Browsing the 'MMORPG' tag on Steam makes me sad

It’s just an endless list of low-effort Eastern ports, indie/pixel garbage, and old games from like 2001-2012 that haven’t kept up with the times with their updates in the way WoW has over the years.

That endless list of garbage, plus like… FFXIV, ESO, and BDO.

I already knew the list of “quality” MMORPGs was pretty small and that we hadn’t seen anything huge in recent years, so this wasn’t really a surprise to me.

But something about just seeing it listed out as it is on Steam (I don’t often browse it) just made me more aware of the fact that the genre is well past its hayday, and as someone who mostly got into PC Gaming because of Runescape and WoW when I was younger, it’s a bit disheartening.

(Note: I know ‘New World’ is coming soon. From what I can tell it looks like it’s super zeroed in on “build territory, then PvP over it” to such an extent that it won’t really have anything meaningful to do in the long-term for those of us not interested in PvP. Also, it’s literally just Node Wars from BDO but without BDO’s fun combat)

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It depends on what you consider “quality” and what you look to get out of an MMO. Some enjoy PvE, while others prefer PvP, while the rest - surprisingly to some - play MMOs for RP purposes. As people said in GD dozens of times: “The fact that these games are still around tells that something’s being done right”. I enjoy WoW for what it has, but at the same time I acknowledge the flaws/weaknesses it has that other MMOs does better on.

It is true that the MMORPG genre is past its prime and the tastes of the playerbase have changed over the years; some of the ones who remain clinging to MMORPGs are the ones who’ve been playing for a long time. I’ve been told the current generation of gamers aren’t looking to play a game with long-term investment and grinding and rather have rewards that are quickly gained with minimal effort.

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All the new games seem to be PvP oriented and I can’t stand PvP games. Stuck with wow til it dies I guess.

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Lot’s of MMOs aren’t on Steam at all though, because they don’t want to give Valve a cut of profits. Maintaining server infrastructure (or paying AWS to do it) ain’t cheap.

SW:TOR is still going strong(ish) and a really fun game if you can get past the garbage F2P stuff like paying for action bars and faster run speed.

Don’t like Star Wars in general. I’ve declined to try that one for years.

When they stopped making “traditional” MMORPGs – that’s when I stopped playing them. WoW is the only one I keep coming back to. Tired of morons reinventing the wheel, and people who consider “swinging their sword manually” the mark of something contemporary. Not everyone thought that twitch reflex games were a step in the right direction for RPGs in general, and a MMO that uses real time mechanics often fails because of lag issues; for instance, when you swing the sword, for you it swings, and then the server sees it, and then the mob dies, and then that communication gets back to you – sometimes light years later. This is the reason I think games like ESO are terrible to play. We see it all the time in WOW in PvP – lag kills, and if you don’t have the best connection, you will feel it hard. The point I am making is with a combination of auto attacks and skills with timers, in addition to clever timing for enemies, the PvE experience at least can be made nearly flawless; hence, why traditional MMORPG schemes always make money, and action RPGs almost always either flop, or die slow deaths in obscurity. No one wants lag, and so what if you can feel the weight of the weapon. When every second counts, just give me a game I can access.

Edit: Another reason I love traditional MMORPGs (diablo / RTS online schemes): not only do they feel like a real RPG – with tactical forethought, and ability to overcome challenges without needing to be fast on the trigger, they also come with a variety of activities. I even stopped playing some single player RPGs (like FF7 remake) just because “on-the-rails” experiences are not RPGs to me.

Here’s a ten year old, but IMO still very relevant, article that might put a perspective on things.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-11-02-wow-sucked-oxygen-from-mmo-subs

My own interpretation and/or opinion: Before WoW, nobody (in the Western markets) really envisioned an MMO subscriber base of more than a few hundred thousand - maybe a million or two, tops.

Then WoW happened.

For about 5-10 years after WoW launched, big money people made big money MMOs hoping to make big money from WoW-level subscriptions. Unfortunately, they discovered quickly that WoW-level subscriptions were the exception, and not the rule. The MMO bubble burst, and hard.

Nowadays, MMOs are no longer new. The excitement of wandering an open world, doing your own thing, and meeting other people in game, is pretty much dead. Strangely, the only game that has been able to capture that old-school MMO feeling (at least for me) was not billed as an MMO - and it, too, had its share of follow-ups desperately trying to cash in on the craze it created.

