The Absolute State of the MMORPG Genre

New World
Ashes of Creation

These two sound like the 2 big MMOs in development, releasing somewhat soon. And then in a few years the games being made by the ex Blizzard guys.
 
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Biggest problem is all these developers are still trying to copy World of Warcraft and its success, by doing so they offer nothing new. World of Warcraft was lightning in a bottle. It'll never happen again. But I guess we can't fault them for trying.
 
New World
Ashes of Creation

These two sound like the 2 big MMOs in development, releasing somewhat soon. And then in a few years the games being made by the ex Blizzard guys.
Doesn't give me a lot of hope. Ex Blizzard guys were supposed to create the next Diablo game...Hellgate London, which failed miserably. (Still have my CE of that game) And Torchlight, which was a minor success, at least the first one.
 
BDO is nothing like world of warcraft. At the same time, microtransactions and pay2win features keep it from being a better game (but obviously make them more money). It feels like a massively single player online rpg though. Because they made almost all content solo accessible, which is kinda good, they also made grouping optional usually inferior (some minor improvements to this in newer content). The PVE bosses are also garbage. They don't seem to understand how to design challenging PVE encounters requiring teamwork. The decision to make it a solo-friendly game causes a lot of, I think, unintended negative consequences. Every class needs to be a DPS class, so it's difficult to design encounters around a tank, dps, healer line-up.

I enjoy the PVP mechanics, but it's too gear focused and all the gear is pretty simplistic, and due to the way item progression works (which I like), it's difficult to switch gearsets to try out different builds. There's no interesting items like a necklace that has zero stats but instantly resets a cooldown on an ability or something. It's all just +dodge, +defense, +attack, +accuracy basically.
 
...Is shit. MMO's have ran their course.
I agree. I was watching a streamer today for the new ffxiv update. How do these people get so giddy and excited to basically do the same content over and over? Game just looks so boring and stale at this point. I didn't even get so excited about new content when I was a teenager 20 years ago mmorpg were the new thing.
 
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My wife is happy there isn't a great MMORPG out there for me to waste my time on anymore.
 
I hear the term MMORPG (or even MMO in general) and I just avoid. I tried Guild Wars 2 awhile back, barely played it, they are just boring to me.

Planetside was a cool idea but not super well-executed.
 
WoW never appealed to me, but I did spend 3 years on the SWTOR train

I guess the setting matters to me more than the genre. I haven't seen anything in the last 10 years that has appealed me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
Doesn't give me a lot of hope. Ex Blizzard guys were supposed to create the next Diablo game...Hellgate London, which failed miserably. (Still have my CE of that game) And Torchlight, which was a minor success, at least the first one.
Wasn't wildstar made by some ex blizz employees, and while I liked the astethic of that game and the humour, the gameplay was terrible.
 
Big WoW player since launch, but I think Shadowlands is just extremely boring and generic feeling. I really can't even muster up the energy to play anymore.

Go out and kill 12 pigs and bring them back to NPC. Your reward is nothing. Now do that 10 times a day for 5 days and you'll get a mediocre reward, maybe.

I just can't do that anymore.

Or run Mythic+ dungeons, good luck finding a good group but low keys are easy and decent fun. But you can only run the same 8 or 10 dungeons over and over before you've seen them dozens of times each. Gets stale.

Raids. I'm done with those. I don't have the 3 to 4 hours each time to just sit at my computer whacking away at video game monsters and get almost no rewards due to Shadowlands crap loot system. Plus the stress of Raiding, don't make any mistakes or we'll wipe.

This might be the worst WoW expansion of all time. And not because it's terrible or the worst, no because it's hollow and lacking everything fun, feels lifeless and like the interns made it.
 
to be fair most games are the same content over and over. Dark souls, nioh, aarpgs like grim dawn and diablow have you running the same missions cycles over 3x , 5x, 10x and revisiting the same bosses over and over just grinding for gear and affects. Procedural generation / shuffling module puzzle pieces helps a little in some games but still. Competitive games (shooters, mobas, pvp arenas etc) are even less variety in the same mall arena smash up derby rock'em sock 'em robots over and over, usually with smaller maps.

