Remember the good old times of gaming? Whye are Blizzardians burned out and not releasing new features in their expansions anymore?
They gave us garrisons, players hated them.
They gave us pet battles, players laughed at them.
They gave us titanforging, players quit the game.
They strip their expansions of features instead of adding more, in fear of the game becoming too clustered.
Now they look back to the old way of thinking for answers. What made vanilla WoW so good, what kept the payerbase playing.
'Tis a great sadness that no good mmorpgâs are manufactured anymore. The asian mmoâs are 2 month hit & runs, i.e. initial sales cash grabs and then the game slowly dies out, they make a new game with minimal changes and slap a new random title on it - rinse & repeat.
Whye were games great in 2004 and now theyâre not? Why are investors investing in the low risk/high reward projects like mobile games that print money?
Folk are back to reading fantasy books agane to get their fix, cause no mmorpg is good anymore.
We are suffering a great mmorpg depression,
vanilla wow isnât good though, itâs frustrating full of bugs and wall jumping pvp cheating. itâs a complete mess without any fairness or niceness.
and thatâs what people like. weâre masochistics
You can look at Runescape for another good example of this. Old School Runescape is a lot more popular than Runescape 3. I feel the same happening to WoW. It might not be the same pop wise but I deffinetly feel it in the general attitude towards the game. The announcement and launch of Classic was met with a lot of hype. The announcement of Shadowlands was met with a cautious âPlease donât f it upâ.
I think the strength of old school MMOs was deffinetly the fact that it targeted a specific group of people. Sure you can say they were targetting sweaty nerds in their momâs basement, but at least they had reward systems that made it enjoyable for those sweaty nerds. If you look at Runescape you can say itâs just a bunch of clicking trees for a lot of hours until you get a cape. Yet the way its rewards are structured make it strangely enjoyable.
If you look at not only how WoW has evolved around 2011-2012 but also at most of the MMOâs coming out at that time, you can see a clear pattern of them expanding the content to be accessible for everyone in at attempt to gain large population of reccuring spenders. I think a lot more mmoâs would have succeeded as well at it if it werenât for the raise at the time of much more condensed experiences such as MOBAs. Why bother grinding a character to max level in a pretty boring experience when you can jump straight in to the action?
I think the combination of the mmo fanbase shrinking and a long series of failed MMOâs pretty much turned large publishers away from the idea of MMOâs. Either something truly groundbreaking will come out, an idea such as Star Citizen (which I have many doubts will ever come out) or weâre doomed to play the same old MMOâs for many years to come.
I love when the classic communityâs shows itâs true toxic face. Makes me always happy and wanting to quote all the talk about how nice and welcoming they are :>
Garrison had recently a big discussion on the forum and most agreed that it was a good feature just people would have liked to have it a bit more extended
Iâm just waiting for Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, seems like the next big thing on the MMORPG market, and will surely be a hit for the old school MMORPG crowd.
Ofc they dont make themppl are not interested in mmo anymore. Last one decent mmo i played was lineage 2. You could do nothing solo there and party was 6/9 support chars with 3 dps chars. 0 instances, all the stuff in open world. Long farm and best items craft system ever. Gold game but dead atm
Also garrisons were gold, mop farm was good. I dont lkke pet battles as its an mmo for me and if i want to play pokemon i got one on gameboy or my phone.
People want to play in communities not in a crowd.
If developers build the game soloable and group play is only optional thereâs gonna be only crowd but not community.
If they force teamplay then they take a huge risk: if the game is not attracting enough players it dies fast, the more players leave the less enjoyable the game will be which forces more to leave and so on.
So the only way to develop a successful MMO if developers and publishers also manage the community around it, which is too much work for too low profit.
Speak for yourself. I love Final Fantasy XIV more than any other game and thatâs a 2013 mmo.
Also lol. Wildstar was the worst optimised pile of crap Iâve ever played. That game tried far too hard to be edgy and a conforming coward at the same time. (Swearing upon level up but bleeping it, either let it be said or donât put it in at all) It was also mega fun constantly getting group quests in a dead world.
It is primarly because rs3 is just a mess of microtransactions & they stripped away alot of the fun from the modern game
Point is, why would you bother go and achieve anything when someone with a bigger wallet than you can be better at the game because he threw more money at the screen?
I think much of the problem stems from two things, the first being that many early MMOs were born out of RPG format games and were created by paper RPG players. So the exp/incremental reward system was integral, and the characters in this game and the format were all drawn from D&D or D&D style games.
Itâs why I had so much of a problem with Pandas, because theyâre just not a mythical being that fits with the format.
The second problem seems to influence most game producers and itâs something to do with many not really grasping why a game succeeds. The elements which get people addicted to a game often seem to pass the creators by, and their next shot at it takes out much of what was good and replaces it with what they imagine will make it better/more popular.
To get a winning game is more chance than design. The entire industry would have laughed at a game like Minecraft being successful before it became a success.
The format of classic should not have been changed at all. Expanded yes, but the general lore, the D&Desque theme, the advancement system and complexity should have been untouchable.
But arrogance, greed and sometimes a lack of creative talent, eventually shoots the goose that laid the golden egg.
It does make me wonder though, what the suits at Blizz make of the surge of returning players, and at what theyâve let slip through their fingers.
Oh I still remember how people back then complained about how Blizz is losing originality in making new tiers because they were ugly and so they had to come with transmog in Cata and how people spitted on itâŠ
