Palum
what Suineg set it to
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We got the best games when the devs made games they wanted to play. Now it's all major corps making them to reinvent the World of Warcraft cash cow. I think the core problem is the "leveling" of player skill. For example, in EQ1 the difference between a skilled enchanter and non-skilled enchanter may be being able to complete the content or not. Then, when you add PvP into the mix it gets way worse. The top 10% of players then take a giant shit on everyone's heads. In World of Warcraft the game was designed in a way to attempt to negate a large amount of player skill so all the "average" players wouldn't be discouraged from playing.
You see this trend throughout the entire industry. Developers "leveling" the playing field to get as many people playing as possible. I think what developers have missed on is the "if you build it, they will come" gamers of yesteryear that came up with EQ, AO, DAoC, RS, etc.
Just look at what happens when someone manages to make something that's "ok". People flock to it.
I think the next big thing will be other games that are created off the Cloud Imperium Games tech, not necessarily Star Citizen itself, but games that use the true 64-bit float positioning, real server meshing, object container streaming, and entity authority with replication layer streaming. Not saying they "invented" these things but bringing them all into the same engine is a pretty big deal.
The big problem is that not enough people care to make 'true' modern MMOs viable. There are a lot of reasons why and causes of the general decline of the industry, but the reality is the only way we will ever see another game at the scale of WoW in the future and with that specific type of fantasy RPG gameplay is leveraging AI tools.
However, I think the reality is 90% of what makes MMOs 'good' can be accomplished with a competently engineered 'live service' game that uses the right facades to hide the lobby elements and seamlessly integrate them into the world. I look back at something like exploring BRD which was the pinnacle (and generally last) of the sprawling megadungeons which really just acted as an instanced zone and think that you could make that type of experience a a template for an entire game and it would be fine.
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