Personally for wow back in the day once they opened up cross server instancing and raiding it took away the local server community. They also made flying mounts which further removed players from being on the same server in the same "neighborhoods" forced to interact on the ground.. making friends/alliances, reputations, and enemies. Additionally , while I get why they added heavy PvP segment to the game financially and to appeal to fps type players, I think PvP is a square peg in a round hole in a PvE content game. It perverts some of the core abilities of classes and uses trinky and other tricks to get around the fact. There are other games for that (mobas) made for pvp arena play from the ground up. All of the above made it less "world" and more "instance". There are plenty of other critiques. Setting up busy work on a weekly basis to get buffs or crawl toward gear/crafting goals instead of adding new content.. leveling "stuff" on the small scale gets tedious too. And you are paying, too much per month for the sub in my opinion to boot. In my opinion they should be like $5 a month. not $12 - $15 and if you don't log in that month they shouldn't charge you. At the rate they are charging you, you should get a ton of games like a game pass. Utimately, the worst part of MMOs for me besides the aforementioned complaints is the 2nd M... the population and time treadmill somewhat based on what masses of other people do in the game.

The current MMOs I've tried in the last several years all seem to switch to consolized controls with only a few action bar slots and they mostly use AoE/Fan/Cone splash attacks in effect or whip around weed wacker spinning arc things rather than targeting. Alot of games in general also use turbo boost type of mobility popular in some japanese titles and I hate that almost as much as bungie grappling hook type mechanics for A.D.D. These days I'd much rather play a co-op game even if it has some progression within it and be able to drop in whenever I feel like it but I'm mainly into single player games. Also worth mentioning as an aside - the massive amount of cheaters in online games (especially laddered shooters).. if you follow the news especally from the last 5+ years but it goes back further. There have been whole industries dedicated to it and personalities have been caught cheating on video/streams too, even quite recently. Very large numbers imo. To me that makes "competitive" online gaming a joke.

I like watching some D&D (table + dice, some computer maps and dice rolling though depending) streams online once in awhile. I think the MUD/MMO genre got away from a lot of that group exploration, unique characterization, fun mob fighting and boss fighting feel then on to the next adventure -- and became more like machinery cleaning floors and workers all with the same uniforms more or less. There are some turn based games that are still much more like D&D but it would be nice if there was something in between that wasn't turn based yet not machine/robot tasks and raids on repeat. It probably has to be generic and machinery-like that way because there are so many people playing at once and everything has to be "balanced". To me WoW is the AoL/Facebook/Minecraft of MMOs but critiques aside, it set a high standard.
 
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Wasn't wildstar made by some ex blizz employees, and while I liked the astethic of that game and the humour, the gameplay was terrible.

Yeah, Carbine studios. I wanted to say Ex fallout but yeah it was members of Blizzard's wow team.
 
to be fair most games are the same content over and over. Dark souls, nioh, aarpgs like grim dawn and diablow have you running the same missions cycles over 3x , 5x, 10x and revisiting the same bosses over and over just grinding for gear and affects. Procedural generation / shuffling module puzzle pieces helps a little in some games but still. Competitive games (shooters, mobas, pvp arenas etc) are even less variety in the same mall arena smash up derby rock'em sock 'em robots over and over, usually with smaller maps.

Personally for wow back in the day once they opened up cross server instancing and raiding it took away the local server community. They also made flying mounts which further removed players from being on the same server in the same "neighborhoods" forced to interact on the ground.. making friends/alliances, reputations, and enemies. Additionally , while I get why they added heavy PvP segment to the game financially and to appeal to fps type players, I think PvP is a square peg in a round hole in a PvE content game. It perverts some of the core abilities of classes and uses trinky and other tricks to get around the fact. There are other games for that (mobas) made for pvp arena play from the ground up. All of the above made it less "world" and more "instance". There are plenty of other critiques. Setting up busy work on a weekly basis to get buffs or crawl toward gear/crafting goals instead of adding new content.. leveling "stuff" on the small scale gets tedious too. And you are paying, too much per month for the sub in my opinion to boot. In my opinion they should be like $5 a month. not $12 - $15 and if you don't log in that month they shouldn't charge you. At the rate they are charging you, you should get a ton of games like a game pass. Utimately, the worst part of MMOs for me besides the aforementioned complaints is the 2nd M... the population and time treadmill somewhat based on what masses of other people do in the game.

The current MMOs I've tried in the last several years all seem to switch to consolized controls with only a few action bar slots and they mostly use AoE/Fan/Cone splash attacks in effect or whip around weed wacker spinning arc things rather than targeting. Alot of games in general also use turbo boost type of mobility popular in some japanese titles and I hate that almost as much as bungie grappling hook type mechanics for A.D.D. These days I'd much rather play a co-op game even if it has some progression within it and be able to drop in whenever I feel like it but I'm mainly into single player games. Also worth mentioning as an aside - the massive amount of cheaters in online games (especially laddered shooters).. if you follow the news especally from the last 5+ years but it goes back further. There have been whole industries dedicated to it and personalities have been caught cheating on video/streams too, even quite recently. Very large numbers imo. To me that makes "competitive" online gaming a joke.

