My favourite part of an MMO is the dynamic events that take place between people when you put them in a giant persistent world and see what happens. Everyone who has played a few MMOs will have a story. That time in Runescape you found rune plate in wildy from people killing each other in PvP, that time you escaped barely in EvE with your wormhole data getting chased across endless sectors, that time you trekked across horde territory for your warrior armor in vanilla.
So my question is, where are the players? And the MMO mechanics? Questing is a solo affair, at best the odd elite comes up and you get recommended its 3 players, but you can always solo it. Dungeons are instances and limited to 5 people. Raids are instances and limited. The only thing in shadowlands I can point to and say that’s a MMO mechanic is world PvP, and you have to opt into it. Its no wonder people love dungeons and raids so much, they’re the only time and place you party up with real people and do something with others. You should be playing with others every moment. You shouldn’t be seeing 20 npcs fighting 20 npcs in the background, it should be players fighting those NPCs. For $60 there should have been some new world mechanics that promoted the MMO part of MMORPG.
Food for thought, or not, perhaps the entire modern WoW community subbed in for a single player/cooperative RPG rather than an MMO and I’m playing the wrong game, but I feel like others must want more from WoW than quests, dungeons and raids.
The problem is that this doesn’t change the content. You can join a guild for Tetris but it still won’t be an MMO.
Take GW2 open world events. Now there were plenty of flaws with them, but you could be running along and then come across a dynamic event and just participate with anyone else who happened along. These features are entirety missing.
Not saying WoW should copy GW2, we’re not that dumb. But its the idea thats missing, the idea of WoW being an MMO which is entirely lost.
the difference is, most other MMOs require you to interact with other people. For the last however many years, you can level from 1 to max level, level professions, and get somewhat geared in the endgame without ever even seeing another person. now if you consider simply using dungeon finder, where you do not have to type/speak to the 4 other people in there, and often times never do, you essentially are playing with 4 bots. So still not really interacting with another player. Now consider LFR, which is the bigger version of dungeon finder.
There’s no requirement to interact with another player until you reach running normal raids/mythic dungeons. That’s probably 100+ hours for an actual new player. It’s a single player game.
Well that is simply not true, you only have to play Classic to see how often stories and adventures get created by well designed content.
My quest as a warrior to get my armor, trekking into horde territory with 2 other warriors (since obviously no one else would do this quest) and fighting off a range of under levelled to over levelled players was the perfect example of stories coming from otherwise simple design choices. And lots of people have lots of good stories like that because it was an MMO based around people interacting.
In my opinion, the reason we don’t have huge spontaneous world events anymore stems from the lack of closed servers.
IF we had closed servers/server groups, then guilds would recognize each other. We’d see one another in dungeon pugs multiple times and start to develop inter-guild/intra-faction relationships.
These lend themselves to guild leaders having one another on a friends list for organizing big events.
That atmosphere fosters a community defense response that people are more willing to organize spontaneous WPvP around.
That atmosphere encourages a baseline of RP fun and shenaniganry (not like actual RP on RP realms…but the idea of people gathering and getting into the spirit of the game).
We don’t have that on the super-sharded hot mess we deal with now. I see people who are not in my server group as often as I see people who are. I haven’t met anyone out in the world that I ever saw a second time.
I think that’s why WoW doesn’t feel much like an MMO sometimes.
It was, but it was extrinsic to the gameplay itself.
So in early vanilla, there were daily fights around Crossroads/Astranaar and also SS/TM, and not only on PvP servers … people would flag up for it on normal servers, just for the fun of the fight. No rewards, other than a few honor points here and there, but mostly just for the fun, for the chance to mess up the other side by killing their NPCs, occupying their hub for a while and so on.
Blizzard basically turned off this form of play when they made some NPCs really almost impossible to kill and then also created superguards that spawn, but that wasn’t immediate. And then when BGs became formalized with the honor system, people migrated to BGs and it killed that kind of gameplay more or less for good – at least in any kind of scale like it was at the very beginning of the game, like the first 4-6 weeks in 2004.
So it’s not the case that it was never there, it’s just that Blizzard kind of killed it off when it was in the crib, so to speak, because Blizzard wanted more control over what players were doing – to channel them in specific ways.
What it sounds like to me is that you’re looking for a “Sandbox” mmo experience in a “Themepark” mmo.
Emergent gameplay is something that WoW used to have. Perfect example: Southshore vs Tarren Mills battles was a totally dynamic event that took place between players.
I believe it takes less resources and more intelligence to design game systems that provide opportunity for emergent gameplay. But, for whatever reason, Blizzard has decided to design a game that leads you around, doing their best to compel you to follow a story that may or may not be good. The way they Forced quests into your quest log was a perfect example of this.