Decline Why do MMOs suck so much?

[KeighnMcDeath]

Its rather odd to see when/which MMOs are created, transfer hands, shut down, rebooted/changed. Some like UO have changed pretty drastically. I don't even know how many private servers there are.

When i finally got dialup I tried a few MUDS or is it MMUDS? Later I tried Wyvern, Dransik, Euo(now euotopia), PWI, drakensang Online, Aion, Angels Online, Path of Exhile, Wartune, Blood & Jade (yeah some of these are so not MMOs), Angels Online, Dungeon Inquisitor, Lost Runes, Realm of the Mad God, Scarlet Blade, and Aion.

Nothing hardcore here and a lot of shit. I try and got bored. Many if these games I tried while visiting my bro and using his highspeed network. Seems pay to win is a format for some but all you can waste time on. Forget about completion.

The ads in magazines made the first ones look cool. Gotta say I missed the bus and later just played mostly rubbish with the exception of euo (i went full autistic play on that since its free and ultima looking).

 

[Cryomancer]

Due WoW. mmos are more about farming carnavalesque armor and managing timers than actual role playing games...

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Lotsa spreadsheets?

 

[Axioms]

I really hate living in a world where you go from GW1 to GW2. What a massive downgrade. Lmao and half of it was casualization and focus on 5v5 pvp. Disgusting.

 

[anvi]

Arguably the MMORPG is the most declined genre of all (maybe jointly with the RTS). I have been hooked by two MMOs in the past: Star Wars Galaxies for the open world sandbox experience and Guild Wars 1 for the teamplay potential and good use of instancing.

Instead of progressing, MMO developers seemed to have just tried to make a bunch of reskinned WoWs, not improving on two of the main selling points of MMOs for me: (online) open world exploration/adventuring and teamplay potential.

My main frustration though with all of these MMOs is that the gameplay absolutely sucks and has not progressed at all in the last 15-20 years. When I'm used to Dark Souls or Dragon's Dogma why would I ever settle to play WoW/ESO/GW2 for hundreds of hours?

For me a big open world, sandbox MMO with the combat of Dark Souls or Dragon's Dogma would be absolutely amazing. Is it that this type of game would have no audience or something? I get that MMOs are huge investment and that risk adverse companies prefer to play it safe. But on the other hand, people seem to be abandoning this genre now for other genres for lack of any proper options.

This is such a weird and clueless post, damn. First off, try Black Desert Online, or Tera or ESO or the flashy Final Fantasies online etc.... They are more what you want. WoW is a 20 year old traditional MMO, and MMO's are descended from turn based Hobbit type text adventures, not action games. GW2/ESO are just reactions to and remakes of WoW, and WoW is just a remake of EQ, and EQ was a remake of a text based rpg. The whole genre had to grow on shaky technology of 56k modems. Also the problem of having hundreds of people in one place at one time.

Diablo 3 and Path to Exile, stuff like that is a better comparison to Dark Souls. WoW is a million times bigger and more complex than any console game. It also had 15 million people paying monthly for two decades, so every mmo ever since has been trying to emulate that. Not Dark Souls. Lately the slicker single player action rpgs have put pressure on MMOs which is why Black Desert, ESO, GW2, are all more modern and have more interactive and actiony combat instead of the more tactical combat the earlier games had.

 

[Garyxeao88]

As everyone else who writes these, you were never in to MMOs. You were in to WoW. Let’s just skip over the fact you got in to it when it was on the down slide of it becoming dumbed down and less about actual interaction that makes an MMO an MMO.

And lol on the other genres have consistency in their quality.

 

[Bohrain]

Always wondered how come MMO's didn't scale down the server sizes to say couple of hundred with more of Rust or Ark style of gameplay (with leveling 'n shit). Thousands of players in the same server don't really have that much meaningful interaction with each other, since keeping the server infrastructure fast and functional for that amount of players has it's limitations on what the players can do. If you want RT combat or destructible environment you have to instance it all and then you end up with a scenario of like couple dozen players doing it at once. The devs could've aimed at that sweet spot in size where it's small enough that you make a group with friends that can have a visible impact on the server, while being large enough that you can still log in as a rando and find existing communities within a server. Instead everyone copied WoW, which has degenerated into essentially being a single player experience where you play with random people on instances that you are unlikely to see in the server you play because of layering.

