“I think that the idea that the MMO crowd doesn’t exist is belied by the number of players who are still in World of Warcraft”
I had some good 50+ hours of fun in Farever, it’s an MMO lite type of game, nothing innovative, but very solid. I’m eagerly waiting for their next update.
I think it really depends. People literally have significantly less time than they did in 2005 when WoW got big. People have to work longer or multiple jobs just to pay sky high rent and mortgage prices with long, stagnated wages.
I get wanting to bring back the nostalgia of a bygone era but these community mmo’s where they were very social were a gigantic time sink that most people simply can’t do now.
Exactly, I miss WoW now and then and especially when I get over-the-top busy with work/life, not because the game is so good but because I miss the simpler life I had back then when my biggest stress was getting realm-first achievements.
MMOs in the early 2000s were an incredibly cheap form of entertainment though. For like $10/month, you got something that you and friends could goof around on for a few hours a night all month, and it was a primary ‘meeting space’ for those friends. I still remember when my online friends shifted away from ICQ, and just moved to WoW as their primary spot to contact each other… like I’d go in to WoW to sort out RL dates with my gf at the time, cause that’s where she’d be in her time off.
Part of the point I’m trying to make is that it’s not necessarily that people have less free time now, or that the cost is a huge burden, but that their attention/disposable income is split between a lot more ‘stufff’ online when they’re off. Social media, in general, wasn’t as big back in the 2000s, and MMOs filled part of that connectivity niche – you’d log in to WoW to catch up with real-life friends. Now you just glance at their facebook page or whatever periodically and pretend like you’ve kept in touch. And before, you’d get by with just the $10/month single MMO subscription and a $5 Netflix subscription shared between all your friends, now you get people that have like 5-6 different ‘streaming’ subscriptions, vpn subscriptions, cloud gaming pc subscriptions, etc etc etc. Heck, just think about the old landline setup vs current cell phones – in the past, the whole family had like a $30/month landline connection with a generic $10-20 handset or two in the house; now each person in the family needs a $50+ cell plan, or you can get a family plan for a slight discount, but you still gotta buy everyone mobile phones every few years, etc.
god so much this.
I’d love to play some Burning Crusade Classic and raid again, and it is admittedly much easier to raid at a high level in that than Classic where you gotta get world buffs in addition to your flasks and potions, but I just don’t have 16-20 hrs per week to dedicate to an MMO right now. I’m just too busy looking for a partner and a better job.
Make a SMALL mmo for heaven’s sake ! How many crazy scale MMOs need to fail before someone learns that lesson ? Make a really, really polished slice of an MMO, and build up from there.
I like that idea too, more of a MMO than a MMO.
(Mediumly Multiplayer Online, I mean, none of that massively nonsense, let’s call it… that…hmm? No I won’t apologize, hey, get your hands off me!.. Jazz tossed out of Bel Air snippet)
Tbh I’d rather just play a really good Single Player game over any MMO. Level 5s RPG fantasy life comes to mind with how well it can beat anything multiplayer. I’m le tired of credit card simulators.
I like the multiplayer aspect though ! But I would settle for co-op.
Oh a tread about MMOs?
I guess I’ll shamelessly plug Foxhole. Not your traditional MMO. The community is small enough that a lot of people know each other. Also no subscription fee! Please join green team. 👍
Yah, I think foxhole is a really good example of why the idea of “reinventing the MMO” is a really good discussion.
Before foxhole I had largely bounced off of MMOs because a lot were overly focused on “quests”, boss fights, loot tables and other spreadsheet nonsense. The sword and sorcery setting of many also just didn’t grab my attention.
Foxholes focus on collaborative logistics, supply chains, and large scale persistent warfare, not to mention being more grounded as a setting, actually engaged me and got me involved in teamwork and collaboration that was very fun.
Also blue team rules green team drools.
Also blue team rules green team drools.
Anybody remember .hack? I want an MMO that is like how the animes and cutscenes portrayed it. Not necessarily that actual game.
The other thing I miss is the social experience and not having to worry about 12 yr olds or pedophiles ruining it.
My ideal MMO would be something like No Man Sky with the scale of Star Citizen. Star Wars Galaxies had the right idea but botched the execution.
The World was always what I wanted in an MMO, but now I probably want something more like Log Horizon
The big thing about MMOs is that they (try to) create communities, and being part of a community is a surefire way to make people stay.
Give too much freedom for a single player and the community as a whole falters. Give them enough to do without groups, but leave the “good stuff” as something exclusive to groups and don’t give dungeon finders or similar auto-grouping tools. I say this as someone who spent way, way too much time playing WoW like a single-player game
People want to be in on the ground floor of the new hype thing. Then they leave. That’s what New World proved, its colossal dropoff in active players and revenue wasn’t entirely because Amazon killed some golden goose. Anyone trying to say “people want new MMOs” is probably coping about that surely the new MMO they want to not fail is going to survive.
New Thing Hype works for a couple years to be sure. And then you run into the content wall and learn that by playing a more established MMO like FF or WOW or ESO or GW2 you get decades of “new content” all at once.
I want a new AAA MMO that does a grand narrative but does a bit more sandboxy stuff. Like Albion Online has a consistent playerbase. Runescape. New indie MMOs all seem to be the player based resource economy style with minimal questing like Bitcraft Online. TESO but more player but more player economy. Some happy medium between TESO/SWTOR/FFXIV and the non-narrative centric mmos
The thumbnail made me think that this was Michio Kaku saying that.