And here we are now - occasionally some plucky studio will occasionally go for broke on some “new” gimmick that isn’t really new, maybe even get some good hype going, only to blip on the radar briefly (sometimes brightly) before sinking into the morass of games about which people say, “oh - that’s still running?”

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Why not play Larian Studios games? It’s weird how when you think of single player RPGs, you only mention FF7 Remake…

Divinity Original Sin 2 is Metacritic must buy, and it’s praised by everyone who plays it, as being one of the best RPG experiences they’ve ever had. I myself have bought it for my PC, Xbox and Switch, plus a copy for my partner :speak_no_evil:.

There are a LOT of single player RPGs out there that are not on the rails.

Wow ruined the genre for me. I loved the MMOs before WOW. Classes were designed to have such weaknesses that required grouping to level up efficiently. The community were inclusive. The community wasnt so selfish (wts runs for aotc anyone?), didn’t rush through dungeons, and the game was about the journey, with others, not the destination.

I came back to this game to see if it was still worth playing, but the RPG is lost from this game. All classes are the same, you can swap talents and specs at leisure, so no choices for your character have any meaning. The community is all about min/max. You have to rep grind for races, flying, and player power. None of these things did I have to do in WoTLK when I tried and liked WOW for what it offered (still not as good as DAOC, SWG, and COH IMHO).

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In fairness, the “journey” was never a thing that lasted. It’s impossible for the journey to be ongoing for the years people play MMORPGs for.

But I do miss that aspect of the genre, even if I believe it’s always been limited. Western MMO is more or less synonymous with instanced endgame content, and enough focus on that shifts the genre away from feeling like a world at all, even if each piece of content is objectively more interesting as a result. It’s a tradeoff, but it’s a tradeoff almost every single game has taken in the same direction, and that’s a shame.

It lasted long enough to make friends, know the people before you join their guild, and it lasted much longer than many even did end game activities. Everyone I met spent months to years leveling different characters. It took months just to get to max level in DAOC and everyone was altaholics, so many people took years to get max level. Contrasting that to the few months you may do end game before leveling up more classes. That game alone had 3 realms and 45 classes with multiple ways of speccing each class. Replayability was insane. Eventually you would get your fill of leveling everything and then, of course, it’d be only endgame. But the endgame was amazing. Master levels from raiding, champion levels too, and 3 realms fighting over towers and castles to claim them as their own. Even had a large open work dungeon to clash against other realms. And this was all in the early 2000s. Then you had SWG with their player ran cities, huge crafter/gathering economy and way more character customization.

All of the above has been supplanted by a game that offers huge rep grinds to get races, flying, world quests to grind, and mythic+ and raids where the community gatekeeps based on what is considered best in order to even play the game. Contrast that to older games where the attitude was more the merrier. 100+ raids were something to behold too.

I’m admittedly feeling a bit bitter at the loss of the genre that i wasted many hours a day to instant gratification and cold community games like WOW and a bit nostalgic.

I just still can’t believe how different the community that played together back then is compared to the community in the genre today.

Eh… Guild Wars 2? I wouldn’t say it’s still going strong per say, but it’s still a solid MMORPG, and a pretty unique one at that: unique skill system, no iLvl treadmill, and one of the rare “action combat” MMO that’s actually fun to battle in. (The other is BDO.)

New World will be terrible. They built a merciless PvP sandbox game and then over 6 months they noped out of it and rebuilt the game into a PvE game with optional PvP, but still won’t have dungeons, raids or a good story. They seem to think their combat and class system will carry the game despite lack of content, which is funny because Anthem made the same assumption and look where they are now… Meanwhile, WoW and FFXIV are undisputed kings of MMOs and don’t have action combat.

Could be wrong, but I think the popularity of games like Breath of the Wild serve as decent proof that there’s still life in the concept of wandering through huge worlds and progressing your character.

This tells me that a new MMO could still work and take off in a big way, but it’s going to look different from anything we’re familiar with, with the multiplayer aspect being a complimentary extra rather than the focus and little to no competition between players… a lower pressure take on the genre, much as WoW was when it came out.

I want to say that if you were the kind of person in highschool who condemned “nerds” for being nerds, true RPGs and MMORPGs are NOT your game. Stop playing them, go away, we don’t want you to like them. WoW ruined nothing; indeed it pioneered certain aspects of the genre which include the killer use of space and UI elements that has been copied by even single player RPGs for quite some time – and rightfully so because it. just. works. well.

