What went wrong with MMORPGs?

Community General Discussion
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What do y’all think? Especially his points after 7:50 about the world getting smaller.

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I agree with him but not on the world being smaller. Raiding didnt matter and it still shouldnt. I have been arguing this point a LOT recently on these forums. People dont want to play the leveling game (which is what a MMORPG is) they want to RAID. Even the world first raider like this guy is saying how raiding wasnt really that important.

RAID or DIE (Ghostcrawler) is what brought down MMORPGs.

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we need the old school mmo mentality from everquest and classic wow that is the key to success

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I just dont think the type of player for old EQ/Classic is still playing games. I play and have tried old school EQ recently but I just couldnt stand the forced grouping to level. I loved it the first time around, cant do it anymore

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Several things went wrong in my opinion…

1-Cata had random people matched up for what was not PUG content, but guild group content. Let’s be honest, its better to team up with friends over strangers.

2-Microtransactions, initially these were not a bad thing, when it was just a handful of mounts, but this gradually kept expanding and kept bloating outwards and unfortunately we now have a situation where key features in a lot of mmorpg’s you have to pay money to unlock. While I appreciate that gaming companies got to make their money somehow, I do feel this has gone a little over the top, that’s just my opinion.

3-I do agree that each expansion has often seemed smaller than the last, with less world to explore and less to do on each new continent. That said, Blizzard has at least done well to give different things to do, I mean Warfront today for an ilvl 400 piece of gear was pretty awesome.

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I think half the problem is people used to group for everything, being friends meant something and guilds were actually families, not this “family friendly” empty promise people advertise.

WoW is a single player game, and it sucks the life from it. People get bored playing alone and drift away, I did too for a while.

The mentality is “me me me” with players, and when it’s not that, it’s bragging and being awful to people. No wonder people don’t play mmos now.

Yes bfa has got a lot of problems, and it’s far from being a good expansion. But we as players need to take some responsibility for the community (or lack thereof) we have created.

Normally I dislike people who mention vanilla, but I bet most of them would reminisce about grouping with friends and making new friends randomly around the world.

Just my thoughts anyway.

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7

I never wanted to raid. More /played than all of you. Keep speaking for me though, please

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Wish I could say otherwise, but you just might not :slight_smile:

Thank God there isnt a way to do /played across all characters and accounts. Still less of a waste of my life than time spent with my ex’s though.

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I think he was talking in a broad sense, don’t take things so personally.

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People dont want to play the leveling game (which is what a MMORPG is)

I disagree, my favourite part of WoW is levelling alts :slight_smile: . I find it annoying that the experience is now so small that it’s much harder to enjoy levelling in the old world though :frowning: .

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Nothing necessarily “went wrong”. Fads come and go, and then come back again.

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I’m just saying levelling is fine and great when the focus isn’t all on the endgame. But casuals have demanded the ability to steamroll through oldworld content in order to get to endgame, rendering all the tens of thousands of hours of development time on oldworld obselete. That content could easily be utilized but all we focus on is the finish line. Then we get there and look around and wonder where everything is.

Sorry to be rude.

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I agree to a point, but once you’ve done the stories two or three times, it gets monotonous.

I do hate getting to the point where I’m level X and there are no zones for my level so I have to move into new expansion areas. Although sometimes I actually stay a while and finish some off.

Newer players don’t know about that though, they see the quest to go to Outland and go. Why wouldn’t they?

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developer and publisher hubris.

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Maybe if they put more focus into making the levelling process more dynamic, like with world bosses of various levels, events along the way, more actual content in places other than just the “end”, it wouldn’t feel that way.

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16

But the world has been the same for a very long time–you can’t really reinvent it unless you do a Cataclysm 2.0 to make the experience “fresh” again. You have to take the age of this game into consideration, which is why I think endgame has become the goto for Blizzard. Sadly it’s when the endgame lacks or isn’t meaningful that people start pointing out everything else that’s unappealing, ie. leveling.

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Funny thing is if you ever watch the videos of the early devs designs, raids had level ranges. They were not “endgame” They were something you did as you leveled.

I agree with your though. leveling should be more important (its why I said I hated the RAID OR DIE! motto)

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18

It’s sad because I don’t think MMORPGs ever reached their full potential. Now that they’re on a downward trend in popularity, it looks like they might not any time soon either. We had a huge open world craze going on as graphics tech exploded over the past couple decades, and yet MMOs opted for a race to the level cap, instanced content and linear paths of progression. Was this really the best they could do?

Also gameplay is a big part of it as well. A lot of current generation gamers don’t want tab target, they want action. I think MMOs are in a bit of a transitional phase right now from a gameplay perspective.

Hopefully things get better.

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19

The flat top came back into style for some time. I’m waiting for Togas to come back into style, truth be told.

However, MMORPGs have changed, and not necessarily for the better. Comparing modern ones to older ones and you see there is something lacking in modern mmorpgs. It’s hard to define what it is, but there is indeed something “lacking”.

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Actually, with good writing, you can do a lot without changing the world. Old school gamer, back to dnd, dice, paper, the works.

The same city can change as the characters level, all because what they’re dealing with changes. At first the city is a stopping point between travelling, then one of them gets the idiotic idea to buy property. Suddenly the city becomes far more important. It’s the same city, but the stories have taken on a new meaning.

1 Like