Because Western culture has become a self-hating, self-destructive thing. It’s pretty simple. Today we’re told that everything that made Western culture great is pure evil and apparently we should “feel bad” because we exist. It’s total nonsense, but it has had an impact on the culture and the byproducts of said culture (such as games).
There was no overarching story; there were several stories that led into the various raids. And then smaller mini-stories within that.
It was charming.
It took longer is the biggest part of it, and there was a real threat of death/failure.
People say “I don’t want the game to take longer to level or play through the story” But the fact of the matter is that slow progression is more immersive, sticks in your mind better, feels more real.
And to my second point, I’m paying much more attention to my quest when me screwing up can result in me dying and having to run back to my body and pay a meaningful amount of money for repairs. I’m also paying much more attention when I have to use a literal map and written directions to find my quest objective, not a glowing icon on a map.
You shouldn’t feel tempted to throw on Netflix or a Podcast while leveling. And if you do, it should be to your detriment.
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I think the answer to your question is simple, technology. When wow was originally introduced people were used to waiting on things, working hard on achieving specific items, etc… over the last 20 years though technology has grown substantially. You don’t have to wait for anything. You want something new, order it on amazon it’ll be here same day. You have a question that needs answering, f#$k a book. We got google. This same mentality has made its way into games. Most people don’t have the patience to come home and grind for hours, days, sometimes months to get a small reward. I’m just as guilty I suppose. That my thoughts anyways. That’s why a lot of games get away with making millions on micro transactions.
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Yeah that aspect of it was cool. it felt much more like discovering and being part of a real world with a lot of different moving parts.
Now it’s just like, watch a movie, then begin your Diablo loot grind.
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Not sure I completely understand OPs question but I’m pretty sure the answer is money.
Even though I believe there is a market for slower experiences, it is dwarfed by a market that buys quick, high energy, easily gratifying diversions. More people want something to waste a little time with rather than having a serious hobby or make real commitments. They want entertainment.
That is not to devalue any or either form and style. But markets decide where things go.
But as the larger markets saturates I think we can see companies return to catering to smaller niche audiences in order to capture ‘side’ revenue. Hence Wow Classic.
EDIT: a bit off topic. I also think within the next few years that we will see WoW subscription turn into a Blizzard subscription giving access to their current and future library of games. More game = bigger library… hence wow classic.
I could see how that lines up with my questions.
Asian cultures to tend to value patience and perseverance outside of the work setting more than many Western cultures. Leisure activities that seem somewhat tedious tend to be more popular in Japan, and I remember from growing up in Okinawa that even just like kids in community sports leagues took the sport very seriously and strove to get really good at it. Even if they knew they weren’t going to play at a higher level one day, or didn’t even aspire to it.
I think that Eastern culture in general adhere far more tightly to the ideal that anything worth doing at all is worth doing well. While in American cultures we’re kind of tossing that out the window cuz we promote everyone having their own value system, rather than touting an ideal standard of behavior and achievement.
Longer is fine when what’s causing it to be longer is actually good story content, when it’s go pick up 10 logs for xyz quest giver because they are lazy, and you do 5 of those quests in each zone, that’s just plain boring.
See I feel much more tempted to watch netflix while playing classic because so much of it is a monotonous grind, hey go kill a bunch of boars for a stew I’m making… I actually find myself paying attention and reading quest text now because it’s usually more tied to a story then most Vanilla quests were.
The moment that institutional investors realized that the gaming industry could be more profitable than the movie industry, the writing was on the wall. That was the end of publicly traded game studios/publishers being able to primarily focus on the best gaming experience. Now, that “gaming experience” is just a means to an end and compromises and sacrifices in the pursuit of better quarterly earnings. Pair this with the emergence of perpetual growth as a financial philosophy and it just means that the meaningful gameplay that we are truly after can 99% of the time only be found from private and small game studios. There is no way to go against investors when a decision is between getting more money or making the best experience. And inb4 “purpose of a company is to make money” …that’s true, but it doesn’t have to be the only purpose nor does making money have to override long term goodwill investment by simply making the best product, marginal pennies be darned.
I firmly believe Blizzard has people working on WoW that truly want to make the best game. I believe this is even the case for Ion. However, the fund managers for Bank of America or Sun Trust don’t know anything about the kind of games we like. They know metrics. They know that someone playing a game for x more hours per week this quarter vs last quarter must mean they are enjoying it more and are more likely to spend more money on it…even if that person is burning out due to chorelike grind on a Skinner box that isn’t that enjoyable anymore. However, those are the metrics they see with mobile games and mobile games make a ton of money. What is WOW but just another game? Right? That’s how they see it. So they are going to be pressuring the development staff to be making these performance metrics for their job review. They are tasked with the impossible of trying to make a fundamentally flawed metric “fun”, even if it violates all the things that make the game actually fun. The investors want more “engagement” for less investment, meaning they can spend less money making content while simultaneously making you play that content even longer so that the enterprise is more “efficient.” Hence, timegated content and artificial limits. But they also don’t want you quitting over frustration, so you have to be guaranteed it as well and a lot of other QoL aspects that ultimately break immersion. Kind of an impossible task to be honest.
