore" and sandboxy gameplay than what modern casul themepark mmos have to offer, so they're waiting it out in LoL/Dota2 or aren't playing at all. Some are scattered across Mortal Online, Eve Online, etc, but those games probably can't satisfy them entirely.

And so the market is there, so it's inevitable that one day the gap will be filled.

Considering the pathetic state of affairs, instead of playing the shit they have, I'm building my own 2d graphical MUD on UE4 as a hobby. Got transition between rooms, basic combat mechanics and multiplayer. I'm probably biased but it's more fun than modern MMOs already.

4f3bc1557d5d49f7f64953b6a7ad6dea.png
 
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Veelq

Augur
Joined
Jul 13, 2012
Messages
191
There are projects like Crowfall and Camelot Unchained, but they are far from finish. And there is Albion Online but im afraid that developers aimed for relatively small audience and didnt count the fact that there is a huge group of players waiting for the next "big one".
 

Morkar Left

Guest
From someone who always felt that mmos are boring I think people are just tired from either grinding always the same quests or having a lot of pvp happen in the harderr ones (or the lack of pvp in games with a more soft approach).
With Minecraft and all the similar crafting/building games in Steams early access I think that's where the mmos will go to. People want to start to shape the mmo world by themselves. And right now they can have a similar experience with friends with such building games on dedicated servers in a smaller ecosystem. And it's for the fraction of the price an mmo would cost (usually paying onetime 15 € and your good to go) while mmo developers have way higher costs to rent all the servers for the game to run properly. It's not really viable at the moment?
 

HotSnack

Cipher
Joined
Mar 7, 2006
Messages
650
Investors threw money left & right back when they were seen as big money. Now MOBAs (and even more recently card games) have shown you can be just as lucrative at a fraction of the cost. They're still wasting money throwing money on anything that's not called LoL or Heartstone mind.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
From someone who always felt that mmos are boring I think people are just tired from either grinding always the same quests or having a lot of pvp happen in the harderr ones (or the lack of pvp in games with a more soft approach).
With Minecraft and all the similar crafting/building games in Steams early access I think that's where the mmos will go to. People want to start to shape the mmo world by themselves. And right now they can have a similar experience with friends with such building games on dedicated servers in a smaller ecosystem. And it's for the fraction of the price an mmo would cost (usually paying onetime 15 € and your good to go) while mmo developers have way higher costs to rent all the servers for the game to run properly. It's not really viable at the moment?

The winner might be the game that manages to combine those sorts of games with some of the addictive Skinner Box grindy structure of MMOs. And of course, lots and lots and lots of polish.
 

Veelq

Augur
Joined
Jul 13, 2012
Messages
191
Wurm Online combines minecraft with mmo, but i didnt play it. It makes sense because its made partially by Notch.
 

Morkar Left

Guest
From someone who always felt that mmos are boring I think people are just tired from either grinding always the same quests or having a lot of pvp happen in the harderr ones (or the lack of pvp in games with a more soft approach).
With Minecraft and all the similar crafting/building games in Steams early access I think that's where the mmos will go to. People want to start to shape the mmo world by themselves. And right now they can have a similar experience with friends with such building games on dedicated servers in a smaller ecosystem. And it's for the fraction of the price an mmo would cost (usually paying onetime 15 € and your good to go) while mmo developers have way higher costs to rent all the servers for the game to run properly. It's not really viable at the moment?

The winner might be the game that manages to combine those sorts of games with some of the addictive Skinner Box grindy structure of MMOs. And of course, lots and lots and lots of polish.

I agree. But actually I don't think that lots and lots of polish is needed. In general I think polishing is overrated. Lots and lots of gamers play early access, basically exclusively early access. I think as long as you can label your mmo as being in steady development / not final game design you can attract new players. What will not work anymore is paying for a monthly subscription.