I like watching some D&D (table + dice, some computer maps and dice rolling though depending) streams online once in awhile. I think the MUD/MMO genre got away from a lot of that group exploration, unique characterization, fun mob fighting and boss fighting feel then on to the next adventure -- and became more like machinery cleaning floors and workers all with the same uniforms more or less. There are some turn based games that are still much more like D&D but it would be nice if there was something in between that wasn't turn based yet not machine/robot tasks and raids on repeat. It probably has to be generic and machinery-like that way because there are so many people playing at once and everything has to be "balanced". To me WoW is the AoL/Facebook/Minecraft of MMOs but critiques aside, it set a high standard.
I agree with a lot there. I am not a very social person but ffxi I was. Back in the day the community was pretty damn awesome and everyone knew each other. There were real rivalries better linkshells and was loads of fun.in FFxiv you que up for a dungeon and it is common to have no one say shit the entire time. Outside your raid group there was no community. Even in big free companies there wasn't much going on.
 
I can barely watch 3 seconds of this guy.

To be honest I’ve never watched any of his videos before. Of course I’ve heard of Asmongold but never clicked to watch his stuff before last night. I thought these were very funny I was laughing out loud nonstop.

But maybe because those two videos are different, it’s him watching another Youtuber's videos about MMOs so it was sort of like two videos at the same time him just commenting on what those other video reviewers were’s were saying
 
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Biggest problem is all these developers are still trying to copy World of Warcraft and its success, by doing so they offer nothing new. World of Warcraft was lightning in a bottle. It'll never happen again. But I guess we can't fault them for trying.
I couldn't agree more. It's alluring from a business perspective as they are the original "game as a service", which can be highly lucrative but the problem is that replicating that success is difficult at best. Many games have achieved short term success, but nothing on the scale of World of Warcraft. I believe, this is because these developers aren't doing anything new as they are afraid to deviate from the formula that made World of Warcraft so successful. Developers need to understand that it was a fluke of sorts given that the identical formula has never worked as well when adapted by other companies.
Doesn't give me a lot of hope. Ex Blizzard guys were supposed to create the next Diablo game...Hellgate London, which failed miserably. (Still have my CE of that game) And Torchlight, which was a minor success, at least the first one.
It shouldn't. Developers are afraid to do anything new in the genre. The genre itself is stale. No one wants to innovate, playing it safe that the formula behind WoW will work again if another game has the right hook. Be it graphics, a sci-fi theme, or whatever.
 
To be honest I’ve never watched any of his videos before. Of course I’ve heard of Asmongold but never clicked to watch his stuff before last night. I thought these were very funny I was laughing out loud nonstop.

But maybe because those two videos are different, it’s him watching another Youtuber's videos about MMOs so it was sort of like two videos at the same time him just commenting on what those other video reviewers were’s were saying

The face looks familiar but I never watch either, I was just jumping into the MMO discussion of the thread.

If he's entertaining to you nothing wrong with that. Sometimes personalities burn their bridges with people along the road or just get annoying with time. Not everyone has watched so isn't on the same page. Also sometimes a matter of personal taste (e.g. Linus) :yuck:
 
Like I said, I haven't watched anything by Asmongold before, but that second video is frigging funny as hell, comedy gold. His commentary to the review he's watching is spot on.
 
WoW never appealed to me, but I did spend 3 years on the SWTOR train

I guess the setting matters to me more than the genre. I haven't seen anything in the last 10 years that has appealed me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

To some degree I was the same way. I tried a bunch of MMO's over the years. Part of me likes the idea and some of the concepts. However, I found I actually dislike games they way they are currently being made. The only one I liked was SWTOR, which was much like WoW mechanically. However, for some reason it grabbed me while no other MMO's ever did. One thing I learned was that I hate leveling, I hate dailies, fetch quests and the whole MMO grind. However, I do absolutely love raiding for some reason. I liked raiding in just about everything I've tried it in. Sadly, no MMO besides SWTOR was able to hold my interest long enough to get to end game. However, I've enjoyed raiding in Destiny 2 and even Ghost Recon Breakpoint. Sadly, they only ever had one raid for the latter.

To be fair, most of my real life friends who play games all played SWTOR with me. They are also the same ones who played Destiny 2 and Ghost Recon Breakpoint. I think having friends involved in the same activities are why I enjoyed the raiding experiences so much. I'm not enough of a fan of the Division 2 to play it alone. However, with friends I can play it all day. Now, SWTOR I could play alone, same as Destiny 2 sometimes. But I think that social connection helped hold my interest for far longer than I'd have maintained it otherwise.
 
