I have been looking back on my most memorable MMO experiences. In Everquest there are so many. Taking the boat for the first time from Butcherblock to Freeport. The first time I ventured to kunark. I had to sneak through a dangerous zone to get to the lake of ill omen. Getting to the giants camp in frontier mountains. The first venture into velious. Countless memories from Everquest.
There are many with WoW. But they are mostly from those early days. Vanilla into Burning Crusade. Adventuring into new zones, encountering dangers that made me turn back. Those first tentative steps into redridge mountains or loch modan. That first time into Molten Core. The Black temple raid. So many memories from those times. For Everquest I had a binder with every zone map in it that I printed out from Alakazam website. I had hand written notes on them about things I found or wanted to remember on them. Points of danger or interest. Spawn locations or pathing.
And it made me realize that we have ruined these experiences for ourselves. The MMO genre was the best when we were adventuring into the unknown. There was something new around every corner. Zones were a mystery. A blank spot on the map to visit.
These days, everything is data mined. Everything is raced through and posted on a site. Or a video of the best way to do something. We strip away the mystery of everything so quickly, there is nothing left for us to discover as we play. We break down classes, specs and gearing to minimize our experimentation and chance of failure. We create addons and weakauras to again, minimize our experimentation and chance of failure.
This is why MMO’s have lost a lot of their feel. There is no adventure and discovery left. My fondest memories were back when there was mystery and adventure left in the worlds. Now with alpha and beta testing. With Twitch, and youtube, we see everything before we get to play it. There are already loot tables posted, spawn timers, most efficient paths, boss guides and DBM releases.
I still love playing WoW. Good and Bad, its still a great game. But there isnt any adventure here. Even with a brand new expansion. I never once felt like I was doing something I havent done before. Or going somewhere I shouldnt be.
Its a different game world we play in. And we strip the mystery and adventure from it ourselves, then wonder why there is no mystery and adventure. And I am guilty of this as well.
Social media outlets have made it easier than ever to stay in touch with your friends. This was one of the main reasons people played those early games. They were graphical chat rooms. Who wants to do that when they can jump into Zoom.
You make a good point, but we’re not the only ones responsible; there were/are also market forces at work here.
World of Warcraft’s success revealed that there was a desire for a more accessible MMORPG experience than what was offered in games like Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot. I’m sure you remember that WoW was considered the easy mode themepark MMORPG at the time. And the market’s response to WoW’s enormous success? Let’s emulate it … but we’ll make the easy parts even easier, and so on and so forth, until it got to the point where you’d have to be dead an buried not to be able to successfully quest your way through the average, modern MMORPG.
Unfortunately, I think the road to where we are now was inevitable. Hell, look at mobile gaming FFS. Many of these games literally play themselves yet they make more money off rubes than slot machines in a casino.
It’s like playing with an old school strategy guide from the get go. Getting lost in experimentation is only done by people looking to do it. Everyone else wants to min max, get to the end, and move on.
This is one of the main reasons WoW even took off so hard. Not only was the game itself easy enough to get into without studying a thesis, but it was (perhaps because of this) enough of a phenomenon that you could meet a huge variety of people within it.
People often forget that WoW came about before social media, or even the entire modern internet. When WoW was new, people were still hanging around on forums, IRC and usenets. It may have been late in the game for those communities, but it was still a far cry from how things are now.
So having this giant world where you could interact, unrestricted, with people from all over the world? That was a huge novelty. Especially if your area was new to the idea of broadband internet (not all that unusual in 2004).
Basically, it arrived at the perfect time to introduce people to online communities. But nowadays? Talking to someone online is so normal, it’s almost boring.
Seems more about economics than the datamining or even social components of the platforms.
MMOs were profitable as the first of its kind. WoW stays around because it is one of the more well done versions. But few companies will invest in such a platform now because it is risky and needs a large player base to be profitable.
Free 2 play is the new model every company wants. You can get away with pretty incompetent mechanics and it attracts a wide player base globally, especially in hot markets like china and india.