 

[Norfleet]

"Scaling down the server size" and "having existing communities" is somewhat at odds. If you have have the server size scaled down to the point where the individual player feels relevant again, then you have either a small game, or a game that has fragmented the playerbase into shards such that there is no longer a real community, just people who happen to be playing a game that is similar to yours, without actually being part of it in any real way. Otherwise, you've got random people on a shared world split across multiple bite-sized instances that make having all those people sharing the universe if not the instance be manageable again, and the sense of individual impact is lost.

It's a tough challenge: How to preserve a shared existence combined with a sense of local community.

 

[Cryomancer]

and more complex than any console game.

This is not truth.

WoW is a streamlined version of EQ. And BG2:EE received an console port.

Black Desert Online, or Tera or ESO or the flashy Final Fantasies online etc.... They are more what you want

All are low lethality gear farming, cooldown managing games. Not proper RPG's.

He likes more action games but more fast paced action games like Dark Souls which are nonexistent on mmos.

I personally enjoy games like ToEE and enjoy games like Dark Souls, but low lethality cooldown managing, gear farming games are just too boring and fells more like an work than a proper living breathing world. I understand him.

 

[Farewell into the night]

Most MMO's I've played where just hoarding drone timesinkers.

 

[Morenatsu.]

beast gaem is phantacy ster onlien 2, cos its not mmo :smaug:

 

[anvi]

Always wondered how come MMO's didn't scale down the server sizes to say couple of hundred with more of Rust or Ark style of gameplay

Yeah Norfleet is right, even if you only require 20 people for a big event, on small servers you end up struggling to get those 20 people reliably. Guilds end up needing to be 40 people to reliably have 20 ready to go at the right time. But that means managing 40 needy people and it means 20 will not get to be part of the main squad which can suck.

Also the M is for Massive after all, so there is the expectation that you have be 'with' thousands of people. A few hundred would be something new and the games industry is scared shitless of new. Copying previously successful games is all they want to do, especially with big budgets.

and more complex than any console game.

This is not truth.

WoW is a streamlined version of EQ. And BG2:EE received an console port.

Even streamlined it is still complex and enormous. It has 34,747 items with enchantments and stuff, 12 classes, about 100 spells on screen at once, 4 huge continents, a bunch of expansions going back 20 years, etc. You can play pvp in arenas, open world, battlegrounds, or pve in dungeons, hundreds of raids with all sorts of complex mechanics, etc. All these different things you can do require learning a bunch of stuff. Games like that are bigger than anything. Little old Baldurs Gate 2 doesn't even come close. The content they add over 20 years is huge, especially when they are making that much money. The asian grindfests are huge too.

Black Desert Online, or Tera or ESO or the flashy Final Fantasies online etc.... They are more what you want

All are low lethality gear farming, cooldown managing games. Not proper RPG's.

I agree but that is the nearest you are going to get to Dragons Dogma or Dark Souls in the MMO world. There are only a few 'high lethality' MMOs and they would not be suitable.

He likes more action games but more fast paced action games like Dark Souls which are nonexistent on mmos.

I personally enjoy games like ToEE and enjoy games like Dark Souls, but low lethality cooldown managing, gear farming games are just too boring and fells more like an work than a proper living breathing world. I understand him.

Me too but MMOs is looking in the wrong place. He should be looking at PUBG and Fortnite type multiplayer online action games and asking why there isn't a hack n slash version of that. MMO's were semi turn based until kinda recently. They shouldn't be expected to achieve a slick fast action game in a game with thousands of people. And if you shrink it down to a few hundred then it isn't an mmo. You all should be blaming the FPS genre not MMOs. I played Quake online with 100 people on a server in about 1997. Laggy as hell but we did it and it was awesome. But 20+ years later there is not much progress... Everyone got obsessed with boring CoD / Battlefield stuff so all the fun Unreal Tournament, Duke 3d, hilarious online carnage type games died out. PUBG and Fortnite type online shooters are getting big now but they aren't doing much more than in 1997. By now there should have been far more online action games, and good ones. But the games industry is it's own worst enemy.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Players get older and realize what a fucking useless and time consuming job playing an mmo is. That's why wow classic was so popular, bunch of 30 and 40 year olds trying to relive the magic of their youth and then getting bored or realizing that they don't have time for this shit anymore.

