true that mmos are a dying genre the young kids are in to p2w games these days.
I don’t think the genre is dying, I think the problem is that the way people want it isn’t compatible with the original vision. MMOs aren’t meant to be super competitive, e-sport like games. It’s supposed to be about the social aspect, the exploration of the world, that kind of stuff, but no game in a decade or more has had that.
A successful MMO needs to go back to its roots, not try to appeal to the Fornite/LoL/CoD/e-sport crowd.
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Are you saying that wow isn’t a successful MMO? Or they FFXIV isn’t story/world based?
Just another Devrox “m+ is the debil” post.
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Not in the way that MMOs used to be, if you think it is I don’t know what to tell you. Compare wow of today to Vanilla. It’s like night and day. For an MMO to come onto the scene and take the crown it has to look towards vanilla wow and before that, not the current genre.
It has nothing to do with my dislike of M+. the genre isn’t “dying” but the current generation of gamer has degenerated.
I think this is a huge part of it.
I’d like to add one more part people don’t seem to think of: Established lore / games. The three most successful MMOs all share the fact that they have an existing audience from their non-mmo games.
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Using my magical TL3 powers
There used to be a job where people would do wake up calls in neighborhoods to make sure everyone was up. Then the alarm clock became more commonplace, and that entire industry went away.
So what are you saying, that the genre has evolved for the better or…? Sorry, confused. I mean, it’s clear you don’t seem to mind the new style of the game.
Nah, stay off my property
future of gaming? this has been true for like a while now.
The genre has evolved, along with the player base and the technology. If you released a game systematically identical to vanillaWoW today, it would fail.
Also, it’s a little arrogant to assume that blizzard doesn’t have experts out there scoping out what those differences are. They’re focus-grouping and making well-researched and deliberate changes.
Change is inevitable. It’s neither good nor bad, per se. Only you can decide that, and only for yourself.
Well, you have smoothbrains that paid $1000s on gachha and F2P games monthly that pushed the market in that direction. You can have a mediocre/ lazy produced game as long as someone can P2W it, or look shiney while playing it
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This is indeed a huge component. WoW benefitted immensely from having a pre-existing world that players of the RTS games had only seen glimpses of to flesh out and make “real”. There’s a massive draw to seeing areas featured in more limited ways and sometimes only alluded to in their most grand and explorable form possible.
A company looking to start a successful MMO would be well served by first doing a series of single player RPGs or something along those lines first to build up a universe for the MMO to use.
Obviously, I disagree that the genre has evolved at all, given that WoW has been in a steady decline the last few years while Classic saw a resurgence. I also doubt that Blizzard is making any sort of well-researched changes, I think they are doing the minimal possible to keep the game running and trying to cash in on fast marketing bollocks e.g. e-sport/streaming.
time will tell, though.
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oh shocking. another DOA wowkiller.
/yawn
how’s New World? have they killed the Old World yet?
It means the game may never release. It’s not rocket science.
I don’t think Vanilla, TBC, or WotLK are ready-made blueprints for the future of MMOs, but certainly they have good bones to build on and to use as a springboard for something more fresh.
From my perspective the biggest weaknesses of the various flavors of Classic when considering today’s players is the fact that it’s been scienced to death, and that it’s even a practical target for sciencing to death in the first place. I think a defining characteristic of next-gen MMOs will be a level of dynamism so high that no two playthroughs of the game will be remotely similar, and that sites like Wowhead will be of little use due to the sheer number of variables in play.
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Yeah, I really hope that the MMOs of the future will do anything and everything to avoid like addons and datamining, just so we don’t see what happened here where everything is known weeks in advance so there’s no excitement or exploration when it comes out, everyone knows immediately what “the best” is and how to get it.
And on that note, bossfights should play a considerably less critical role in the game (e.g. core progression isn’t tied to them) so it’s not that big of a deal if one is kinda busted at release, eliminating the need for extensive player testing and moving mastery of fights away from the PTR and back to live servers where it belongs.
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I’ve been saying for years that the future of MMOs is going to be something more like Destiny 2, but with more content and obviously more third person MMO oriented. It doesn’t get everything perfect, but it fills the role pretty well. This is coming from someone who has been pretty hardcore with WoW on and off throughout the years.
The biggest change that needs to be made is getting rid of the tank/healer/dps trinity. Allow players to still build around being tankier, having more utility/self-healing or doing more raw damage. We live in a very fast paced world of gaming now and one of the biggest things that makes MMOs lose players are QUEUES longer than five or ten minutes… Most players want to pewpewpew. If I had to take a guess at WoW’s distribution, I’d say that for ever 100 DPS players, there are maybe 5-10 that want to heal and 1-5 that want to tank. It leads to a lot of bottlenecking in queues and group finding.
You’d have instant queues 24/7 if they did away with the trinity. I know other MMOs have tried in the past, but they failed for other reasons like poor content or issues with progression.
Oh and also: Trim the maximum number of abilities you have access to at one time down to something more like 10. Having 300 icons on action bars != more in depth gaming or more skill. Button bloat is a thing and there are a million other ways you can make a game more interesting. Maybe use some system like in Diablo 3 where you can completely morph abilities around, based on which runes you use.
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