From what I understand (haven’t played it) New World is a good and immersive MMORPG but it is completely ruined by issues that are both technical (dupes, critical bugs, etc.) and game design issues (nothing to do, too grindy, etc.) and the dev team appears to be overwhelmed with fixing all the issues.
FF is an odd take on the WoW formula and it’s really not for everybody. Although I really enjoy the game myself I’m surprised it is the number 2 MMORPG at the moment because it is story driven to a fault and its art style is very divisive, to put it lightly. For a lot of people coming from WoW, FF can be really offputing.
Guild Wars 2 was never a competition for World of Warcraft, except maybe at launch. (It was IMHO the second most hyped MMORPG, albeit far behind SW:TOR which was just absurdly overhyped and overmarketed.) It fell off very quickly though. I don’t understand why you mentioned Guild Wars 2 there, it is and will always be that oddball MMORPG for people who don’t really like MMORPGs.
They’ve been doing pretty good in the development department and creating new expansions for their players.
If you look at their score on almost every critic website or just by googling it has a high rating among players and professionals.
Like FF14 they’ve managed to bring out solid expansions to expand on the world they’ve built and not just small tid bit ones either. It hasn’t been 10 years yet for them and they’ll already have 3 expansions under their belt. That is pretty darn good in my book for a game that is free play who doesn’t use a pay to win strategy. It’s all horizontal progression, story driven with solid PVP.
Thats was me. Its just not my style of game; I dunno, maybe WoW has ruined me for art-style games although they tend to have a longer shelf life. Games designed on Unreal Engine seem to deteriorate visually as they get older and you can see a definite lower definition compared to newer games using the current version. Ive enjoyed playing ESO and although I think its kept up you can still tell its an older UE style.
I will never play FF again (I even tried earlier in the year and after half an hour of trying to get the renewal system to work I just gave up). Its WoW for me (with occasional breaks to ESO) and my single player games such as AoE until something to my taste comes along.
I used to go to E3 every year, and every time I talked to a publisher putting out a new MMORPG, I’d always ask them the same question:
“What will I be doing in your game 6 months after launch?”
Nobody ever had an answer.
Their games are designed all around the first month of play and having flashy graphics to impress critics and get good reviews. Long term play just isn’t a concern for them.
The MMO market is saturated, there are a lot of them on the market, each with their own group of players. What happened to New World is actually the norm. An MMO will launch, get a ton of players really early, and then after the honeymoon phase (which can end really quickly if there are game breaking bugs like New World has had and continues to have) the majority of those players will leave. Those that stay become the core niche audience of that game, which may grow or shrink depending on what type of audience the MMO attracted and what the developers do with the game in the first few months.
MMOs like Final Fantasy 14 and World of Warcraft are the exception to the rule. They explode into the market, attracting a LOT of players and they generally keep the majority of them, although over time they’ll also drop players, especially as the MMO gets older and the players themselves also get older.
Yep, which is why it’s one of the exceptions. When it launched, Final Fantasy 14 was a disaster. Square Enix was able to generate a LOT of good will throughout the lifetime of 1.0 by refusing to charge subscriptions and essentially letting players play for free while they tried to fix the game, then they went through and shut it down to relaunch it.
Which is why when A Realm Reborn launched later, it got a ton of good publicity and a lot of the 1.0 players returned for it.
But if the team at Square hadn’t done any of what generated that good will, FF14 would have eventually lost players until it had its niche just like every other MMO on the market has done before and since.
I don’t think devs have any idea just how much content people consume Blizz does, and that’s why we have time gates and people still complain about lack of stuff to do.
Because people get over-hyped and think that this new thing is going to change the entire industry, then get upset when they realize it’s the same old thing with a different coat of paint.
It’s happened so much now that I’m kinda surprised people still fall for it. Although I guess it’s good for initial profits. Imo, you should always give new MMOs a good 2-3 years to mature before taking it seriously. Even single-players are getting into the habit of being released as a mess and it takes a while before it becomes more playable.
It’s weird because I just looked at twitch and FF is far below both NW and WoW in views.
Are we still using Twitch to verify the success of a game? Because I personally feel like we shouldn’t, but then a new expansion or game releases and suddenly Twitch numbers matter again.
Because MMOs launch without nearly enough content to satisfy everybody. When they release it’s just a leveling game because they’re hoping the lackluster amount of things to do will keep people busy until they can start actually developing things. This was why every MMO that tried to compete with WoW back during the MMO crazy of 2007-2014 died horrific deaths. They all released with very barebones content to the game but hoped they’d get feet in the door. Aion people realized had nothing. Age of Conan was bricked after level 30, etc. They were launching with games that were going to be done with in four days for the average player content-wise and expecting it to last months.
WoW always had the edge it could put out content while people were chewing through the available stuff. Naxx released and some guilds still hadn’t cleared BWL. Black Temple was put in the game before any guilds had cleared tier 5. Eventually players got at the point of outpacing the development, this wasn’t a WoW thing, this is just players these days are far more efficient in their gameplay and everything is meta’d out before it drops.
FFXIV, Guild Wars 2, and ESO all kept diehard fanbases that weren’t going to leave while they put things out to flesh the game more to make them more appealing. A completely fresh IP does not have this luxury. I’ve said before, if Vanilla WoW dropped in 2014 the game would have been dead instantly when groups were curbstomping Molten Core in the first two weeks.
invincibility exploit(its fixed now)
PVP is in a state of garbage due to exploits.
Endgame PVE is terrible and got nerfed.
5 dungeons, no raids
Increased XP req for crafting proffs
Dupe glitches ruining economy
Economy is worthless now
Low gold income(after quests you’ll be poor unless territory owner)
Gold being stolen from cities and then player server transfers with it all(someone stole nearly 1million gold in 1 case).
There was no PTR servers early on…live servers were testing servers. Hence exploits.
That’s just a few. It’s in a VERY bad state right now. Also open world PVP is nearly non-existent. It was a MMORPG designed to be hardcore PVP, but half way through they listened to feedback that it would die early on due to no PVE servers. They didn’t design enough for PVE endgame.
Some guy was complaining on reddit or something they had 840 hours into new world and there wasn’t much to do. That’s more then 2/3 of the time the games been out.
i’ve enjoyed reading this thread. I thought 2021 was the perfect opportunity to capitalize on the mmo market, with more than average people staying home.
And the constant talk (probably since end of BC), the next big wow killer.
Regularly? No, but it has definitely changed. Once other companies realized the only way to coexist in the same market as WoW was to not shamelessly rip off the game they got a lot better.
GW2, ESO, FFXIV, New World all deviate substantially from WoW’s formula as well as each other. They cater to different things.
Let’s face the fact that there will never be another World of Warcraft MMORPG. All those other games have no SOUL. I gave FF14 a try but it’s not my cup of tea to be honest. I’m not into those asian style games. What blizzard did with WoW is unmatched till this day. New World I played up to 55 and hated my life until I uninstalled. Nothing will come in our life time. Let’s hope for our children their future will be riddled with good MMORPG’s like WoW. Or else, this game might go 100 years.
Blizz does, and that’s why we have time gates and people still complain about lack of stuff to do.