Where are all the MMORPG games? lol

MMO's are dying because they're designed like shit. You can only have so many games with repetitive design to keep you actively engaged, and thats all MMO's have done for two decades. Everything is rinse and repeat ad nauseum whether its raids, dailies, or dungeons. You run the same dungeons the same way every time. You run dailies the same way every time. You run raids the same way every time.

Until the cycle breaks, were going to continue to get the same garbage.

Mist said:

You'd need to design an MMO where the fun part is getting TO the quest, rather than just looting the Obelisk of Bear-Butts and going back to town.

Click to expand...

WoW style quests were a mistake and have ruined every mmo since. The combat is supposed to be the fun thing, not the shit you do to waste time in between turning in quests.

TJT said:

This is a concept that I absolutely love. It currently only exists in LTRPG books which can be tons of fun.

But there's this whole idea of dynamic classes. Like everyone gets some basic bitch class and you have standard progression like joining the mage guild and becoming Mage->Magus->Arcmagus. Which is good and powerful and requires grinding and such to accomplish.

Or you can fuck off and run into the forest come across some weird ass encounter which gives you a hidden class that was never even documented on an entirely different skillset that can do whatever the fuck. With its own limitations and excitement. Then there's a whole universe of these differing classes, secret classes, secret progression and so on because it's all guided by the game.

But all of it requires a near-sapient AI dynamically doing all of this. You're seeing the start of this with AI language models doing really engaging choose your own adventure stuff.

A man can dream.

Click to expand...

I feel like this is a concept you'll see very soon, but mostly in single-player type RPGs. Or your "mmo-lites" such as Conan Exiles, Palword, etc.

MMORPGs are a dead genre. The social aspect of them is completely unnecessary in 2024. All it has left feeding it is nostalgia. There are too many social tools now. And let's be honest, the maximum number of people you really interacted with in most MMO settings was.. 50 or so? That's roughly what you see in modern day survival-esque style games now. The other "players" you see could easily be AI and you'd never know the difference.

Mist said:

They could be AI, but would you really want them to be AI?

Click to expand...

Yes. Have you interacted with most mouthbreathers in the world, let alone "gamers"? Let's not pretend that even half the bozos we played with in EQ were any more interesting than your average NPC. AI is far more interesting than most "real" players. And in 5 years? It'll be almost indistinguishable.

How many of the players sitting around FP did you interact with on your runs to the bank? How about EC tunnel? Again, the "players" were just background NPCs in 90% of cases. How many players do you have deep, meaningful interactions with when your dungeon queue pops? Or your capture the flag PvP arena? Who gives a shit if they are AI.

Mist said:

Wouldn't you rather play with real people who might be interesting, and then let the game fill in the rest with AI?

Click to expand...

it doesn't matter. Human nature dictates that my social circles remain relatively small and insular. And in 2024, I interact with those insular communities via the 5 bajillion social tools that exist now.

Genshin Impact has a great open world design in places.

I would like to see an MMO with a vast traversable world with crafting mats to collect everywhere and enemy camps amd dungeons randomly spawning - then you compete or team up with other players.

Have environmental effects like snow areas where you need to warm up etc, lots of player housing and customisable gear.

I give absolutley zero shits about quests and voice acting and cut scenes in a MMO yet they eat up all the dev time.

Kirun said:

How many players do you have deep, meaningful interactions with

Click to expand...

The real question isn't "how many?", it's "how many does it take to make it worthwhile?" And the answer is not very many. The problem is that from WoW forward, games increasingly took systems that enabled meaningful interaction over a prolonged period of time and made them transactional and ephemeral, all to reduce the friction and barriers to entry. The problem is that the friction is what make it all worthwhile.

Control said:

The problem is that from WoW forward, games increasingly took systems that enabled meaningful interaction over a prolonged period of time and made them transactional and ephemeral, all to reduce the friction and barriers to entry. The problem is that the friction is what make it all worthwhile.

Click to expand...

WoW didn't really take those. Let's not forget, OG WoW is pretty much just a better version of EverQuest.

Most people agree that WoW's "downfall" starts somewhere around the end of WotLK and many consider that period of time its greatest. And what happened right around the time WotLK starts to wind down/end? It just so happens to roughly coincide with the rise of Facebook and mass adoption of smart phones. These aren't really coincidences. And as people start to look elsewhere for their social interactions, Blizzard and other devs started designing their MMOs accordingly. That's also roughly when you start seeing the rise in popularity of cross-server solo dungeon queues, PvP arenas, etc. too.

Almost as if players no longer really cared about that aspect of MMOs anymore and devs in the industry start designing around it accordingly. And the pace of all these systems only increases as attention spans start to dwindle, social media gets even MORE popular, the advent/rise of Discord, people wanting shorter and shorter bursts of content, etc.

Face it - the thing that made MMOs the MOST novel, doesn't exist anymore. That genie is out of the bottle and can never go back.

Ukerric said:

Looks like Albion Online, I think?

Click to expand...

A lot of the boomers on here that bemoan about "interdependence", "name mattering", meaningful consequences, blah blah blah? It almost perfectly describes Albion Online. Yet almost nobody plays it. Almost as if nostalgia is the only reason people think they actually want that shit in their MMOs in 2024.

Ukerric said:

Looks like Albion Online, I think?

