Personally Rift failed for me because it felt like wow all over again. No dramatic differences at all. If I wanted to play wow, I would have just played wow.
Why did Rift fail?
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Miele
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There are probably a dozen thounsands dead horses nearby, but... "you don't say?" (insert meme here).
Aside from GW2, which is a game made for being played on and off, being b2p, and being the only MMO I played recently that at least tried to apply some changes to the formula, all we got were clones of the ever-popular WoW, with the tiny, insignificant detail, that WoW is state of the art production quality and clones often are not, WoW changed itself every two years and clones do not, WoW is always fun to play and clones often are boring after two weeks and I think I could go on for 10 pages, detailing why everything, from class design, to raid design, to the UI which is orders of magnitude better than anything else ever made, to the animations, to the graphic style which is somewhat still pleasant after 9+ years.
This post would make me a wow fanboy in the eyes of many and while I like it and sometimes still play it, I can also see its shortcomings in several aspects, what I have yet to see is another game being just as good. As I said, I think GW2 got close, it was just not good enough (still decent) to take its place.
Rift? It had good ideas, they were scrapped one by one to make room for shitty unrewarding, uninspiring grinds,because somebody is convinced that having dozens of shitty things to grind is good for retention! Seriously?
Korrupt
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Rift in the beginning had a lot to do at least so the initial rush lasted for what seemed like longer than usual. On these forums though 98% of the people singing Wildstars praises as the coming of jesus will be gone week 2 like every other game they play. I mean shit most of them just did it in FFXIV after saying how amazing the game was for months in beta.
spronk
FPS noob
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"this game isn't the worst game ever made" isn't the same thing as saying something is amazing. SWTOR, TERA, FFXIV, and Wildstar all have been described as "well... it should be fun for a month, I guess" by most people, which is pretty much completely accurate. GW2 is really the only one that felt like the enthusiasm didn't match reality.
I am pretty sure that companies are making enough money in the 3-6 months of success to justify making another clone that will profit them big for 3-6 months. Everything after that is just gravy until they stop profiting. It's almost our fault for putting money into crap games. But how will we know it is crap until we try it?
If you change the wording around, isn't this the case for pretty much every video game genre? I don't think the problem is MMOs. I think we've done so many of the same types of games there is very little luster there.
I grew up with games designed by gamers with my interests: i.e. Tolkien, Warhammer, AD&D, and in depth characters and storytelling, etc which has somewhat died since most of us, designers included, all grew up and got older. Things now are built and marketed to the Xbox generation, and therein lies the problem for me. It's not a problem for the industry, they keep selling things.
We are mostly old jaded bastards who pine for the good ole days of when players were players and there was no catering or LFR. The problem is us.
MMO's were supposed to be different etc.... w/e you're right. So much for ever having an actual online community again.
Miele
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bixxby
Molten Core Raider
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Unproven point, there hasn't been a good product since Everquest that was more group centric or whatever. Warcraft created the worldwide gigantic mmo market, but Everquest was already dead. Nothing since then has come along that might have a chance of doing well that wasn't just a copy of Warcraft.
I don't know about that. Vanilla WOW's max level play, was incredibly group centric. Do we not remember all of the rabid casual vs. hardcore debates? The solo player had nothing to do but crafting, pvp, and reputation grinds. There were zero dailies, no group finder etc.
Miele
Lord Nagafen Raider
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In fact Vanilla WoW was great. MC Raid was also not too difficult, even for beginners, so stuff could be killed by pretty much every guild where people used both arms and a tiny fraction of the brain. Time was a valuable commodity back then, that's true, meaning that if you had 1 hour to play, you wouldn't get much done in a decent guild, probably not even a full dungeon run, but here we go back to the good ol' argument of "why play a MMO if you barely have time to login?".
Agree with this.
By definition a persistent MMO is designed to keep people playing - and thereby they generally make money. If people don't want to keep playing it - ie if there is not something about it's persistence and ongoing game play that people enjoy - then it's a failure.
The vast majority of the industry for the last eight years has ignored this thinking they could copy paste something which achieved this to some extent and print money.
In short game makers have started from, 'How can we milk this?', instead of, 'What can we make that people will enjoy?'.
It's really not that hard a question for those of us on this forum with over 10,000 hours logged playing/studying/evaluating the genre - and there are many of us. We know what's fun and what isn't. The problem is we know more than a lot of the industry do, not just that we are jaded.
The recent history of the industry and each individual title was entirely predictable if we'd had access to design documents and ongoing development state of play.
And so is the near future - you know you'd bet your house on there being a half dozen 'Minecraft' like MMOs out there that we haven't even heard about yet, just Trion and SoE shat the bed trying to be the first to announce and release (and yeah if someone at Blizzard isn't working on one of these Kotick will be ripping souls out).
shabushabu
Molten Core Raider
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WoW vanilla endgame was great many interesting dungeons/raids to crawl. But of course, MMOs cater to the solo champions now so ... there ya go. Everyone wants to be a Leroy and WIN and the industry gave it to em.
Jimbolini
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tad10
Elisha Dushku
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Jane's Rift?
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Rift was awful. As a friend pointed out, you start out fighting a battle at the end of the world and then get summoned back in time because you're some kind of super hero and the first thing you get asked to do by the people you summoned is kill rabbit-pigs or collect rocks or something equally insipid. You'd think they could have collected their own rocks or killed their own rabbit-pigs instead of summoning you from the future. But no, this was Rift, so while the factions could summon you from the future, they couldn't kill their own rabbit-pigs or collect poseys or wtf.