Star Wars Galaxies was my favorite MMO of all time and I played it on release in 2003. I still have my original box and discs too. Back before the dark times (WoW), I was certain that SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) was going to be the big player given that they had SWG and Everquest 2. WoW appeared and singlehandedly changed the market and SOE, desperate to compete, destroyed SWG in the process.

I think the kind of open-world game like SWG is dead, at least to the big publishers. You may have games like it from small indie publishers which carve out a niche, but ultimately those never last. It’s a shame, as my brothers and friends would come over and crash at my house almost every weekend and we’d play SWG the entire time. The fact that SWG released 18 years ago makes me feel really old.
 
Star Wars Galaxies was my favorite MMO of all time and I played it on release in 2003. I still have my original box and discs too. Back before the dark times (WoW), I was certain that SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) was going to be the big player given that they had SWG and Everquest 2. WoW appeared and singlehandedly changed the market and SOE, desperate to compete, destroyed SWG in the process.

I think the kind of open-world game like SWG is dead, at least to the big publishers. You may have games like it from small indie publishers which carve out a niche, but ultimately those never last. It’s a shame, as my brothers and friends would come over and crash at my house almost every weekend and we’d play SWG the entire time. The fact that SWG released 18 years ago makes me feel really old.

I never understood the appeal of that game. Frankly, I thought it was terrible. They managed to make a game that had droids, Stormtroopers and a lot of the imagery we associate with Star Wars. Yet, somehow the game never felt like Star Wars to me. I always thought it was a mess mechanically and I absolutely hated the quest design based on what I recall. I played it enough to give it a fair shake but it never grabbed me.
 
I never understood the appeal of that game. Frankly, I thought it was terrible. They managed to make a game that had droids, Stormtroopers and a lot of the imagery we associate with Star Wars. Yet, somehow the game never felt like Star Wars to me. I always thought it was a mess mechanically and I absolutely hated the quest design based on what I recall. I played it enough to give it a fair shake but it never grabbed me.

I agree on some of your points but disagree on others:

1. Mechanics - the original version of the game (called Pre-CU) was definitely a mixed bag. Crafting was awesome across all versions of the game. Combat, however, was somewhat frustrating because it was more of a “load my queue with one of a bazillion attacks and wait for them to execute.” I was in the minority that thought the game improved with the CU, though had the original CURB been implemented, it might have been better. The NGE was a complete disaster. I had a second character who was an architect and I bankrolled my main character by cornering the market on some of the heavy harvesters during some of the great resource drops. I loved being a “businessman” back then. :)

2. Was it “Star Warsy”? Most definitely and as a SWTOR player as well, I think Galaxies was way ahead in this department. Nothing beat exploring Tatooine in the initial weeks and months of the game. I still remember the first week of the game, as a band of us ran across the deserts of Tatooine at night and were forced to set up camp and wait for daylight due to all the dangers. The theme parks were very well done (Jabba‘s Palace, Emperor’s Retreat, etc). I enjoyed SWTOR and my group and I all preordered and played around the clock in the early release and initial weeks; however, it felt too linear and constrained to me.

3. JTL was great and had tons of potential, but SOE squandered it. My one complaint was that I wished it moved a bit faster, but it was great getting on a multi-person ship and engaging in combat while your friends were in turrets or repaired the ship.

4. Jedi - the downfall of the game was people whining about how hard it was to become a Jedi and that was partially behind the NGE. The game takes place between Epsiodes IV and V - there were a handful of Jedi left and it should’ve been very hard to get one.

5. Planets - Tatooine and Naboo were great. The rest seemed like pretty generic sci-fi planets so I can possibly agree they didn’t feel “Star Warsy.”

I occasionally play the SWGEMU but with no one to play with consistently, I haven‘t really established a routine. Plus, the EMU is still under construction and has been for like 17 years, so like many, I’ve kind of moved on. There is an NGE emulator where they’ve added new planets and content, but I hate the NGE and can’t force myself to like it.

My gaming patterns have changed tremendously in the last decade as well. I started gaming as a kid in 1978 or 1979, when I first played Space Invaders at a theater, and gamed heavily until the mid 2000s. Coincidentally, that is around the time SWG effectively died. If I’m honest, had SWG launched today instead of 18 years ago, I wouldn’t play it more than a week or two. I’ve gone from a gaming diehard to a casual gamer. If you added up all the time I’ve played games in the past two years, it wouldn’t even equal a single weekend of gaming from 2003 or 2004.