I'm pretty curious how long Elite Dangerous - as a semi mmo hybrid - will do with its paying model. If it does well - paying the equivalent of a full price game (50 €) for one year of development - I'm sure mmos will probably adapt to this.
Basically games like Minecraft, Space Engineers and what not will pop up as an mmo game (which you can play in your own "forever alone" instance if you want) and provide additional story quests and new landscapes to explore on top of building your own Lego / Barbie dollhouse.
On top of that you can sell a shitload of additional purely cosmetic stuff like furniture, clothing etc. The mmo worlds of tomorrow will become what Second Life wanted to be: a virtual world you can "live" in with a new virtual marketplace to sell virtual stuff for real life money. And I'm not even mad at it as long the pricetags are reasonable (which I doubt).

Even Bethesda has introduced such building gameplay into their single player games. All this building and altering the environment is the next big thing in gamedevelopment and basically something new that gets incorporated into almost any genre similar to rpg mechanics some years ago.
 

Aenra

Guest
I don't think this genre ever lived, really lived. Something has to grow and expand in order for that to happen, so how could it be dead :)
The best it did in my eyes was paint a picture, one of a promise never realised. Hence my continuing to hope despite the hard facts;

Even if i ascribe a rose-coloured quality element (in antithesis to the genre is now dead, ie it was fine once) to some of the older titles (and i am guilty of that), the truth is they only felt so to me because:

- I was young
- I was in a state where playing games + playing them a lot was "ok" (emphasis on was)
- I was in a state where the sociological and emotional factor could or was forcefully projected onto the game environment

I fast forward it to today and look back, really look back, all i see is half shoddy tin cans i rode as trains because these were the best toys out there at the time. None of the 'oldie gems' really was a gem. They lacked important elements, they lacked the professionalism and quality factor which is a PREREQUISITE for any other product of millions and millions of dollars a cost. Barring their novelty, they had fuck all. Really fuck all.
Unless you are happy, twenty years later, being the same pathetic loser that spent 10 hours glued on his chair for lootz? It's just a change. Other things lacked back then, other things lacking now. Genre never took off, not creatively, not qualitatively. Such is the idiocy of the average gamer, that a pew pew onliner requiring 10hour sessions (for a single fucking piece of lootz) is considered a 'classic'....

If we have to succumb to the monosyllabic again, perhaps we could say it's undead :)
 

Veelq

Augur
Joined
Jul 13, 2012
Messages
191
I agree that alot of players think that mmos are games that if you want to be succesful you need to spend 10+ hours each day everyday to achieve that. But that comes from mostly themeparks that have preset goals to reach. And thats why i think more sanboxy mmos will be succesful because they will put the player in position of a person that creates the goal. Just like you do in Minecraft or for example Dwarf Fortress. Developers need to provide a universe where you can do stuff, relatively w/o restrictions. The more player driven gameplay and less restrictions + massive amount of options the better recipe for a good mmo. Devs have to understand that those games are the ones w/o end, so players shouldnt feel like there is one at any point of the game.
 

Mustawd

Guest
For me the main attraction of MMOs way back in the day was the feeling that you're in a living and breathing world. So many MMOs today seem formulaic or created to do Thing A Thing B and Thing C, but don't really meld cohesively to a "place"

Personally, the only time I ever got that feeling of a real live world was UO. Yes, guilds existed and parties were "formed", but there wasn't any real reason to play beyond just enjoying the world. You could level and grind and PvP, etc., but to me it always felt more organic than later MMOs where PVP was eventually the main goal (e.g. Dark Age of Camelot; which I loved for the PvP).

Other MMOs like EQ, DAoC, WoW always felt like the questing/killing monsters/crafting was very one dimensional. And if you think of the fact that you can't "win" an MMO, then it's the experience of a living world that ultimately brings you back.
 
