The success of an MMO relies solely on its community, Blizzard understood this back in 2004 because they made a game by gamers, for gamers. Retail is currently suffering because Blizzard strayed from this original agenda due to the influx of “Modern Gamers”.
Today the “Modern Gamer” is not one who genuinely wishes to binge play for hours on end. I have a friend, lets call him Mustard who is about 17 and him and many other people of his generation can’t play a single game for more than 3 hours without having to switch to another game, no matter how heated the game gets or how compelling it is he will find it bored and quit because that’s what they are wired into playing. This is why BR games are currently popular, they are fast-paced and are over after only 30 min.
Our generation was simply wired to Time+Effort=reward+value Meaning the longer the time and effort put into the game the bigger the reward and value we find in it. Today they would prefer the reward and value without hardly any time and effort, just fast-paced cycle of log into x, do the thing, open loot box, repeat tomorrow. I for one find this stale and unrewarding but the younger generation loves it… maybe I’m just old and stale… maybe WoW should just be a BR… or maybe these hypotheticals are getting out of line and I should get back on topic.
The casual log in get reward system works for BR games but not for MMO’s solely because MMO’s are supposed to be a time investment where you immerse yourself in a Massive Multiplayer Online Experience and are forced to join and work with communities in any hopes of getting any form of reward much like real life.
Now I am not saying its impossible, If we THE PLAYERS can prove our undying love to classic, its community, and its formula like we did in 2004 and PROVE the formula of MMO’s is not something that should be taken lightly then we could very well reset the market standard for what people expect in future MMORPG’s and maybe even inspire the younger generations to understand the importance of “Time+Effort=Reward+Value”.
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And if you think BR games are dumb and should be purged for the safety of all Lordaeron click the heart button.
No, it won’t revive anything, WoW is nowhere near action-y enough by today’s gamer standards. I want that old mmo style actually, but there won’t be millions playing it or anything. Games like Classic WoW are niche.
This is false, or at least misleading. The grindy games are as numerous as ever, haven’t drastically changed their replacement rate (lower than action but still significant) and are as “chunky” as always.
In the olden days one could pop out of town for a quick monster killing spree in, say, Final Fantasy, head back to the Inn save and be done, achieving progress and fun. Or run a level in Megaman save the password and go to school.
Moderate chunkiness.
Contrast this with Ark, an (arguably) mmo with far less chunkiness, generally requiring more commitment, almost at EQ “Bat-phone” levels.
Low chunkiness.
There has always been a fair spread of both and while technology has certainly advanced, i don’t see a significant difference in the proportion of grindy games. They were always quite rare.
The only real changes to the API that would affect Classic are ones Blizzard cut off because an Addon did something they did not like such as Augmented Virtual Reality back in Wrath. Addons like that will still be broken in Classic.
Any API call that does not exist for Classic but does in Retail will probably just generate a warning/error.
Yea I mean post-launch going into the future as the live game continues to evolve and classic still has to use the same backend. Presumably dealt with over time by the same live wow devs. Might suck if you get #changes due to live (ala pvp or pve balance changes bleeding into eachother).
Well, chances are most of those changes will need to happen anyways as they’re addons that are doing things Blizzard does not like or behaving badly in other ways.
A good chunk of things will come from the databae anyways which will have different content between the two editions.
What remains to be seen is how the client will be structured too. Will it be the same client with a drop-down like we have for PTR/Beta and the Demo that was available during BlizzCon or will it be another one altogether.
Things like this are going to depend on the community in Classic. Will folks be willing to accept PvP modifications like we have on live. Obviously that system will already be in place but they’ll just simply be set to 100% so on the front end nothing will happen.
But, IIRC, they can tune it so Fireball does X amount of damage in PvE, but in PvP it only does like 75% of that damage. Otherwise we’ll see what we did prior to WoD/Legion… something in PvE is too strong so PvP gets nerfed along with it or vice versa. It will be kind of a lesser of two evils thing.
But I highly doubt that will be a problem since there will be nothing beyond Patch 1.12 so all balancing and such will happen during beta and then can be left alone once they are satisfied.
I would support the genre of risk taking that is pre november 2004. I think the smaller developers trying to put out games like that will do well in a market crowded with action based games. I like slower paced games, especially ones that just don’t focus 100% around combat (like how SWG was). The MMO isnt a dead genre it just needs some companies to actually take some risk and go beyond the status quo, something almost no company does these days. There are some up and comers that look promising to scratch the itch. I hope they hold out in offering up too much before launching.
I love it to, but i just don’t see it happening. Times are just different. Gone are the times where games are for time wasting nerds. Gaming is now mainstream. That also means that people want to do other things. Spending hours upon hours isn’t “normal”. Where as playing fortnite for an hour then running off to soccer practice is.
In addition, parents are also different. These days helicopter parenting is the norm. These parents sign their kids up for a million activities. They don’t have time to be kids anymore. Heck, the kids don’t have time anymore.
I only played a few hours but i definitely got a more modern vibe from that one. Yeah the global cooldown is slightly longer but you’re still snuggled in a playground with the other kids with Mom watching closely, losing nothing for long and being handed shiny toys everytime your gaze wanders too far afield.
I mean gorgeous game and music ofc; it’s Final Fantasy for sure.
Kind of like WoW Vanilla… you should have hung around until Nidhogg. That was a seriously hard fight.
It’s obviously not as hardcore as FFXI was (back in the day, world dragons were 6 hour fights, rare bosses spawned every 2 weeks, and Absolute Virtue took ~48 hours to down the first time). Man I miss that game, though there’s no way to play it with anything approaching a full-time job.
Like somebody already said, the genre hasn’t been killed, it was sabotaged and turned into some abomination. This makes the task of bringing it back much harder as it requires another transformation.
The rest of the world has moved onto battle royale games, no idea what the next big thing will be. Looter shooters are becoming the over done tripe that open world survival were a few years ago.
Anybody’s guess what the next big money making thing will be, but it wont be a slow grind game design from 20+ years ago.
![:cowboy_hat_face:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/cowboy_hat_face.png?v=6" ":cowboy_hat_face:")