MMOs like SWG and EQ are nostalgia for me and from what I consider a better era of gaming and a time when I was single and stress was low. Now I’m 50, married, have many more responsibilities, and have a stressful job which is sucking the fun out of everything. :) I get why games like WoW are popular compared to games like SWG - the grinding is much less. Still, firing up the SWGEMU and running into the Tatooine night, even briefly, takes me back to the Galaxy far, far away and makes me feel like a kid again.
 
I think and know EVENTUALLY there will be a big MMO release with tens of millions of subs again, when it's like full on VR life like, and even touch and smell is in the game, and you interact with thousands of payers all the time and everywhere your head turns you see the game world around you, alive and living. But something like that is probably 30+ years away.

In the meantime, thinking back on all my years playing WoW, I recall around Cataclsym, back in 2010, when they redid the original areas, i was like, man imagine WoW in 10 or 15 years from now when it'll be running on a brand new next gen game engine with A.I. controlled Smart NPC's and the game is freshened up. Well those 10 to 15 years have come, it's right now, and WoW is still the same old game, with crap graphics, and stupid fetch quests, ugh.
 
I think and know EVENTUALLY there will be a big MMO release with tens of millions of subs again, when it's like full on VR life like, and even touch and smell is in the game, and you interact with thousands of payers all the time and everywhere your head turns you see the game world around you, alive and living. But something like that is probably 30+ years away.

In the meantime, thinking back on all my years playing WoW, I recall around Cataclsym, back in 2010, when they redid the original areas, i was like, man imagine WoW in 10 or 15 years from now when it'll be running on a brand new next gen game engine with A.I. controlled Smart NPC's and the game is freshened up. Well those 10 to 15 years have come, it's right now, and WoW is still the same old game, with crap graphics, and stupid fetch quests, ugh.
Yea when tech gets to that point. MMORPG as they are now have become nothing but stale copy cats. Nothing will capture the market like WoW did.
 
I think and know EVENTUALLY there will be a big MMO release with tens of millions of subs again, when it's like full on VR life like, and even touch and smell is in the game, and you interact with thousands of payers all the time and everywhere your head turns you see the game world around you, alive and living. But something like that is probably 30+ years away.

Hah, so kind of like "The World", the MMO that .hack was about? I'd be into it despite there being a teensy tiny risk of going into a coma if your character dies in game, NBD. :D
 
Doesn't give me a lot of hope. Ex Blizzard guys were supposed to create the next Diablo game...Hellgate London, which failed miserably. (Still have my CE of that game) And Torchlight, which was a minor success, at least the first one.

Oh man, I loved both!
Especially Hellgate London, that game was tons of fun. I don't know why it was so hated. It was probably way ahead of its time. No one asked for FPS Diablo game. But look at them now, Outriders, Division, Borderlands, Destiny, etc etc.

SW:ToR is actually more fun to play than WoW. And I'm not a SW fan. But I come back for the story, not the dungeons/raids.
I'm putting a lot of hope into Diablo 4 with its more open world MMO approach. I'm hoping it will have a monthly sub so the content is constantly coming.
I hate F2P games because you always have to give up something. Path of Exile is not a bad game (although I hate its aesthetics) and the F2P system is not bad, but the fact that its cosmetic means the in game loot looks like shit.

Also New World and Ashes of Creation is what I'm very interested in, but sceptical.
 
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I agree on some of your points but disagree on others:

1. Mechanics - the original version of the game (called Pre-CU) was definitely a mixed bag. Crafting was awesome across all versions of the game. Combat, however, was somewhat frustrating because it was more of a “load my queue with one of a bazillion attacks and wait for them to execute.” I was in the minority that thought the game improved with the CU, though had the original CURB been implemented, it might have been better. The NGE was a complete disaster. I had a second character who was an architect and I bankrolled my main character by cornering the market on some of the heavy harvesters during some of the great resource drops. I loved being a “businessman” back then. :)
I always felt the game was needlessly complex and that the combat wasn't engaging at all.
2. Was it “Star Warsy”? Most definitely and as a SWTOR player as well, I think Galaxies was way ahead in this department. Nothing beat exploring Tatooine in the initial weeks and months of the game. I still remember the first week of the game, as a band of us ran across the deserts of Tatooine at night and were forced to set up camp and wait for daylight due to all the dangers. The theme parks were very well done (Jabba‘s Palace, Emperor’s Retreat, etc). I enjoyed SWTOR and my group and I all preordered and played around the clock in the early release and initial weeks; however, it felt too linear and constrained to me.
I never got that "Star Wars" feel from it. Everything looked right, but the way the game played gave it a feel all of its own for better or for worse.
3. JTL was great and had tons of potential, but SOE squandered it. My one complaint was that I wished it moved a bit faster, but it was great getting on a multi-person ship and engaging in combat while your friends were in turrets or repaired the ship.
A lot of what was implemented at this time should have been in the game from day one.
4. Jedi - the downfall of the game was people whining about how hard it was to become a Jedi and that was partially behind the NGE. The game takes place between Epsiodes IV and V - there were a handful of Jedi left and it should’ve been very hard to get one.
That's one thing SWTOR did right with its setting taking place so much earlier.
5. Planets - Tatooine and Naboo were great. The rest seemed like pretty generic sci-fi planets so I can possibly agree they didn’t feel “Star Warsy.”
And this was part of the problem for me.
I occasionally play the SWGEMU but with no one to play with consistently, I haven‘t really established a routine. Plus, the EMU is still under construction and has been for like 17 years, so like many, I’ve kind of moved on. There is an NGE emulator where they’ve added new planets and content, but I hate the NGE and can’t force myself to like it.
I can't go back and play super old games. They just don't hold up well for me and all I ever notice is their flaws, dated designs, etc. I'd rather remember the games fondly than play them wondering what the hell I ever saw in the games to begin with.
My gaming patterns have changed tremendously in the last decade as well. I started gaming as a kid in 1978 or 1979, when I first played Space Invaders at a theater, and gamed heavily until the mid 2000s. Coincidentally, that is around the time SWG effectively died. If I’m honest, had SWG launched today instead of 18 years ago, I wouldn’t play it more than a week or two. I’ve gone from a gaming diehard to a casual gamer. If you added up all the time I’ve played games in the past two years, it wouldn’t even equal a single weekend of gaming from 2003 or 2004.
I only played SWG for a few weeks. To be fair, I'm not a fan of MMO's in general. I like them conceptually, but the terrible narratives, generic storylines, boring fetch quests, and tedious mechanics put me off to them. Weirdly, I love endgame raiding but I've never been able to get to the end game of most MMO's. I feel like they are work or that my subscription fee forces me to play them to get my money's worth. They feel like a grind and more like a job. I'd rather do my taxes or clean my baseboards with a toothbrush than play most MMO's.
MMOs like SWG and EQ are nostalgia for me and from what I consider a better era of gaming and a time when I was single and stress was low. Now I’m 50, married, have many more responsibilities, and have a stressful job which is sucking the fun out of everything. :) I get why games like WoW are popular compared to games like SWG - the grinding is much less. Still, firing up the SWGEMU and running into the Tatooine night, even briefly, takes me back to the Galaxy far, far away and makes me feel like a kid again.
I get that. I'm rarely nostalgic or sentimental in that way. Revisiting old games tends to entertain me for all of ten minutes as the experience never lives up to the memories I have of playing those games. Also, I have one of the same problems with SWG that I have with modern open world games. Or any "sandbox" for that matter. They lack direction and if they have a narrative to speak of, it's so unfocused that I can't get into them. There are some exceptions for this in terms of open world games, but they are few and far between.
 
I'm still waiting for an MMORPG where player skill is a major factor. I don't mean knowing what spell combos to use, I mean mechanical skill like aiming and dodging shots with nothing being lock on. Basically Skyrim and Oblivion type combat.

Nearly everything I've seen or tried has lock on spells and shots, or skill just doesn't really matter at all because level and item stats overwhelmingly trump the skill.

I've been hyped and disappointed so many times I've basically given up looking. Maybe there will be a VR MMORPG that does it.
 
I think I may unsubb from WoW, until patch 9.1 comes out in July / August.

The last time I truly had fun and a smile on my face and really excited to play WoW was during Legion, I just loved that expansion.

BfA I played, didn't love that one, but also didn't hate it either. It was just good enough to keep me subbed, but my game time was definitely less compared to Legion.

But Shadowlands, I'm just not into. Feels so stale and tedious and like nothing to do. Feels empty. I log in play for 5 minutes then log off. There's nothing going on. Sure M+ is ok. And Raiding is not my thing anymore. And PvP is dumb this isn't Counterstrike deathmatch.
 
I think I may unsubb from WoW, until patch 9.1 comes out in July / August.

The last time I truly had fun and a smile on my face and really excited to play WoW was during Legion, I just loved that expansion.

BfA I played, didn't love that one, but also didn't hate it either. It was just good enough to keep me subbed, but my game time was definitely less compared to Legion.

But Shadowlands, I'm just not into. Feels so stale and tedious and like nothing to do. Feels empty. I log in play for 5 minutes then log off. There's nothing going on. Sure M+ is ok. And Raiding is not my thing anymore. And PvP is dumb this isn't Counterstrike deathmatch.