Joined
Jan 4, 2014
Messages
795
You know, like most codexers I'm a single player guy and all that, usually MMOs (even when you loved to death and played for 38,000 hours one of them) are kinda disregarded and never appear on personal top 10 videogames lists and all that... but I can't lie to myself, it was a huge part of my gaming career. Starting with Tibia and then jumping over the years to UO, Ragnarok Online, Guild Wars 1 (not sure if I'd call an MMO but it's pointless to discuss this shit now), Lineage 2, WoW and finally GW2 which was my last MMO, all I can say is that all things considered I always had a fucking great time with this genre, which is a far, far reality from its sucessor's, the unbelievably stressful and irritating MOBA games.

Today I had a pretty entertaining conversation about this with a long time friend that played many of those MMOs by my side, and eventually we started looking at the newest stuff that's coming out these days or have been released recently. Wow... what a total disgrace. As far as I've seen there are next to zero meaningful stuff being made and all the latest ones look awful. What happened to the days where you'd open an MMO related website and would see billions of them being made and a lot of people interested in each one of them? Is everyone just populating the old, famous ones? If I want to go back to this genre, should I wait for some new promising one or just go back to WoW/GW2? Is there even people playing this shit nowadays or everyone and their moms already migrated to LoL?

If this genre is dead or completely stagnant (and one of the two is most certainly right) it's really a shame, so much potential for great stuff wasted and gone. Say, where the fuck is a modern, 2015 real sucessor to UO? Don't even think on that abomination that is SotA. And while I don't think GW2 is bad, I think it's infinitely worse than 1 was, starting by the fact that they fucked up the best class in any RPG in history - Mesmers and their debuffs, fuckups and anti-action stuff - and transformed it into an average "magical Phantom Lancer". The general structure of the game also doesn't really please me, but it's still entertaining to play with a couple of friends. I imagine it's a bit better now that it has guild halls and other stuff that makes it all less pointless, but whatever.

Eh, I don't know, I feel I've came back to an already familiar point: years away from MMORPGs makes you miss them and then you start looking back to search if there's any good stuff to return to. This time though I was surprised by a weird "sameness" in the available stuff, like nothing at all really changed in the last two or three years.
Maybe for you it's dead, but not for me.

Wurm Online was everything UO was and a lot more, at least to me. The thing you're missing is we're not all the same. Maybe you're right and the genre has forgotten people like yourself. For you, I can only hope good things are to come. Just don't pretend we're all in the same predicament. Many players make the mistake. I used to think that way. These days, I now realize we're all different. Most of us don't even realize we're different. Instead we mix everyone together.

Keep in mind my first MMO/MMORPG was Everquest. The second was Ultima Online. I played only played 1 month on the OSI servers. AFter that I played exclusively on player-run servers. I played quite a bit though. I played more Everquest in the long run.

Wurm Online DESTROYED EQ/UO for me. Maybe this is because Wurm Online has so much in common. Otherwise, I do have nostalgia for EQ/UO, but when it comes to spending money, I'll choose Wurm Online EVERYTIME because it's that goddamn good. It's just better. Sure, it's not an RPG. I haven't even seen any lore in it. There was no story. It just deposited me into the world with some tools and I survived. I enjoyed the f*** out of it! There're no traditional quests, just missions and they're rare. No non-player dungeons. Almost everything is player-driven. But it has everything else I ever dreamed of. It's another world!

Wurm Online won't be satisfying for someone who played EQ for the grouping, I'll admit. UNLESS they go to the PvP servers, but it's only distantly similar because PvP is not PvE. And people who played UO just wanted a sandbox version of EQ with more soloing. Wurm Online has a sandbox but only its mechanics are similar to EQ, the rest is not.

I sit here and I want to tell you how AMAZING Wurm Online was in those first initial moments in 2012. My God, it was better than sex. I've had so many moments in Wurm Online. The thing which makes it so special is the world exists on its own and changes and players are a signficiant part of the change. The world does have its own rules (or physics if it can be called that) and it'll change even without the players. But the combination of the two is where the magic occurs. The fact things at least remain similar from day to day makes it all the better because you grow attached to places. Living places!

Wurm Online has a lot of grind, but I find nothing else--I know of--even comes close to how alive it feels. Of note is I've played 99% on Chaos, a PvP server. Anybody of any skill can kill me. And they can loot and destroy anything I have. In all my years, I've found most players don't enjoy losing the security of PvE. But for me it's part of the "living, breathing world."

