Anoregon
The flight plan I just filed with the agency list me, my men, Dr. Pavel here. But only one of you!
Please. EVERY MMO is better than Everquest.
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How WoW ruined the MMO genre.
- Thread starter Azzurri
- Start date
Please. EVERY MMO is better than Everquest.
meanspartan
Member
I also think his metaphor falls apart. Jordan's personality may have been more and more manufactured, but there are TONS of personalities in the NBA today, all of them different.
Sure everyone is compared against Jordan, but only because he was the best.
And to take his metaphor to a different direction, yes, WoW like Jordan is the standard others are compared too. But also like Jordan, its existence doesn't mean there can't be other good MMOs (players). Sure, maybe Bryant or Love or Nowitzki or what have you aren't judged to be as good as Jordan, but they are still damn good players.
Just like Guild Wars 2, EVE, DCUO, etc, are all good MMOs even if they aren't WoW.
Sure everyone is compared against Jordan, but only because he was the best.
And to take his metaphor to a different direction, yes, WoW like Jordan is the standard others are compared too. But also like Jordan, its existence doesn't mean there can't be other good MMOs (players). Sure, maybe Bryant or Love or Nowitzki or what have you aren't judged to be as good as Jordan, but they are still damn good players.
Just like Guild Wars 2, EVE, DCUO, etc, are all good MMOs even if they aren't WoW.
SWG already was
BULL
Yes, the MMO genre is dead. So dead in fact that it accounts for 20% of all video game revenues.
WoW was great.
It is now different, but still well done/highly polished.
Too many games have segmented the world/don't allow flying mounts. That sense of place. That sense of freedom. No other game has been able to create the same sense of world that WoW does.
ffiv for example is beautiful! but the loading screens really take away a lot of what i like about mmos
It is now different, but still well done/highly polished.
Too many games have segmented the world/don't allow flying mounts. That sense of place. That sense of freedom. No other game has been able to create the same sense of world that WoW does.
ffiv for example is beautiful! but the loading screens really take away a lot of what i like about mmos
Azzurri
Member
And this is why I hate group finders and raid finders and all that stuff that actually takes out the exploration. People now want that instant gratification, no more doing anything and it's sad.
Arrogant Bastard
Banned
That is because death doesn't mean anything. It was one of the things that made EQ so good. I didn't want to die because I didn't want to lose the exp that I had just spent an hour obtaining. Not to mention I was constantly scared that I wouldn't be able to get my corpse back (thus losing all of my gear). The idea of having corpse recover gear in the bank is completely lost on most people. Yah, you had gear in the bank that you would put on when you died so you could work your way back to your corpse and recover the gear.
Leveling is also way too fast now in all MMO's. All people want to do is hit max level, start raiding, and then moan about how there is no new content. Rinse/Repeat.
Touché.
MMO's now are also filled with Fast Traveling points, like Guild Wars 2 and the new Elder Scrolls Online ( don't know about FF14 )
In WoW if you wanted to get somewhere that was not near a Major City you had to go on your awesome mount and ride it there.
It just felt so authentic.
Even in Vanilla when you had to take flight paths. I know that sometimes it took a long time, but it was just part of it. It was just so cool to go above areas that were to dangerous for you to explore.
I still remember flying from Stormwind to Ironforge and seeing Blackrock Mountain during the flight and just thinking : Man...I can't wait to be strong enough to go there.
There was just so much more surprises and wonder than nowadays.
Everything is artificial now. Everything is very casual oriented. Very streamlined...very limited.
The WONDER is gone in today's MMO's. Completely and utterly gone.
you design your game to let players decide the future of what happens in some place. Build or destroy and the changes must be able last for long time or forever.
ChosenPredator
Banned
Ultima online destroyed everquest
Inspired SWG greatly
& nothing has been like it since and im talking about the old school ultima online not the abomination that they've molested it into.
Azzurri
Member
And that is the problem with Theme Park MMO's; users will always eat up content faster than the devs can get it out.