Click to expand...

I did play that, seemed to have some promise but Runescape graphics and not enough to do. Seemed like they were going for medieval EVE Online.

Genshin has a vast variety of mats everywhere in roleplay appropriate locations, like you climb to the top of a mountain and there's a specific flower there, or a swamp has specific mushrooms. Albion just had generic mats to grind for in vast quantities.

MMO's were an answer to a dream of those who lived in a different time. Most of our experiences in RPGs and living out fantasy storylines took place either through tabletop games, consoles, and eventually in much smaller worlds/interactions such as Diablo. As those experiences progressed and evolved it just eventually landed in the minds of those who took a crazy risk and make a MMO. Though somewhat primitive (UO / EQ) it was a crazy innovation and finally brought all of those people together who were in countless small pockets in their homes or isolated online communities. Even at its hight, EQ brought together what... 500k people before WoW and FF14 took it to millions? However, those millions do not interact the same way. They really play a smaller experiences that just happen to exist in a much larger world. FF14 is a great example. In EQ, I could name you nearly every player on our server. Outside of our guild, I have no idea who I play with on WoW. I know about 75% of our build, some of the IRL, and others float in and out. There is no need for community, relationships, or even reputation. You queue up, do your thing, and move on.

As others have said... people are so heavily connected. No one is wishing of a world were they could take their experiences from D&D, Zelda, FF, and Diablo and dream of what it would be like if those experiences were shared with thousands of other people. People are just different just because there's a different audience who grew up through different times and innovations.

I think there could be MMO's and even be considered successful, as long as the developers understand what successful means to them. If you want to relive EQ and take the community, style of play, and declare them your audience then you're not going to have millions of players. Those players also are not going to want a lot of the newer gaming experiences such as microtransactions, dungeon finders, lack of exploration, or meaningless character development. If you want to make a WoW clone or at least something WoW similar it has to be better than WoW or something that will take players from years of investment to another game.

Its a tough spot to be in but games like Valheim give me hope and there are others as well that very well may bring something new to us.

Nevermind, was already said. Some ones to look at for but yeah still nothing I want to play currently. Turtle WoW remains on my PC but haven't booted it in months.

Kirun said:

WoW didn't really take those. Let's not forget, OG WoW is pretty much just a better version of EverQuest.

Most people agree that WoW's "downfall" starts somewhere around the end of WotLK and many consider that period of time its greatest. And what happened right around the time WotLK starts to wind down/end? It just so happens to roughly coincide with the rise of Facebook and mass adoption of smart phones. These aren't really coincidences. And as people start to look elsewhere for their social interactions, Blizzard and other devs started designing their MMOs accordingly. That's also roughly when you start seeing the rise in popularity of cross-server solo dungeon queues, PvP arenas, etc. too.

Almost as if players no longer really cared about that aspect of MMOs anymore and devs in the industry start designing around it accordingly. And the pace of all these systems only increases as attention spans start to dwindle, social media gets even MORE popular, the advent/rise of Discord, people wanting shorter and shorter bursts of content, etc.

Face it - the thing that made MMOs the MOST novel, doesn't exist anymore. That genie is out of the bottle and can never go back.

A lot of the boomers on here that bemoan about "interdependence", "name mattering", meaningful consequences, blah blah blah? It almost perfectly describes Albion Online. Yet almost nobody plays it. Almost as if nostalgia is the only reason people think they actually want that shit in their MMOs in 2024.

Click to expand...

From launch, WoW taught players that "mmo content" was running from one quest-giver icon to another. You needed to go kill 10 boars over here, then run to this other spot where you can find more quest givers. That was easier than what EQ asked people to do, so it was more popular. Almost magically so. Just enough diku, just enough social, just enough 'I don't really need anybody else'. It was so much more popular that EQ's design basically doesn't even matter except to the extent that it shaped WoW's designers. WoW players literally aren't EQ players. There's what, maybe single digit % overlap? And because WoW won the MMO war, every game since then has copied it. BUT, they've copied it without fully understanding it (and that probably includes Blizzard too once the original designers moved to other projects), so we've just been getting faulty copies of faulty copies.

On the other hand, EQ taught players that they better fucking make some friends. I think there's still a market for that, but it's definitely niche, maybe in the 10's of thousands of people. And That would be enough to keep a small team running though. If you had stripped away the novelty at the time, that may have been the actual size of EQ's niche anyway. Hell, Vanilla EQ was originally made on what would be an large indie budget today, or at most a single-A budget, and it would be infinitely easier now than then. A few tens of thousands of people would have still been profitable for EQ. Publishers aren't going to touch it though, so it's up to the indie world to brute-force it like Monsters and Memories is doing.

EQ didn't teach people to make friends. It taught people that anyone on the internet is probably a piece of shit who will steal your loot and laugh about it on a forum. So you better try to join a guild that's better at doing it than everyone else.

People don't prefer soloable content in multi-player games because it's some conditioned pavlovian response. They prefer it because most people they interact with online are either worthless, or shitheads.

Peak MMO raiding, in any MMO ever, was WoTLK when 10 man loot was equivalent to 25 man loot. Because its way easier to find 10 people you can put up with for any extended period of time.

Mist said:

Again, WEIRD, not BAD.

Weird fiction - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Click to expand...

"All the failed examples weren't REAL socialism!"