It’s why we had the whole Diablo Immortal debacle and the famous “don’t you guys have phones” quip. There will always be a market for PC games, but it’s definitely a much smaller one than it used to be, especially in a world obsessed with quarterly statements rather than quality products.
Good point, but WoW also had the Warcraft IP. 3 very successful games with expansions on them. If you played games on a PC in those days, you more than likely played one of the Warcrafts.
Warcraft did hold your hand and made the MMO more accessible. Every class could solo. Difficulty wise, in my opinion, Everquest wasnt really more difficult to play once you acclimated. Everything was just more dangerous. So you had to be careful. Also you had to rely on other players as your guides and aid. Once you got into Everquest, due to the amazing community, it was very user friendly.
The only way to solve the data-mining, Youtube video, online guide problem that takes all the mystery out of the game? You have to find a way to make at least the instanced experience random each time you do it.
And not like Island Expeditions. More like a table-top RPG with a human DM working from a book. The basics scripted but the experience itself unscripted.
Yes, I know, we aren’t there yet. But I think Blizzard knows perfectly well that the Internet wrecked MMOs . . .that’s why they are trying new stuff with the IEs and Torghast.
(And, for them, the Internet thing is also very much a mixed bag because WoW players have been bailing out the meh parts of their game design with add-ons and giving them free advertising forever.)
The first company that makes an MMO with an elegant AI that designs instances from pre-made parts so nobody can go look up stuff online will make bank.
I think it’s just a list of things that kind of all intertwine but you are onto something OP. Unfortunately with how people are conditioned, and companies designing in that direction, you kind of are left stripped away with the need to explore, imagine, and immerse yourself and are simple plebs who sit down at a trough waiting to go for the next meal (new content to digest).
Oh yeah, this was absolutely the case. Hell, I doubt I’d have even been introduced to WoW if not for friends who’d played the first few games as well. WC2 got me into it, but WC3 and the friends I played with got me into WoW.
But yeah, EQ and WoW weren’t necessarily much different in terms of difficulty - WoW just gave off a way better first impression. Like you said, once you got used to EQ … it wasn’t all that different. But I think that first impression made a ton of difference.
There are still MMO experiences. Millions game online together every day. Fortnight is an MMO. It’s just not a trinity RPG.
And there are also young gamers who have logged into Warcraft for the first time this past week and had their minds blown. Not as many as in 2004, but they’re out there.
I agree with both of your points. I stopped reading MMO Champ and WoWhead prior to expansion releases because it became more enjoyable to discover things for myself. Take for example the cutscene between Denathrius and Prince Renathal. I wasn’t expecting that when I was questing and it made it all the more enjoyable.
And I 100% agree with your second point that the adventuring aspect in WoW is gone. This comes back to the whole theme park design and the devs thinking they need to narrate every part of the questing experience and story for you. Which is a shame because often making your own experiences are much more enjoyable than when someone else dictates them for you. Its sort of like reading a book versus watching a movie. One you have some freedom to use your imagination and with the other there’s no imagination, just entertainment.
Making computer games is expensive. Making an MMO is ungodly expensive. I’m blown away by the amount of content in WoW. Yes, it always needs tuning, but that the parts are almost all there is impressive.
I would say, for WoW, in my opinion, CRZ started the great downfall. I never enjoyed this game as much as I did in LK, dungeon finder and all. You want to know why dungeon finder wasn’t a big deal? Because it used people on your own server. You were still playing within your own community and your actions still mattered from a social standpoint.
Once you moved out of that and went with all servers matchmaking and CRZ started filling zones with people you did not know or need to know, the game’s soul began to decay and it has not recovered since.
Yes I’m not denying that but there are a portion of the player base that simply go and lose their initial enjoyment that they used to be able to get… and are simply jaded or numb to it all.
But the more I chat with others about different MMO’s, it’s clear why the genre of MMO’s out there offer really just end - game predictable things without really fleshing out the world itself.
Honestly, as much as I love virtual worlds and worldbuilding, I can see why the genre went in this direction. Making a virtual world (let alone one for hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands of people) is monstrously expensive. Even today, where server costs are, to put it lightly, cheap as hell - it’s still a significant overhead compared to say, an open-world singleplayer game.