I had no idea what a raid was before WoW, and I had been playing SWG and UO for 7 years(together) I never raided in SWG or UO and it was the most fun I've ever had. Now, it's lvl as fast as you can so you can PvP (instanced PvP) or Raid. In UO and SWG everything was in play. If I wanted to be a dancer I could, a musician same thing. If I wanted to sit in my house and decorate it all day I could. Shoot the shit in the cantina with my buddies I could.
We don't see this anymore, but hopefully with EQN will get some of that magic back.
Arrogant Bastard
Banned
I get what you are saying, it makes me wish I was able to play vanilla WoW. I was still enamored with EQ, I remember the demonization of guild members who left EQ for WoW. I had the exact same experiences in EQ albeit different, we didn't have mounts, or flight paths. If you wanted to get from one end of the continent to the other, you either got a port from a druid/wizard or you walked.
Part of me feels that we will never get this back, because it just is not possible. We have grown up, we have changed. The first MMO experience will always be looked back on with immense happiness. It is an impossible question, but if a new WoW/EQ launched today, as it was then...would we even play it or enjoy it.
Anoregon
The flight plan I just filed with the agency list me, my men, Dr. Pavel here. But only one of you!
I still go back to AC every now and then. Still such a unique, interesting MMO in both the lore/setting and gameplay. They even still add interesting stuff and do major change-ups sometimes.
WoW didn't kill anything, it just set a new standard for quality in the genre. No other MMO since its release has hit every quality landmark they needed to. Some were boring (biggest killer), some were buggy, some looked like ass (not a big deal, but let's face it, some gamers are fickle), some had terrible support, some had no/terrible end-game.... the list goes on. It's not Blizzard's fault that no other MMO has risen to this new standard.
Teletraan1
Banned
WoW is and always will be more feature complete than any other MMOs that come along. Every single MMO i have ever played outside of WoW its always streams of complaints that it doesnt have some obscure feature or QOL improvement that WoW has had 10 years to implement.
It did that style of combat better than any other game.
Once people played WoW for long enough people got so invested in those characters it was impossible to pull some people away.
I really hope there is a return to SWG style MMOs. I am sick of WoW and its clones.
It did that style of combat better than any other game.
Once people played WoW for long enough people got so invested in those characters it was impossible to pull some people away.
I really hope there is a return to SWG style MMOs. I am sick of WoW and its clones.
Arrogant Bastard
Banned
This is the problem, this right here. No offense.
People want a new MMO to offer WoW's current level of polish, and guess what you are not ever going to get that. Ever. It is an unrealistic expectation.
Bingo.
Especially the investment into their characters. Good luck with that, trying to pull someone away from a character that they invested so much in...yah. We are talking about people who have over a year of real time in their characters, they aren't just going to walk away. I think a lot of people have rose-tinted glasses when it comes to WoW.
so.... games should not be great, because otherwise people will make bad copies of them?
Great post that gave me the idea to expand upon my previous post;
After 4 years in Aion, I am quitting permanently because it became so much casually oriented that nailed the coffin for me (as well as a shit ton of reasons). I remember in December when they introduced one event and all the servers were doing non stop that mini event and for a month and a half everyone was doing that and just that, literally just that. When the event ended everyone had the same gear, tons of kinah (in-game money) and so on and so forth.
I can't take this ideology anymore - where everyone is the same, everything is attainable by everyone in a short amount of time, everyone can be everyone. That is why you see so many free jumpers - the mass exodus in every current mmorpg after its launch - because they are not challenging enough and/or captivating to maintain a healthy population; Aion specifically used to have 5000 on average and now in Eu it barely gets 400 players per server.
And that is coming from someone who for the past two years is a casual as well.
thehunter01
Banned
The problem with mmo's in general was, that if you didn't spended a life time on it you couldn't compete. If you joined later after a expansion or two had hitted, you would have a absolute horrible time to grind through all the content in order to actually be capable to do something, because everybody was already at the end content anyway. The game really just started there. As no new players where found in the game anymore, the game kinda became deserted at the leveling area's which also repelled new players even more.