I've heard this complaint about Shadowlands from the few people I know who are into that game.
 
I'm still waiting for an MMORPG where player skill is a major factor. I don't mean knowing what spell combos to use, I mean mechanical skill like aiming and dodging shots with nothing being lock on. Basically Skyrim and Oblivion type combat.

Nearly everything I've seen or tried has lock on spells and shots, or skill just doesn't really matter at all because level and item stats overwhelmingly trump the skill.

I've been hyped and disappointed so many times I've basically given up looking. Maybe there will be a VR MMORPG that does it.

The closest you can get is something like Destiny 2. Afterall, it is a shooter and shooting skills do factor into the gameplay. However, it's not a full MMO. Beyond that, there is a problem with shooter skill coming into play and that's that the mechanics typically found in MMO bosses do not necessarily translate to something with typical shooting mechanics. Mechanically speaking, shooters are typically best in a first person perspective which doesn't lend itself to MMO boss mechanics. Honestly, Skyrim and Oblivion style combat would be problematic as well. Frankly, you'd end up with one combo, build or set of skills that beats everything else and you'd have to execute that same combo over and over again. Destiny 2 has this problem with bosses where swords are the meta for DPS. This can be done from the third person of course, but I'm not sure that it would work any better with typical MMO bosses. I suspect it wouldn't.

Now, the problem with shooters or anything with a loot system like an MMO is that they become gear dependent, and thus, skill becomes less important than gear or figuring out what the meta is for abilities and weapons. Destiny 2 should be about skill, but tight enrage timers on some bosses mean that there is basically only a couple of viable DPS loadouts for a given boss. If you don't have Anarchy, Xenophage, Lament or Falling Guillotine and a few other specific weapons, LFG groups will not take you. Similarly, there was always a "best way" to deal damage in SWTOR. Rotations were almost always fixed and there wasn't a great deal of room for variation. Skill in that game is more about understanding its mechanics and being able to execute rotations and react to boss mechanics but that's it.

I think that's one of the reasons why MMO's are basically stuck in the past and why they are built the way they are. Another reason is that there is some lineage with pen and paper RPG's where they feel they have to stick to an almost DnD system and have abilities and skills structured that way. Actual skill as you've described it isn't necessarily desirable as that always makes a game inaccessible to potential customers. I almost feel as though there is no way to innovate in the MMO space, or at least, I can't see a real solution to the shortcomings of the genre. I think they'll fail time and time again and fall to the way side the way MUDs and space combat games have. Basically, no one could figure out ways of doing them better, so developers quit making them. Or, some technological advancement leaves that style of game in the past.
 
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I think there's space to innovate, but maybe because the market has dried up everyone is trying to do everything with their MMOs and then doing everything poorly as a result. BDO, for example, has pretty good combat compared to stuff like WoW used to, so there has been development, but the whales, and I would say most people that like RPGs, don't want to play an MMO based purely around skill. So gear needs to be more important than skill in a lot of games to appeal to more customers. PvP vs PvE is another one I see, where the PvP crowd turns off PvE players and the PvP crowd likewise gets bored by PvE content. Again, I kind of like BDO's approach here of incentivizing PVE players to join PVP servers by giving them higher loot droprates and such, but I feel like it needs to be more than that. Having trade caravans earn 10x more on PVP servers but lose their goods to PVPers if they get murdered I think is the type of thing that's needed. Then you start giving people incentive to create bodyguard guilds, caravan raiders, etc. to create a more alive world feeling. What I've seen in the past is that one side or the other is catered to too much and the other side leaves for something else. So I guess devs need to get better at providing incentive to both sides to play together or to just stick to a limited design philosophy and just do certain things well.

I tried planetside for awhile just to test it out and it really fell short of my expectations. As a shooter I guess it was alright, but I didn't feel like it offered anything better in the FPS segment than other games. And as an MMO it all felt pretty meaningless. I think the correct approach for something like this would be to make gear basically meaningless except for supporting different playstyles (sniper, MG, demo expert, etc.) and to put the development focus into making the performance on the battlefield give meaningful impact. I think I've seen better "MMO" ideas in FPS games such as the winning team choosing the next map, getting more respawns next map, etc. In a non-gear based game maybe building in better territory control mechanics and funneling those resources gained by winning battles into vehicle/building/heavy weapon resource points or something would help. I think with these type of games you also need a quarterly reset mechanism like some survival games are doing. Once one group steamrolls all the others, you reset everything and let everyone try again on an updated version or a new area.
 
