MMOs died out?

[Black_Willow]

There is plenty of "survival MMOs" like Conan, Ark, Last Oasis, etc. Oasis is particularly known for some harsh pvp shit.

Yeah, I think survival-crafting games are where a large chunk of MMO crowd went.

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

Norfleet, you can play eve for free on Alpha account. I have like 6 of those. You can, and will win fights on 1mil skill point alpha account, and you get free 1mil sp if you sign up with a code (pm me if you want one). On alpha, you can't fly expensive stuff, which is great, because you won't be afraid to loose it :D

 

[ADL]

Yeah, I think survival-crafting games are where a large chunk of MMO crowd went.

Pretty difficult to justify playing an MMO these days when you can get a better looking, better playing comparable experience out of something like this. ARK and Atlas in particular have a lot of really interesting mods and roleplaying communities. Especially since you can hop from linked server to linked server running different maps with a persistent character.

 

[TheEntitledOne]

Amazon? Lordy.

Wait until MMORPG mechanics are applied to your job. Oh, wait...


https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/22/...e-working-conditions-gamification-video-games

Amazon turns warehouse tasks into video games to make work ‘fun’

Conditions in Amazon’s warehouses are notoriously grueling, but the company has a new tactic it thinks will make employees’ lives easier: turn work into a video game.

As detailed in a new report from The Washington Post, Amazon has started installing screens next to workers’ stations that feature simple games with names like PicksInSpace, Mission Racer, and CastleCrafter. Their physical actions, assembling orders and moving items, are translated into virtual in-game moves. So, the faster someone picks items and places them in a box, for example, the faster their car will move around a virtual track.

The games are intended to make work less tedious, but also encourage higher productivity by pitting workers against one another in the virtual game world.

The games are voluntary and have so far been installed in five warehouses in the US and the UK, reports the Post. In at least one facility, managers reward workers who achieve high scores with Amazon “swag bucks.” This is a company currency that workers can only exchange for Amazon-branded merchandise, like t-shirts and water bottles.

Imaging getting killed by an amazon delivery truck and then getting isekai'd into an amazon warehouse MMO.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

They're so dead that this entire forum section barely has posts for the new year.

 

[Perkel]

Ohhh i get it now. This is why Amazon bought engine and few studios. They will make FPS, RPGs for their workers.

Imagine. Planescape Torment 2 written and directed by Chris Avellone. Playable only on Amazon Warehouse displays ! Get hired today !

 

[TheEntitledOne]

How to bait codexers to a death camp:

Ohhh i get it now. This is why Amazon bought engine and few studios. They will make FPS, RPGs for their workers.

Imagine. Planescape Torment 2 written and directed by Chris Avellone. Playable only on Amazon Warehouse displays ! Get hired today !

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Training Videos for Amazon gaming, i guess...




Anyway... i guess it fizzled out as I haven't seen 2021 VRMMORPG listings..

 

[kreight]

I read some news the other day. Americans were using VR sets to educate people on racism.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

And i thought they were sex instructing devices. Let the VR guide you with your love doll, waifu pillow, hooker, gf, wife at the honeymoon suite... educational... yeah

 

[Caim]

I read some news the other day. Americans were using VR sets to educate people on racism.

How? By making them experience a lynching in first person?

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Choking control collar sold separately?

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

MMOs lost their way, led astray by WoW gold. You see, as early MMO devs realized very astutely, the real MMO potential always lay in the social and interactive aspects. In those early days, games like MUDs, UO, and SWG were built around social interaction. Even more themepark MMOs, like Everquest, still had mechanics which encouraged social interaction and made it mandatory.

Then WoW happened, and over time, eliminated social interaction almost completely from the genre. Cross-server dungeon LFG queues, phasing, instanced content, battlegrounds/arena PvP (with queues), etc. But it did so well financially, that all other MMO devs/publishers didn't care that it was essentially killing off the genre, they blindly followed along like blind lemmings, jumping off the cliff of WoW's success.

Since then, we've had a putrid stream of WoW clones of varying quality, but all inferior to the original. So yeah, other genres picked up the slack of bored MMO players: MOBAs, survival games, battle royales, etc. But of course none of those genres offer the glory of a true MMO, so mostly the consumer has been screwed.

Ultimately, one can only hope that with enough time and failure, someone with money will realize that hey, the true potential of MMOs is in social interactions between players, whether it be in the context of combat, economy/trade, politics, or LARPing or whatever. Just imagine an MMO with Eve Online's political meta-game BUT with actual gameplay below that.