Wow made things easy and simple already from that perspective. But it didn't offer the quality most mmo's had at the time when you started those mmo's from day one and actually advanced with the majority of players.
New people didn't care about quality if the quality was not reachable by them any time soon. This is why sunwell in tbc was something that the wow developers regretted about building it in such way that only really a few % of the players could enjoy. This is why they make everything to this day of age easy and simplistic. Because they know that new players is what feeds them and not the old players. They will get bored and they will go somewhere else at some point. But if the content on the lower levels isn't solid or if we can't move those players fast enough to the end content they will quit and not bother at all with anything.
This is why every game these days tend to be easy and simplistic in general and needs to be fast rewarding.
Wow really never was that interesting towards people that played already other competing mmo's at that time. As they mostly had far more rich and deeper experiences. But for new players it was perfect.
example:
lineage 2 : to get a flying mount, you had to own a castle, be a clan leader etc etc. It took you probably a year or two to get it. ( and that's when you where extremely lucky already ).
wow: pay some cash get max level = flying mount there you go !.
Then when time passed and a lot of mmo's failed to track new people and just started to milk there low budget content, old players just became bored in general and just wanted to move on towards the next big mmo.
And that's when wow exploded. It also helped that they copied all there new innovations from other mmo's but made them more casual friendly so that people actually could reach it. It's also the reason why wow atm starts to stagnate massively. As there really isn't much else to copy anymore and the game just starts to feel like a boring same old same old experience.
Tbc was when wow really started to have content that made the game interesting for more experienced mmo players. Pre-tbc just felt like a beta to me all around. The content in it just wasn't there. It just had to go through some more patches / a expansion which at the end was the case.
Wotlk / catalysme just felt like a never ending commercial that just bored the hell out of me and eventually made me quit the game entirely.
I don't really think that's the case. I experience far more interesting worlds and combat solutions then what wow had to offer in other mmo's. I think this is more nostalgic way of a person that probably started with wow and not experienced anything else.
My man,first time in a mmo i felt i was in a real open world and everything even today going from one zone to another is amazing no loading screens what so ever.
I ask that to myself very often, and I think that, like you said, the answer is most likely no
I think that the enjoyment and wonder we felt at the time had a lot to do with the very high quality of the games, but above all, it was a matter of 'timing' and the fact that it was the first MMO experience.
It was a time when me and my friends had a lot of time to play and no responsabilities. It was a time when many people didn't know very much about MMO's, so you were seeing new stuff ALL THE TIME. We were discovering the whole game at the time, and it was awesome.
The whole discovery of the game itself was like a huge sandbox. But nowadays we don't have the same amount of time. Nowadays our heads are already filled with knowledge of MMO's. When you enter an MMO you immediately compare everything to your past MMO experience and figure out the game in a very short time.
Now we don't "discover" the game anymore, we just "figure it out" and that's it.
This also goes back to the fact that most MMO's now don't even want to focus on this discovery experience. They just streamline everything and make the whole game much more mechanic and artificial
Like I said, there is no wonder anymore. For that we would have to wipe our memories to experience it all again. And even then, like you said, we are now older. We have less time, probably less patience, and it's probably harder to play as much and with as many people as back then.
I hope this all makes sense...it's all a bit abstract and english isn't my native language so communicating these things can be hard.
WoW is still my best gaming experience ever, and I doubt this will ever change. I still once in a while go out with the friends that I played with at the time and we just have some drinks while reminiscing about the " WoW golden days", and it's awesome
Nostalgia...it's so bittersweet!
UO was before WOW and is the better social game and sandbox. Blizzard stepped in and made WOW, a more noticeably instanced game where soloing is too easy to do. A solo player in UO has to understand the game systems and be quick and intelligent to survive. More powerful characters in UO can be killed by starter type characters with good strats.