The closest you can get is something like Destiny 2. Afterall, it is a shooter and shooting skills do factor into the gameplay. However, it's not a full MMO. Beyond that, there is a problem with shooter skill coming into play and that's that the mechanics typically found in MMO bosses do not necessarily translate to something with typical shooting mechanics. Mechanically speaking, shooters are typically best in a first person perspective which doesn't lend itself to MMO boss mechanics. Honestly, Skyrim and Oblivion style combat would be problematic as well. Frankly, you'd end up with one combo, build or set of skills that beats everything else and you'd have to execute that same combo over and over again. Destiny 2 has this problem with bosses where swords are the meta for DPS. This can be done from the third person of course, but I'm not sure that it would work any better with typical MMO bosses. I suspect it wouldn't.

Now, the problem with shooters or anything with a loot system like an MMO is that they become gear dependent, and thus, skill becomes less important than gear or figuring out what the meta is for abilities and weapons. Destiny 2 should be about skill, but tight enrage timers on some bosses mean that there is basically only a couple of viable DPS loadouts for a given boss. If you don't have Anarchy, Xenophage, Lament or Falling Guillotine and a few other specific weapons, LFG groups will not take you. Similarly, there was always a "best way" to deal damage in SWTOR. Rotations were almost always fixed and there wasn't a great deal of room for variation. Skill in that game is more about understanding its mechanics and being able to execute rotations and react to boss mechanics but that's it.

I think that's one of the reasons why MMO's are basically stuck in the past and why they are built the way they are. Another reason is that there is some lineage with pen and paper RPG's where they feel they have to stick to an almost DnD system and have abilities and skills structured that way. Actual skill as you've described it isn't necessarily desirable as that always makes a game inaccessible to potential customers. I almost feel as though there is no way to innovate in the MMO space, or at least, I can't see a real solution to the shortcomings of the genre. I think they'll fail time and time again and fall to the way side the way MUDs and space combat games have. Basically, no one could figure out ways of doing them better, so developers quit making them. Or, some technological advancement leaves that style of game in the past.

Yeah, the more skill matters the harder the game is to balance which is why I think it hasn't happened yet. It seems like some RPGs start out with that goal during development but give up.
I was really hoping Elder Scrolls Online would do that but I was disappointed when they just went with generic MMO combat with spells and arrows magically homing in on enemies etc., and drastically scaled back the freedom compared to what Skyrim and Oblivion had.

I did enjoy Destiny 2, but yeah it's definitely not a full MMO, and it doesn't really have much RPG in it.

I think there's space to innovate, but maybe because the market has dried up everyone is trying to do everything with their MMOs and then doing everything poorly as a result. BDO, for example, has pretty good combat compared to stuff like WoW used to, so there has been development, but the whales, and I would say most people that like RPGs, don't want to play an MMO based purely around skill. So gear needs to be more important than skill in a lot of games to appeal to more customers. PvP vs PvE is another one I see, where the PvP crowd turns off PvE players and the PvP crowd likewise gets bored by PvE content. Again, I kind of like BDO's approach here of incentivizing PVE players to join PVP servers by giving them higher loot droprates and such, but I feel like it needs to be more than that. Having trade caravans earn 10x more on PVP servers but lose their goods to PVPers if they get murdered I think is the type of thing that's needed. Then you start giving people incentive to create bodyguard guilds, caravan raiders, etc. to create a more alive world feeling. What I've seen in the past is that one side or the other is catered to too much and the other side leaves for something else. So I guess devs need to get better at providing incentive to both sides to play together or to just stick to a limited design philosophy and just do certain things well.

I tried planetside for awhile just to test it out and it really fell short of my expectations. As a shooter I guess it was alright, but I didn't feel like it offered anything better in the FPS segment than other games. And as an MMO it all felt pretty meaningless. I think the correct approach for something like this would be to make gear basically meaningless except for supporting different playstyles (sniper, MG, demo expert, etc.) and to put the development focus into making the performance on the battlefield give meaningful impact. I think I've seen better "MMO" ideas in FPS games such as the winning team choosing the next map, getting more respawns next map, etc. In a non-gear based game maybe building in better territory control mechanics and funneling those resources gained by winning battles into vehicle/building/heavy weapon resource points or something would help. I think with these type of games you also need a quarterly reset mechanism like some survival games are doing. Once one group steamrolls all the others, you reset everything and let everyone try again on an updated version or a new area.

Yeah I played BDO and it was pretty fun, but holy shit is that game a grind. I got to the point where I couldn't really move on to new areas without simply grinding the same thing for hours so I got bored with it.

I played Planetside 2 and while it was fun it definitely didn't have much RPG, it was really just Battlefield at a larger scale.
 
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