I do think Wurm Online is losing some of its survival aspect. It's mudflating and losing sight of things. Still, no matter how far from its roots Wurm Online goes, it's still much closer to what I want than most MMO's out there.

The lady in this vid is in her 40's and loved UO. She says Wurm Online is UO 2. Given what I wanted out of UO, she's almost completely right. However, some people want other things or don't like Wurm Online's implementation:


If you REALLY liked UO and the things which stand out to you were the sandbox and the PvP and the skill-based system and social aspect of making a guild house with others and you're ok with lots of grind and old fashioned mechanics then I think you should give Wurm Online a try. You have to also remember Wurm Online has a LOT of crafting! You probably had to like the crafting in UO. (Wurm Online recently added Bridges.) If you don't want PvP, you don't HAVE to start on a PvP server. If you want, just start on a Freedom server. Then once you're played for a while, sail to the Chaos server and get all the PvP you want. You can move to/from Chaos! Or you can create a Epic portal and go to those servers instead, but you'll have to start over because the game doesn't allow people to move stats/skills/items from Epic to Freedom or vice versa. Epic has much faster experience gain.

If you're itnerested, visit the wurm online thread:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/wurm-online-the-ultimate-sandbox-mmo.83506/
 
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Severian Silk

Guest
I feel in the future MMOs will get more prominent as they continue to integrate with social media and our digital lives. If you haven't read Snow Crash give it a read, it only makes sense (to me) that we've been on that path for a while now.
I read that book. I don't remember it having a P2W ending.
 

Zetor

Arcane
Joined
Jan 9, 2003
Messages
1,706
Location
Budapest, Hungary
I've been MMOing since the early UO days, and imo if you're looking for any innovation in MMOs, you've got to drop the first M. Trying to make a game that's only profitable with 100+k players is at odds with interesting / novel design, and with good reason -- the risk of failing is just too high, and then that's a couple years of dev time and hundreds of millions of $ down the drain. Better to make faceless EQ/WOW ripoff #8917243 with microtransactions instead.

MUDs have always been out there, and they have the potential to be amazing if you don't mind the lack of graphics. Underlight was quite interesting before it went under, but what I have my eyes on right now is Project Gorgon. It's in alpha and -as expected- looks terrible, but the concept (mainly sandbox with extreme world reactivity... there's some Dwarf Fortress-tier simulationism in the background) is great. It's also made by some of the original Asheron's Call team, so there's that.

e: btw, if you're looking for genre-shift level evolution in mass-market MMOs, it's already happened. They're called MOBAs now...
 
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zeitgeist

Magister
Joined
Aug 12, 2010
Messages
1,444
There is no need for massively multiplayer games anymore, since everyone's brains have turned into mush, so barely multiplayer games make equal or greater profit, and that's the only thing that matters.
 

Space Satan

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
May 13, 2013
Messages
6,216
Location
Space Hell
Change of formats. Now not everyone could allow to spend time on mercyless grinding. With MOBAs it's easy - you get in, play a match and have fun. In many MMOs you haveto invest HUNDREDS of hours just to begin having fun. To be able to run on guild wars with maxed levels or go on epic raids you have to invest a lot. Team Fortress 2, CS;GO or DOTA2, make match fully dependant on your skill without requirements to level up or grind up some equipment to be able to do something.
 

Doktor Best

Arcane
Joined
Feb 2, 2015
Messages
2,849
You know, like most codexers I'm a single player guy and all that, usually MMOs (even when you loved to death and played for 38,000 hours one of them) are kinda disregarded and never appear on personal top 10 videogames lists and all that... but I can't lie to myself, it was a huge part of my gaming career. Starting with Tibia and then jumping over the years to UO, Ragnarok Online, Guild Wars 1 (not sure if I'd call an MMO but it's pointless to discuss this shit now), Lineage 2, WoW and finally GW2 which was my last MMO, all I can say is that all things considered I always had a fucking great time with this genre, which is a far, far reality from its sucessor's, the unbelievably stressful and irritating MOBA games.