In WOW when something out of the ordinary happens people go nuts. Back in UO's hay day something crazy and emergent happening was par for the course.
WOW is made to be idiot proof, but in doing that they limit emergent game play and social play.
In WOW when something out of the ordinary happens people go nuts. Back in UO's hay day something crazy and emergent happening was par for the course.
WOW is made to be idiot proof, but in doing that they limit emergent game play and social play.
Don't Chinese pay per hour?
This should really read:
"How business and consumer practices ruined large businesses taking risks with large projects."
Businesses aren't going to throw a ton of money into something risky (something I agree and disagree with it at points), and consumers keep feeding large IPs year after year (WoW still makes all the money, as does CoD, etc.) so it really only makes sense for large projects (MMOs always fall under this category) to keep trying to do what is already working.
"How business and consumer practices ruined large businesses taking risks with large projects."
Businesses aren't going to throw a ton of money into something risky (something I agree and disagree with it at points), and consumers keep feeding large IPs year after year (WoW still makes all the money, as does CoD, etc.) so it really only makes sense for large projects (MMOs always fall under this category) to keep trying to do what is already working.
Liberty4all
Banned
I played all 3. DAOC rvr was great, UO was fun too if you had a good group of friends to play with.
Arrogant Bastard
Banned
Just canceled my WoW sub, thanks NeoGAF.
SatelliteOfLove
Member
It's a balance thing. I could NEVER get into EQ from what I heard of it. The shakeout was too strong for it to ever get past 500k subs by design; you could never hold onto enough people long enough to help that. They'd hit those long hour stretches and people who were barred from doing just about anything at that level by important real-life things. Developers were so terrified of people getting done and quitting that they cap themselves off by design as it eats into frustrated/stuck people.
Then on the other hand, you have this example (and current WoW amongst others) of developers so terrified by people getting stuck/frustrated and quitting that they throw everything at the player...leading to the player being disincintivized to keep playing much at all. Voila, the opposite problem starts to eat into sub base of more people quitting from feeling "done". I could never stay in an MMO that does this, even if it's fun as hell, as I'd be farming that fun as hell parts when I'm in till it swiftly stopped being fun as hell.
It's when these things are tools, not goals is when content-driven MMOs will get back on track of getting large and staying there. Correcting the player, not hating them, rewarding the player, not bribing them. Fixing problems with these methods instead of causing them. Until then, a stable but capped niche or a pump 'n dump concurrent population crash after launch is all that will happen.
While i somewhat agree, exploration is still there. It's just that now its about finding rares and treasures, not about finding the entrance to a dungeon.
diffusionx
Gold Member
I remember flying those same paths and saying the same thing. But I disagree that it is casual oriented now. Quite the opposite. If anything the flight paths and "wonder" is for the casuals just popping in once in a while.
Look, those flights are amazing the first time. Maybe the first 10 times. But think about who plays WoW these days. Mostly people who have been playing it for years. They don't care. They want to get from point A to point B to grind what they need to grind. There is no wonder anymore because it's all numbers. That's who the game is for. That's who Blizzard is designing to.
Regarding the topic: WoW blew the genre up way beyond what it ever should have done. The fact that no other MMO has come within a 1/10th of WoW's success proves as much. The massive investment of funds that went into MMOs post 2004 wouldn't have happened without WoW, and we would have gotten, in its place... nothing.
I absolutely understand what you are saying, about everyone looking the same, doing the same thing, and so forth.
This unfortunately also started to happen to WoW, specially by the end of the first expansion. But it went very much that way by the second ( WOTLK ).
Once again, making everything easily attainable to everyone is something that just takes the wonder out of the game.
There is no more mystery. Everyone knows everything and can do everything, and this sucks.
I remember when in WoW vanilla, I saw this guy in Stormwind with a fucking Epic Night Elf mount, in full PvP armor. He was a Paladin so he had this beautiful golden armor and was riding a goddamn giant tiger.