Even though I am thrilled at the opportunity to play Classic on official servers, I’m still very sad thinking about the future. I think publicly traded studios can no longer make the magic they used to anymore because of pressures that will never go away. The only hope is to not be publicly traded and make sure any investors you do have understand the enterprise will make money, but only by putting the best gaming experience first. No slaying of the golden egg laying goose, as you see commonly today.
If you think I’m crazy, just listen to the earnings calls with Activision Blizzard. Think about how they talk to you vs how they talk to the fund managers. I get the feeling sometimes I pay for the privilege of being the product to the real customer; the institutional investor. That’s not unique to Blizz, but to a lot of large publicly traded companies in the age of perpetual “growth”. It’s really a scorched earth goal because the only thing that happens is that the goodwill built up over years and decades is liquidated and the big investors jump ship leaving only a soulless husk behind…reputation left in tatters. I really wish this could be reversed.
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I can totally understand and agree with both those points.
When it comes to questing, I feel like even your standard “Go kill 10 boars” quest should be engaging. You’ve got to make sure your pet maintains aggro, you’ve got to manage your mana, you’ve got to kite, you’ve got to make sure you don’t pull extra mobs.
When you can just stand in a quest zone and smash your hand indiscriminately on the keyboard while watching Netflix, hardly even looking at the screen…and have 0 threat of dying…then there is a serious problem.
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I feel like Collect X Drops and Kill X Mobs were only there to put a veneer on grinding. But we generally think of grinding as a bad thing, hence the need for a veneer. But really, grinding serves a valuable role in getting us acquainted with our character and various rotations. You learn something by doing it many times. And when you e got the muscle memory down to do the basics, then that frees up your attention to focus on more advanced things like difficult boss mechanics. Nobody wants to practice their clarinet every day, but if they are made to, eventually they might become quite good and be happy they put in the time. Grinding is how combat mechanics in various situations become muscle memory and different survival scenarios help broaden and sharpen those skills. So they may not be the most stimulating quests, but they have their purpose in the big scheme.
Preach homie, preach
if ur not immersed enough, i got a jakoozie
Again, preach dude
I came back to check out bfa, and hang around for classic. I have zero immersion even while questing. My husband decided to jump on his mage, to get him to 120, and I go to help. When I can actually see what he’s killing, I ask “why are you fighting a lvl 120?” It’s a 113 on his screen. How is it both? Me being there just made everything take longer, and I realized how much it sucks never getting to run into anything that isn’t your exact level. I got my flight form, but he falls off my back because there is phasing everywhere. I ended up telling him that it seemed like blizzard doesn’t want us playing together. If I could turn it all off, I might be playing right now, but it isn’t fun for me.
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Search Youtube for “World Coherency: WoW’s Missing Link - Introduction”.
Then ask yourself if chasing money quarterly instead of seeing the big picture is what leads people to say things like “You think you do, but you don’t”.
We are off to a bad start already with layering…
Prediction- If they don’t remove it like they said they would it will be a gigantic mistake. The longer they take to remove it, the more of the hardcore long term players who have been playing private servers for years already, will leave.
“Everyone dreams of a theme park without any queues, but no one wants to go to a theme park where you go by yourself on all the rides.”
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That explains it perfectly.
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There are better ways to teach people to use there abilities then to make them grind 10 boars, especially as with a lot of mobs you don’t get through a rotation, and you aren’t dealing with the factors introduced by other players.
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Based on this, what you are looking for is a Story Driven Theme Park MMORPG. WoW, is by large, just that. Most MMORPGs these days are just that. Star Wars the Old Republic and Final Fantasy XIV are probably the two strongest examples of that.
However, at the end of the day, the only person your definition of immersion will matter to is you.
No one else, is going to have the exact same definition. You will, however, find that there are many who come close, and some very close indeed to sharing that definition. Those people will most likely help you better find and enjoy the sort of immersion you are looking for.
Your ideal scenario, however, is at odds with your definition of immersion. By what you have stated that makes a game more immersive, you do not want a fantasy world that is real. For such an experience to happen, you cannot have a game driven by someone else’s story. YOUR STORY would be the one that would have to drive everything, tell everything, and be everything as you play the game. The same would also have to be true for everyone else. Each player’s own story would be the driving force behind their own experiences. The intersection of stories between players would then establish the dynamic pivoting points about which each players story swings. Only in this way can a fantasy world truly come to life. Anything else, is just a guided story, like a book or a movie, just with more interactivity.
That kind of MMORPG is called a Sandbox. The best sandbox out there with great story telling backdrop is EvE Online. The best sandbox out there from a gameplay perspective, from what I have been told, is Black Desert Online.
Unfortunately for you, the strong points of the Theme Park MMORPG and the Sandbox MMORPG are by and large mutually exclusive. You can either be a part of the world, shape the world, make an impact upon the world, have it truly live; OR you can pretend to do the same as you follow along the scripted patch created by someone else, in this case Blizzard.
But don’t forget your original question in the process, you originally wondered why so many gamers have turned away from both formats of slower story driven gameplay in favor of instant gratification. That question and its answer, has nothing to do with immersion, however you define it.
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