For context, Ghostcrawler started his own company and is developing their own MMO. There are quite a few ex-WoW devs like Holinka on that project.
My question to GD is what they think regarding this paragraph - specifically the part about MMOs moving too far toward solo adventuring. Do you think this is true or you think MMOs need to be even more solo-friendly?
“As players, we are deeply in love with MMOs for their promise of social worlds. But we also feel that the genre has lately struggled to provide a community that you care about while still making your character feel heroic or special. We believe MMOs have moved too far toward solo adventuring, where other players often just slow you down. We want to bring back as central pillars of the MMO experience both playing with friends and building a community. We want to bring back the chance to impact the world around you.”
I think they do need to make running old content solo-friendly if that’s what you mean. But current content, I like being able to queue for stuff because it simply saves time rather than having to organize your own group for things. It would be nice if you could queue for mythic plus runs. But for now, I’m glad we’re gonna be able to queue for rated battlegrounds.
Ill try it out when it comes by, but I really doubt he will meet any expectations cause the bar to entry is that high . You don’t have the advantage that wow had back in 2004 -2008 and worst you can do is be a copy cat Wow clone.
Shoulda known better than to name a project “Ghost”.
And, no, I don’t think the genre has moved towards “other people just slow you down”. On the contrary, the trend has been to move away from that with cooperative world events, removal of unnecessary competition for spawns or tags, but also with macro-level changes like not shackling people to the same handful of tryhard guilds full of loot drama.
I don’t believe that it’s a game designer’s place to try to build the community for the community. It’s the community’s job to decide what, and how, to embrace as their goals for themselves. It’s a game designer’s job to make a game and make it fun, and if the community happens, it happens.
I’ve seen strictly single-player games with phenomenal communities and games where you can’t do beans without other players but those players are awful. And I’ve come to realize that a big part of it is a simple misunderstanding: being forced to play together does not build a community. Playing together because you want to builds a community.
I should throw a shout-out here to the FGC (fighting game community) where it’s almost entirely a single player PvP experience, of course, but the community is phenomenal.
Not gonna happen. Unless you force , enforce , and watch almost a cult like thing start to form. People will not magically get along and work together genuinely.
It’s an MMO.
Lots of time will be needed and invested into it.
People generally will go in with their own goals in mind and anyone hindering those goals will get the ‘fake getting along’ treatment so as to not get banned or will just be another thing blocking said person and will be ignored.
Sounds like they want to tone down the “go go go” perfectionist stress modes and make things easier, simpler and slower so that everyone is valuable. Maybe I completely misunderstood though.
Personally I think MMO’s are at their best when they involve coordinated groups of players that are committed to playing together.
Without that end-goal, MMO’s become little more than chore simulators. Which is not an inherently bad thing, Stardew Valley is as popular as it is for a reason. But it has no interest for me whatsoever.
That being said, I think people are reading into GC’s statement without the proper context.
A core feature of his proposed MMO is splitting the game up into “shards” where you’ll have private shards for yourself and friends, and public shards that are affected by the playerbase as a whole.
The comparison I’ve seen is Minecraft Private and Public Servers.
In our game, you will alternate between private realms that we’re calling “Blue Shards” for you and your friends, and more public “Red Shards” that deliver a more traditional massively multiplayer experience.
Blue Shards play a bit like a survival game - you and your friends can gather resources, construct bases, and adventure out into the wilderness. Blue Shards are extremely variable, ensuring a place full of new discoveries and challenges, guaranteeing that you’ll never see the same Blue Shard twice. Because the Blue Shards belong to you, your effects on them are persistent and permanent. If you prefer a more competitive experience, you can host or join Blue Shards focused on guild rivalry, or even guild-versus-guild PvP.
Red Shards are crafted by some of the best world artists and encounter designers to provide a signature massively multiplayer experience with many players at once. Red Shards are some of the most challenging places in the game to survive, so your group will need to band together with other groups to defeat world bosses, collect critical resources, and even open the gates to the end-game raiding instances. We expect some of you may prefer Blue or Red Shards, but the core way to play Ghost is to travel between both regularly as well as to Ghost’s central city.
I think there is a significant difference between, in their words, “playing with friends” and group content. I don’t think that logging into the game and PUGing everything, with almost no social interaction with other players, is what they mean when refer to playing with friends. By many people’s definition it’s also not solo content, but maybe it is, and it’s a form of play that WoW has been catering to and nurturing for a long time.
It does certainly touch on that grey area where PUGs may lead to new friends which is always a positive. But strictly speaking, I agree that a player that logs in and PUGs everything is arguably just a solo player.
