Hi everyone, wanted to make a post here about where we think MMO’s in general and specifically MMO-RPG’s are headed. I don’t want this to be a conversation about Retail vs Classic. While they necessarily have to be part of the conversation, I’m thinking more big picture to the gaming industry as a whole.
Here are a list of things to consider, then everyone to post what they think the future of MMO’s will look like from now to the next 5 or 10 years.
The initial MMO boom was mostly because of the MMORPG genre, with some help from games like Starcraft
Recently, MMO’s have gone the route of battle royal games, or more arena style like our MOBA’s and such. And even WOW has become more quickplay, end game grind oriented
Very few companies have an interest in trying to compete over the MMORPG audience. Guild Wars and Final Fantasy being the main two that come to mind, the others who have attempted to break into the genre like ESO or LOTR very quickly stopped dumping resources into these games after their initial launch boom.
We do have WOW classic launching soon, with some strong positive feedback from beta/stress testing. And then you have the guys working on Pantheon - Rise of the Fallen, who are very very vested in recreating the “true MMO-RPG”.
Games like Destiny and the Division have brought MMO’s an entirely new genre with the FPS looter style, and even those games have slightly stepped back from the RPG elements as time has gone on.
While a lot of major developers are working on or already have an MMO of some sort in their portfolio, the majority of the ones who would fall into the RPG category are being looked at by more indy studios.
So, do we think MMO’s are pretty much a permanent fixture of the major gaming industry? Or a fad that will fade out? What about MMO-RPG’s? Are they on their last limb? Are both going to stick around forever? Are MMO-RPG’s only going to be able to survive the next 5-10 years if they focus more on quick-play and grinding, going light on the RPG side? Will MMO’s that focus heavily on progression rather than end game grinding be able to survive, or is that a style that has more or less come and gone?
95% of MMO’s fail miserably so there very little incentive for developers to make new ones. At the same time, there is a lot of money that can made in the F2P system. So if anything, you’ll see more of those and less traditional MMORPG’s.
I think “MMOs” will be around for a very long time, if we’re including games like Destiny and Division in that category. Those types of games seem to be the natural evolution of the genre. They streamline the tropes of the MMORPG genre and present it in a more accessible way to the more mainstream and casual audience.
I think the traditional form of “MMORPG” is going to become a niche thing that no sane AAA dev ever makes again before too long. Even now, basically all we’re getting are expansions for existing MMOs, Asian releases ported to NA a couple years late, and overhyped crowdfunded indie releases that are ambitious but riddled with issues.
What was the last major western MMORPG? Wildstar? lol.
It makes me sad because I love the genre, but in the same way Blizzard continually simplifies WoW and turns it into less of an RPG and more of a lobby game, I think the genre as a whole will do the same or risk dying entirely, which gets us to “looter shooters” and such.
Also worth noting that the current generation of younger people seem to have very little interest in time sink games, which is fundamentally part of what MMORPGs are. As a result, I feel like most of the growth and decline you see among popular MMOs is mostly just people migrating between these games, rather than a significant amount of new players coming to the genre.
ESO might have been an exception just due to how much draw the franchise has.
MMOs aren’t a fad, but they are succeptable to stagnation because of the enormous cost to get started. For the industry to move on, it needs an upstart that doesn’t care about any of things where an established game can just outspend them and has a solid nugget of world design that is fundementally new. Minecraft proved a few years ago that it is still possible for indy games to do this and catch fire. But it worries me how few others have come along.
When the monetization model of mobile games starts to crack (if it ever does), it is possible we will see someone come along and try to create a cohesive world out a collection of successful minigames that becomes a single platform.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. It makes a lot of sense. So I have a follow up question since you specifically mentioned asian imports. I meant to include in my list above that while western gamers are going nuts over battle royale games and simplified MMO’s, with only the highest tier of RPG like The Witcher getting hype…in Japan and Korea true MMRPG’s are still very popular, very storyline driven games like what Square Enix puts out are huge, and progression based JRPG’s have a lot of traction (Monster Hunter, Dragon Quest, etc)…and then over in China people are just all in on mobile games.
What is creating this divide? Why are western AAA’s unwilling to produce a game that might have a 50/50 split in terms of Western & Asian audiences? Asian developer certainly have no problem producing games that are meant to target both audiences (Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy). Why are Western studios so hesitant to do the same? I’ve done a little research on the topic, but have found very little to suggest that doing so is overly risky from a business standpoint.
I hate to boil a game down to its graphics, but I feel you’d be hard pressed to make an MMO with the level of simplistic graphics Minecraft has and attract the people playing games like WoW, FFXIV, ESO, and so on.
You’d more get the audience of something like… Trove?
At a certain point, graphics become less of a means of displaying what you need to see and more of a specific theme, and that theme can turn people off.
That’s part of the issue with most indie games. It’s hard for them to -look- appealing to people. Even something like Ashes of Creation with a huge crowdfunding campaign looks… mediocre.
You bring up an interesting point, which is the ability for big titles to outspend indy companies. It brings to mind ESO.
Any Elder Scrolls game is automatically guaranteed a huge initial boom just because of the following and draw of the title right? Which is why it blows my mind that they did not go all in on the MMORPG. For the most part they just created a standard Elder Scrolls game and ported it onto an online platform.
The the amount of resources their studio has, and the guaranteed draw, it was the perfect opportunity to really go all in. But they created very little end game content, did not adapt their leveling & skill system to fit that of an MMORPG, did very little in terms of guild or auction house or community infrastructure, and had a boring PVP system.
In my mind, if you are going to just dip your toes in, just dabble, then you shouldn’t do it at all. We know MMO’s are expensive to produce, so it’s a big waste of money. And I think that’s a big reason why 95% percent of MMO’s especially RPG’s fail. Companies want to just dip their toes in and see what the response will be. While heavily established games like WOW and GW are so refined over the years. So the only way to compete is to go all in with a fully decked out, refined, robust game from the get go.
One of WOW’s best competitors out there is Final Fantasy Online, and they did just what I said. They used the resources and draw of the FF title, to go all in and not pull any punches in game production, content, complexity…and created a game very geared towards what they knew the MMORPG audience was looking for. And it’s currently one of WOW’s top competitors. And if you read my other post, you’ll also note that again, Square Enix was not afraid to produce a game that would need to attract both Asian and Western audiences to survive.
They will have to go fully VR to survive, imo. I mean, would you play WOW VR? I think I would. I would fall down and hit furniture, a LOT, but I would play it.
mmorpgs are dying their future is cell phone arpgs.havent you seen the every year videos of up coming mmorpgs? they are all the same ones from 5 years ago.
Sorry I should have been more detailed/specific. I did not mean that they had cut content production entirely.
But if you go back you will see that marketing and interviews and such very much hyped the game up as a true MMO. And the community was led to believe that the complexity, size of world, and scope of content (such as raiding and dungeons) would be on a scale comparable to WOW.
So either that was all just fanservice marketing, or…the game didn’t get as much traction as they had hoped and they had to be a little less ambitious. I did not mean to suggest that the game failed miserably and the producers cut the cord.
Graphics are a dead end, they’re just a way for mature games to outspend the competition. Until someone can come along with a Spore-like environment where making graphics is part of the gameplay, graphics will be the enemy of innovation.
Disclaimer: I should probably point out that I’m not exactly bleeding edge in my tastes … I still think of WoW as “fancy modern graphics” which probably undermines my point.
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