That being said, I will freely admit that I am a 40 year old, jaded nerd, and I want more of the games I love – games that I love, not the world at large, me, just me. Someone here made the point that in the beginning the demographic for these games was very small and compact. This is a good illustrating point – I think, for all RPGs. There was a point in time when the in crowd of people wouldn’t dream of playing RPGs for fear of ridicule, or maybe they found them boring to play; these were the games that were thought provoking with their narratives, they were tedius with the work involved in getting anywhere in them, and for the most part only catered to a select crowd of people that relished 60 - 100+ hours of building a virtual life inside a game space.

Nowadays these games are disappearing fast in leu of faster pace, punishing control and mechanics, and action sequences that suck the joy out of the proverbial fantasy life. It seems like someone, who didn’t belong in the same room in the first place, has come along and said, “Hey this is pretty fun (RPGs originally), let’s make this even better…” This person who shall remain nameless took my pastime and perverted it so wholesale that I barely recognize what I play anymore. My recent trip down memory lane with Final Fantasy 7 remake is all the evidence anyone needs to see just how insanely disperate the change has become – if you compare it to the original.

My point is this: It wasn’t broken when it was fixed, but they fixed it anyway, and in the process, broke many more things along the way; and, I am talking about all forms of RPGs here, not just MMORPGs or table-top type gaming. It was for people like me, and now that it’s broken, we have to deal with the mess. When someone mentions DnD anymore, I break out my OOOLD ADnD 2nd ed. or my 3rd ed. DnD – I will not be playing the broken rulesets. If someone mentions MMOs, I play this because despite its many flaws, it’s still one of the best MMOs in existance due to the fact that the core aspects of the game remain unchanged.

I used FF7 remake to illustrate a point – it’s the most recent trash RPG I’ve played, and I needed the fanservice at the time I purchased it. Also, I don’t particularly care for Indie games because despite the great care they take to develop them with me in mind, they miss the mark on game breaking bugs and other tedious nonsense I was tired of in the 90s. When I complain about current RPGs too, I’m also complaining about things not being innovated either. For instance, do the graphics have to always be circa 1990? I was over the 90s when it happened, and I am not looking for retro experiences – think todays graphics attached to a Dragon Age Origins game minus EA. Why is no one developing clones of DAO? It was hilarious fun, and it could be complex and deep, and it could punish too. I think that there was a fertile market for more of those games, but nope…

Wait for Pantheon.

no instances is a dealbreaker for me. Basically just automatically means “content” is faceroll via numbers, OR its actually instanced and they’re just not advertising it that way.

I love a big open world for leveling and just exploring, but endgame content needs to be a bit more finely tuned than world content allows for IMO.

All true, could be neat if an MMO more seamlessly blended instances with the world though. The way WoW puts them behind a loading screen kind of bugs me, feels like it could be more like walking over a phase boundary.

I feel like they COULD do this, but it would make things a bit awkward for a few reasons.

  1. Lockouts. Would a “phase boundary” be able to be coded with the way lockouts work without a total revamp that may or may not be worth the dev time?
  2. Swapping out party members. How would phasing be handled if someone leaves halfway through? Instant port to nearest graveyard? Same phase until they walk out of the area? If someone new joins to fill the group, would porting to catch up to an in-progress group still be possible? How are trash respawns handled, if it’s treated like another piece of the same world?
  3. Raid Groups. How do you restrict them? Do you randomly phase groups of 5, splitting the raid? Does it literally go group by group in the raid roster? Is it possible to have something block someone in a raid from entering the dungeon if it’s just another phase?

I think “world dungeons” would almost have to be a separate thing entirely, which could be neat if handled well.


Note: Check out Shadowfang Keep sometime. Instead of there being invisible walls on the ramparts/walkways/whatever, you can just straight up jump off. You don’t die and respawn inside, you literally load out of the dungeon (its a super fast load, like fraction of a second, IIRC) and fall in that location in the world. I feel like, while it’s still a loading screen, this is one of the best examples of Blizzard attempting to make a dungeon feel like part of the world. Maybe the only one.

Yeah the trick in SFK is pretty neat, I think Ramparts in HFP does that too.