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

Eh, I wouldn't say Eve doesn't have gameplay. If you find the right group you can do small gang warfare, which is fun. Less and less groups like that though
100% agree though that social aspect is the strength of Eve. There's even a saying that "The best ship in EVE is friendship"

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Whether point and click spaceship combat and chatting while waiting for mining to complete count as gameplay is ... debatable.

 

[Caim]

You know which MMO has tried to improve the social interaction aspect instead of the rat race to the top? Runescape. No really. They redid the mining and smithing skills to allow for more social interaction instead of competition (especially mining) and they added a new skill that lets you talk to other people while training, so the game is a lot more social than it used to be.

 

[Norfleet]

You know which MMO has tried to improve the social interaction aspect instead of the rat race to the top?

Some of those older games realize the important thing that sets an MMO, especially an aging one, apart: The social aspect. People play an otherwise shitty game because their friends play it.

they added a new skill that lets you talk to other people while training, so the game is a lot more social than it used to be.

A curious choice. Chat, at best, is an increasingly cursory element of the game, given how widely accessible outside comm systems are. Promotion of social aspects, while it begins with chat, certainly shouldn't consider it a goal. Especially one that you charge people in buildspace for.

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

Yeh, EVE is good example of failed experiment of integrating chat. EVE voice was a horrible piece of shit and nobody cried when it was discontinued. Most serious groups use mumble/teamspeak, with more pubbie places using discord. Local chat in many places is cancer (jita being uber), with just occasional reason for a good fight. Corp/Alliance chats are mostly useful for sharing intel and seeing who's online. All the real comms happen outside of game on forums, discords, and voice comms.

 

[Calthaer]

I have a thread you may find interesting.
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/mmos-didnt-die-they-just-became-single-player.123840/

Truth. Classic EverQuest was impossible solo - you had to group. That meant some boring times when you were "LFG" for a while, but once you got into the groove it was fun teamwork. Nowadays there are better single-player games offline; why bother logging in for pixel quests?

 

[Galdred]

Ultimately, one can only hope that with enough time and failure, someone with money will realize that hey, the true potential of MMOs is in social interactions between players, whether it be in the context of combat, economy/trade, politics, or LARPing or whatever. Just imagine an MMO with Eve Online's political meta-game BUT with actual gameplay below that.

Actually, I played Eve online (a little), Shadowbane, and several browser based political/strategy games(Fondations, Hyperiums, and some "instanced" ones like BattleCorps), and I think the latter were more interesting, even though they had even less "gameplay". In fondations and Hyperiums, the gameplay was moving your ships on the map, and joining/betraying alliances, so you ended up doing that 100% of the time instead of 10% in Eve (where most players are too busy not getting ganked to take part in politics). Also, 3 AM raids did exist in these games, but they were not nearly as bad as in Shadowbane because your ships/armies would still fight when you were offline (no idea about Eve as I never got to that point, but I think it is also common).

I wish there was a really successful MMORTS experiment actually.

 

[J1M]

The social aspects of gaming were consolidated outside of individual products into tools like Discord. They lowered the bar on the gameplay requirements so much that you don't need to even open the game to socialize while your friends are gaming now. It also hurts socialization in a way, since the cycle of forming and curating groups of people now leans more on previous connections instead of new common interests.

 

[ADL]

I don't see desktop MMOs working out ever again unless developers were both able and willing to force users into running it in a sandbox mode that disallows shit like Discord running in the background but that'll never happen even if they could because they're too scared of the outrage. The lack of Discord on consoles is why console MMOs are somewhat more tolerable but even then you have people using the app on their phone and reading everything off the wiki.

VR MMOs and super niche games like Project Gorgon have a fair shot.

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

That's not a problem of Discords or wikis, but with MMOs being theme parks and being able to be solved. All the PVE in EVE is "solved", so by not reading up on wiki or getting info from other players you're gimping yourself. PVP is where the fun is, and you can't really solve unpredictable humans - no amount of discord chats or wikis will help there.

 

[kreight]

PVP in mmos is an outdated concept. If I want PVP ill play MOBA. PVP in mmos is either unbalanced arena with very few players or it is based on ganking. Ganking is griefing, it's a sad thing which no one except gankers like. GOP-STOP.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=03usuu5Osrs

 

[Calthaer]

PVP is where the fun is, and you can't really solve unpredictable humans - no amount of discord chats or wikis will help there.

That, or some kind of really dynamic content engine where the world shifts intelligently to player action(s). The kind of thing where empty zones will slowly increase in danger (and loot) until they bleed out into other zones and start to threaten the "safe" areas in the game, a world where the environment figures out where players are massing and sends AOE casters to take them out en masse. Where the game AI at least looks like it's trying to win and it's not just an amusement park. I don't know if such a thing is possible, but I'd love to try it.