I was just in Awe.
I also remember when a raid from the Horde invaded Stormwind and we had like 200 people in their mounts lined up like an army in front of the gates ( we knew the attack was coming ). And then, at the forefront of the Horde attack, was a massive Tauren Shaman with the Hand of Ragnaros, a legendary weapon that I had never seen in the game before. He charged at us and it was chaos. At that time, you had to be lucky to even see that weapons model in the game, and when you saw it, it imposed respect.
These sorts of moments don't exist anymore, because the designers line of thinking now is that everyone should be able to experience all the content, over and over again. Forget the players creating their own experiences . That doesn't exist anymore, and I think this truly hinders these games.
And by the way, this is coming from a non-hardcore player. I would be one of those that could NOT experience this top content, because I couldn't commit enough time to it.
But you know what? I prefer to not be able to experience these things, and have them stay unique. I prefer to not be able to experience them, but feel the enjoyment and wonder of seeing that one badass guy with his golden armor riding a fucking epic tiger, instead of watching a bunch of clones acting like robots and doing the same things over and over again.
Casual was not a good term, so scratch that
. What I mean is that now everything seems to be built for robots. Just like you said. People don't think now. They log in, they do their daily dungeons or whatever it may be ( I haven't played in 2 years, so I can't comment on the state of things now ), they do their raids, and everyone has the same gear and does the same thing over and over. It's a constant automatic grind.And I perfectly understand what you say. People don't want to be on a flight path for 10 minutes now. That's absolutely true - But I think this happened because of the way the game evolved. The designers started making the game, like you said, "all about the numbers". People now just want their instant gratification fix. And while in part, it is due to them playing the same game for a long time, I also think that the direction of the game is to blame. People don't feel like they are in Azeroth anymore...they are simply in a game grinding for gear, over and over.
There is no more "sandbox" in WoW now. There is no true world pvp. There is no community creating their own experience. Everyone is a robot. Doing what the designers programmed for them.
I'm not offering a solution, because I'm not even sure there is one at this point, which makes me very sad.
TheChewyWaffles
Member
Arrogant Bastard
Banned
This is going to be a controversial opinion but it is one of the reasons why I was so angry when Timeless isle came out. In one fell swoop this isle destroyed tons of content.
Well, yes and sorta and no (can't watch on phone). I guess it depends on whether or not you agree that it was WoW's fault that so many devs copied (poorly) instead of doing their own thing like before. I disagree with that part because I consider personal accountability a thing. So many people apparently know allllll about WoW and why they like it and dislike it yet fail so badly to either emulate it or go back to how it used to be "when it was good" or "when MMOs were good" that I just don't get their point.
That's the thing though: that really didn't go anywhere. Heroic Garrosh is one of if the hardest bosses to ever exist in the game (and some of the others in this tier are up there). The bleeding edge hard content didn't go anywhere if one wants to experience it.
But it's also not the game's primary focus (at least not anymore). And I think that's for the best, since you can't realistically base a huge part of the game on such a small minority of players. Blizzard just wants people to see the content they paid for, so they released dumbed down versions of the raids to include everyone as best they can, so they can "see the content they paid for", yet still offer some very prestigious rewards for those that do harder modes (titles, heroic heirlooms, mounts, ect). It's as inoffensive as possible, really. It's not ideal for anyone, but that's something Blizzard has to deal with by having such a large userbase.
Technosteve
Banned
why not larp?
Slamtastic
Member
What if you want to larp with your internet friends who live across country or across the ocean?
I'm all for more larp simulator video games. Sandbox MMOs, Elder Scrolls, and hopefully more. Give me a good tool to immerse myself in a medieval fantasy world with elves and orcs, make that world feel real and alive, and let me perform all the miscellaneous minor task of living life.
TheChewyWaffles
Member
Night Elves could not be paladins
ding ding ding. Perfectly put. WoW was an incredible addition to the genre. The problem came when the genre stopped innovating and just kept trying to copy WoW over and over to mimic/match its success.