Today I had a pretty entertaining conversation about this with a long time friend that played many of those MMOs by my side, and eventually we started looking at the newest stuff that's coming out these days or have been released recently. Wow... what a total disgrace. As far as I've seen there are next to zero meaningful stuff being made and all the latest ones look awful. What happened to the days where you'd open an MMO related website and would see billions of them being made and a lot of people interested in each one of them? Is everyone just populating the old, famous ones? If I want to go back to this genre, should I wait for some new promising one or just go back to WoW/GW2? Is there even people playing this shit nowadays or everyone and their moms already migrated to LoL?

If this genre is dead or completely stagnant (and one of the two is most certainly right) it's really a shame, so much potential for great stuff wasted and gone. Say, where the fuck is a modern, 2015 real sucessor to UO? Don't even think on that abomination that is SotA. And while I don't think GW2 is bad, I think it's infinitely worse than 1 was, starting by the fact that they fucked up the best class in any RPG in history - Mesmers and their debuffs, fuckups and anti-action stuff - and transformed it into an average "magical Phantom Lancer". The general structure of the game also doesn't really please me, but it's still entertaining to play with a couple of friends. I imagine it's a bit better now that it has guild halls and other stuff that makes it all less pointless, but whatever.

Eh, I don't know, I feel I've came back to an already familiar point: years away from MMORPGs makes you miss them and then you start looking back to search if there's any good stuff to return to. This time though I was surprised by a weird "sameness" in the available stuff, like nothing at all really changed in the last two or three years.

Tibia? When did you play, and which server?
 
Joined
Jan 4, 2014
Messages
795
Change of formats. Now not everyone could allow to spend time on mercyless grinding. With MOBAs it's easy - you get in, play a match and have fun. In many MMOs you haveto invest HUNDREDS of hours just to begin having fun. To be able to run on guild wars with maxed levels or go on epic raids you have to invest a lot. Team Fortress 2, CS;GO or DOTA2, make match fully dependant on your skill without requirements to level up or grind up some equipment to be able to do something.
What kind o fun are you talking about? I think many here would classify Wurm Online as grindy. I do because it's definitely grindy. However, I enjoyed every second the moment I logged in. It didn't take hundreds of hours to realize I was playing a special MMO. I knew the first few moments. It was subtle. Things like: 1) different tiles slowing you down 2) slopes 3) not consolized 4) sandbox (not linear). And that was just in the tutorial. Many players apparently never evne make it out of the tutorial. In the past it was always thought the tutuorial just wasn't good. However, I thnk players picked up on these subtleties and quit. Hence, the only way the game is going to get a high population is to consolize itself and appeal to those gamers.

Yes if you want to go to PvP servers and be competitive then you'll have to invest either lots of money and some time or lots of time and some money. But if you can't enjoy the journey then Wurm Online isn't for you. People who come into the game wanting to be at the top of competition from the start are the kinds who'll grind and grind endlessly and make the game much worse. To enjoy the game you have to enjoy it for what it's. You have to like crafting. You have to like surviving in a harsh environment. You have to enjoy starting small and slowly developing. You have to enjoy being lost sometimes or evne losing some of your stuff. If you play on the PvP server, you also have to enjoy the thrill of being hunted and evading the hunter and sometimes losing. When I say sometimes losing, I mean having almost all of your s*** stolen or destroyed. It WILL happen.

I find I don't like people like that who only care about being at the top.

Thing is, lots of players who're like that will blame other things, like grind or just random s*** like trees you can't pass through or slopes which're "too steep!" They don't really know what they want and stab at everything.

I'm telling you absolutely honestly that the first few moments in Wurm ONline I KNEW it was what I wanted. It was a punishing sandbox world like nothing I had ever seen before. It has casted its magic on me and stuck ever since.
 
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