 

[anvi]

I agree but a lot of old people have little to do so love these games as well. I still love EQ but I use all sorts of hacks to make it how I want it.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Players get older and realize what a fucking useless and time consuming job playing an mmo is. That's why wow classic was so popular, bunch of 30 and 40 year olds trying to relive the magic of their youth and then getting bored or realizing that they don't have time for this shit anymore.

Lol... sounds about right.

 

[tindrli]

Players get older and realize what a fucking useless and time consuming job playing an mmo is. That's why wow classic was so popular, bunch of 30 and 40 year olds trying to relive the magic of their youth and then getting bored or realizing that they don't have time for this shit anymore.

happens to me all the time. except that after CS 1.x i didnt played much online at all.... now 98% is this "getting bored or realizing that they don't have time for this shit anymore"

 

[Perkel]

Because promise of MMO is to have living world where players replace NPCs in everything and this is where it initially was going.

Then devs hit technical limits like how many people per instance can play, quest design problems like how you can make quest when players might not be there etc. So they started cutting down on freedom. And now you have amalgamation of shitty design and technical limits to what is possible. So player driven shops were replaced by shitty loot generators, people hutning some beast for prescripted raids and so on and as time went it was clear that designers started doing everything to make sure people don't go through all content quickly.

I too wanted to play MMOs and was looking forward to that genre in 90s.

This was also reason why after decades of not giving a fuck i was actually pretty hyped about Ever-quest Next. Actual player driven economies, cities build by players etc.

The only thing that aspires for the same goals today funnily is Star Citizen. Whatever it will finish or not that is at least what is their goal.

All other like FF WOW clones and rest are just safe closed boxes with forced multiplayer rather than emergent multiplayer where you come with people to increase your chances to do something rather than just because that is how quest is done.

 

[Bohrain]

Camelot Unchained had similar ambitions about player-driven economy and player made cities, but it seems to be vaporware. 7 years and the project isn't anything close to launch ready as far as I know.

 

[Norfleet]

Because promise of MMO is to have living world where players replace NPCs in everything and this is where it initially was going.

The flaw with tihs plan is that, as it turns out , players are extremely unreliable. The entire game could just straight up grind to a halt when players vanish in a feedback loop.

Plus, there's the bootstrap problem: When the game starts, there are no players yet. Unless the very first players are somehow able to perform all of the game's core functionalities that you intend to have run by players, then nobody is doing any of those things on day 1.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Modern MMOs expecting you to buy the content then pay a subscription then shoving a cash shop in the game too is some of the most jewish shit I've ever seen

if you want to know why MMOs suck it's because they're ran by soulless husks of human beans that only care about milking whales

 

[anvi]

I've been playing the revamped Tera and it is really good. I've only done solo stuff so far but the combat is amazing, it makes games like Dragons Dogma look retarded. I hope the grouping is good though, and I hope there is something to keep me playing later on. But for now it is fun.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

I've been playing the revamped Tera and it is really good. I've only done solo stuff so far but the combat is amazing, it makes games like Dragons Dogma look retarded. I hope the grouping is good though, and I hope there is something to keep me playing later on. But for now it is fun.

this one?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I've been playing the revamped Tera and it is really good. I've only done solo stuff so far but the combat is amazing, it makes games like Dragons Dogma look retarded. I hope the grouping is good though, and I hope there is something to keep me playing later on. But for now it is fun.

this one?

Meh class lineup.
Modern MMOs don't even acknowledge support classes anymore.

 

[Cryomancer]

Modern MMOs don't even acknowledge support classes anymore.

When I was playing DDO in a group, as an warlock, I was using a lot of spells on my party members to buff/protect then while use my Eldritch Blast on enemies to DPS. Magic when can help allies and control enemies is far more interesting than only fireballs.

 

[Norfleet]

Modern MMOs don't even acknowledge support classes anymore.

That's because the "me" generation doesn't really grok the concept of a team. It's so bad that if you actually have a team and play as one, they'll accuse you of being robots.

That's why I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.