MMORPGs can be looked at as
Pre-UO
post-UO to pre-EQ
post-EQ to pre-WoW
post-WoW to...
In those 7 years or so the genre had four pretty major design shifts forward. And in the 10 years since we've essentially had none.
Hoping EQNext and Landmark change that.. we'll see I guess.
Arrogant Bastard
Banned
That is what you pulled from that...
That's the thing... he was a Human
And getting another race mount at that time was not easy, since IRRC, you had to be exalted with it, which evolved farming a lot of wool and doing a lot of quests. not to talk about the amount of gold you had to pay for the mount
TheChewyWaffles
Member
My bad
I misread that. I was a Paly back in Vanilla wow and we got so much abuse that it was almost like a wartime flashback.I see what you are saying, and I agree that the solution is not ideal either way.
But still, while I know that there is some very hard tier content, it's not the same anymore.
On Vanilla WoW you didn't see everyone running around in full epic gear. And if you saw someone will a full tier set, that was pretty damn impressive and awesome.
Sure, now not everyone has a flashy title, but everyone is running around in full sets, in full epics, and you only have blue items if you have just hit the level cap.
You do a 10 man raid or a 25 man raid...what is the real difference? I know that 25 man is harder and the gear is better, but looking at it it's all the same. The guy that makes 25 man raids might have a different color on his gear and that's it.
Look at something like Naxxramas ( probably not well written ) in WoW vanilla. Almost no one got even inside it. You went to the plaguelands and looked at that thing hovering over your head and you wondered how it might be...and if you saw someone with the tier set gear that drops in there...respect! It was just different...there was a sort of mystery to some aspects of the game. You heard stories of some guild that went in there and defeated some bosses and that was it...it was sort of a myth. At least to someone like me who played quite a bit but was not anywhere as hardcore to be in those raids...
Now it's not like that anymore
( when I say "now", I mean about 2 years ago during Cataclysm
, but I'm assuming it hasnt changed much )Coinspinner
Member
It's funny, when FF14 switched from seamless overworld to segmented overworld (not instanced) people seemed glad.
You probably would see that there's no point in stating this in this thread if you had watched the video, because that's exactly what he says in it.
SpookyFries
Member
The problem is that most MMOs that come out either lack content, lack end game, or just lack mechanics. I can't tell you how many times I quit WoW for another MMO just to return a month later. Everquest, Aion, Anarchy Online, City of Heroes, Dark Age of Camelot, Terra, Rift. They just didn't have that polished feel that WoW had. I agree that trying to copy WoW's success is the major issue here. Not too many people have tried to do anything original.
Also, subscription models are a thing of the past. Why would people want to pay 15 dollars for a game with no population/content? There are plenty of populated F2P mmos out there now. If you're going to throw a monthly fee on the game then you need to make sure you have the content to back it up. If you don't have any end game content for the people who get there quickly, they're going to get bored and find another game. If the mechanics are broken and people have a bad first impression, same thing. WoW came out at the right time. Even when it first released the game felt polished. The characters moved and animated smoothly, the controls were solid, the in game tools to keep in touch with your friends was easy. It wasn't too hard for new players but it had the content for veteran MMO players.
That's my giant point of view on the genre.
Also, subscription models are a thing of the past. Why would people want to pay 15 dollars for a game with no population/content? There are plenty of populated F2P mmos out there now. If you're going to throw a monthly fee on the game then you need to make sure you have the content to back it up. If you don't have any end game content for the people who get there quickly, they're going to get bored and find another game. If the mechanics are broken and people have a bad first impression, same thing. WoW came out at the right time. Even when it first released the game felt polished. The characters moved and animated smoothly, the controls were solid, the in game tools to keep in touch with your friends was easy. It wasn't too hard for new players but it had the content for veteran MMO players.
That's my giant point of view on the genre.