Yah we just need something new that brakes away from the wow style RPG, some are trying but I don’t think they go far enough.
I’m replaying Crosscode and just yesterday I thought that the MMO that game is set in would be cool as an actual pixel art MMO.
They make a good point about how massive multiplayer games shouldn’t try to compete with wow, nor to try and implement every feature that wow has, but I think it goes beyond that. I think they need to question the pre existing assumptions of what an MMO is. Like, fundamentally, it’s a mass multiplayer online game, but so much of what gets associated with that concept is not really inherent to it.
Quests, bosses, grinding NPCs for equipment, ect ect. What the shape of content even looks like for these kinds of games.
There is so much potential in the concept of a big world with lots of players all interacting and it is held back by attempting to hew to a certain formula that looks very similar to WoW. Specifically the reliance on NPCs to fill out the world and to act as a source of resources.
Someone brought up foxhole and I think that’s a really good example. It is made by a small team(like… 10 people if I recall?) and it completely lacks a lot of the stuff normally expected in an MMO. No NPCs, no leveling or skill points, no quests or missions. All of the purposes those systems normally fulfill are handled through largely player driven dynamics. It’s a profoundly collaborative game built on team based PVP and an entirely player driven economy. Importantly, you are not playing a hero or unique character, nor collecting particularly valuable equipment overtime. You are cannon fodder, and you will die. In some ways, you are the NPC. Some parts of it definitely share heritage from the genre, but it expands on a lot of stuff that I feel is under developed in most.
It’s a departure from the normal formula and I think it shows that the potential audience for MMOs is actually much larger than the current crop, as a lot of people who play were never into other MMOs. The genre has pigeonholed its self by attempting to chase an existing audience that are used to a certain dynamic, but there is so much more potential that is left on the table.
I want an MMO where social reputation actually matters. None of this phasing shit where you play with people you’ll never see again. MMOs need a sense of community. Modern WoW is just a single player game that lets you get cursed at by 12 year olds right now.
My MMO wishlist is more survival mechanics. Having to prepare before you leave town. Like in old WoW. You have enough food for you and your pet? Bullets? Potions? Leaving town was an event as was getting to the next one.
Yeah… I kinda don’t miss that aspect. Star Wars Galaxies made me like that aspect. FFXI made me truly hate it. Nothing like losing half a level in xp.
Yeah, looking back…25(?) years, Ultima online was my go-to
You could just be making a living by running a shop and stuff.
In that sense it really was like a second world.
We had meetings there, where we discussed and decided together how to proceed with the city or some current problems.The quests weren’t the main thing for me, much more the people there on this specific server
UO didn’t even have quests until, like, the 3rd or 4th expansion. Just being a world drove players to have their own events and make up their own quests, and I have not really played anything that allowed that kind of freedom with the kind of community that embraced what it was like UO.
Just being a persistent world was a huge novelty in and of itself.
Asheron’s Call was my time sink. It had quests and stuff but the devs had a storyline they developed with active monthly updates. It made everything feel so alive on top of it also just existing in realtime.
And even so the quests and stuff they added was extra fluff. The social system and trading economy were the backbone of the game. It wasn’t until trade bots really took over that the social system collapsed.
It’s quite some time ago
I do remember something like, server events, the admin could trigger
Maybe I mixed that up with quests or I actually played a pretty late version
But yeah, UO was absolutely great :-)
I was too young to catch the UO train, but from everything I heard about it I would have loved it.
I’m still loving it
A remake with the same principle would be absolutely awesome
Edit: because of your comment, I’ve checked out, if there are still servers online
Seems to be :-)
this is way the opposite of the type of mmo I want.
I think the article underscores both of your sentiments well - don’t try to be everything for everyone, have a vision and a niche and min max that thing.
MMOs (the kind that are actually good) require people to be social to function properly. Everyone wants to build single-player experiences that function as MMOs kinda sorta. It has a big impact on the quality of these games.
People are less social than they were 20+ years ago too.
The problem is the lack of innovation on the formula. Many MMOs are the exact same mechanics, quests, dungeons, with a different lore and graphics.
Ideally all classes should be able to farm alone, ideally the grind should not punish adults with limited time.
But I totally agree l, socialization is fundamental to it. I just miss new ways to make players socialize.
I miss Ragnarok Online in this regard, where sitting would recover hp, mp faster, making players often sit and talk while they wait to recover.
RO was godlike. And so was Eve Online. I wish more games favoured an open ended game play formula.
I’m completely sucked in by Project Zomboid at the moment. If it had better Multiplayer, with easier to find servers, more comprehensive mod handling and a refined netcode, it’d be the GOAT.
Just give me an experience like azerothcore with playerbots and I’ll be happy.
Also if ya’ll want a singleplayer mmo play erenshor. It’s more everquest than wow in gameplay tho.
I want a good MMO, but I also don’t want to pay a lot to play it properly.
Guild Wars 2
Guild Wars 2 is the only MMO that doesn’t aggravate me.
- Feels like a real video game. You can dodge and stuff.
- Other players can only help. No “kill stealing”
- Other players are frictionless. They show up, do whatever, leave. No need to make a formal party
- Level cap doesn’t go up. No need to chase stats forever.
You do have to buy the expansions, but the core game is free now.
I love wow but I don’t want to pay ten euro a month even though I have time to play every 2 months
Warframe
