Why did MMOs die?

Why did MMOs die?
Is there any chance of them ever making a proper return and what would that require?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=36IgjXkSoPM
youtube.com/watch?v=fVhggGSjXVg
twitter.com/AnonBabble

lack of content
huge open empty maps with lots of travel time
endless grinding
no purpose

that's mmorpg at least
shit combo, mmo only works for action
looking forward to games like what star citizen promises to be

Social media and wikis.
As little moneygrubbing as possible and taking down any information hubs for the games.

People got that MMOs were the same shit over and over.
Mobas killed the genre

I do think Wiki's and datamining killed a lot of what made MMO's great.
There were no surprises anymore. People know everything thats in an update before the update even hits anymore.

but mobas are the same shit over and over too

good MMOs = wow and eso
have fun and stop bitching

>wow
>good
come on now, let's be serious

Because WoWclones don't even attempt to copy what was good about WoW i.e. Vanilla

People actually watched this show?

WoW clones striving then dying because they're trying to be WoW clones.

Fun smaller ones with a nice community like Dream of Mirror Online are a tad too grindy at times and community is very small compared to other MMOs.
That said, DoMO will hold a place in my heart, even if it was rather basic and had a bit of grind.

yes
>not watching for anime tiddies

WoW got really popular and blizzard started removing mechanics to broaden their market. They did this by shaving off mechanics to appeal to the same sort of userbase that plays farmville on facebook which resulted in an introverted, anti-social majority which ultimately would kill MMO's.

Regardless of these decisions, it made money and multiple game companies wanted in on WoW's success. Investors were rigged and ill-versed in just how blizzard was successful and would only feel safe funding new MMOs if they resembled WoW. This wasn't helped by the angry WoW players who threatened to leave the game every patch when their class was mishandeled, giving reason for new MMO's to copy WoW.

It was soon apparent that MMO hoppers had no reason to quit WoW no matter how bad it got, because they were discontent with the content in general and already made progress with the game, there was simply no reason to leave for a game that was the same + some gimmick like PVP focus that was intended to attract complainers.

These games began to drop like flies due to total and utter failure, until the Korean Market tapped into a gold mine known as free to play. They discovered that if their game failed they could remove a monthly fee, advertise it was free and profit off of an ingame shop that preyed on peoples spending addictions or even make the game so unbearable people would buy items just to enjoy it.

This destroyed the notion that WoW-clones were failures, because they still made profit after being failures, so investors remained unchanged especially in the east.

Because investors believe they can create a WoW meal ticket, MMO's continue to promise a fresh take on the genre only to become WoW clones last minute, fail, become f2p and then make the investors a meager profit.

pic unreleated.

>Wildstar

MMOs have always been and always will be shit

Shitty joke. Not even the purest, unicorn riding, clean air breathing maiden would have urine that goes down that smoothly.

I liked FFXI and RO.

They were pretty fucking good.

WoW's success killed it. It became so good that it defined what an MMO was. Nobody questions adding in theme park PvE elements, cooldowns, even their UI. It's seen as the genre now.

Maybe that's why everyone thinks MMOs are stale.

>Why did MMOs die?
youtube.com/watch?v=36IgjXkSoPM

They are repetitive as fuck. In todays market it's all about being, "new."

Yeah, but moba's are team games. Games are more fun when its you vs them.

who is this

S P U N K M O N K

MMOs died once the genre's community no longer saw a need in experimentation or social interaction.
Then there's the legion of WoW clones that don't quite understand the game they're ripping off.

Now they're only good for dressing up your waifu.

Master

A lot those concepts aren't original to WoW though, they're mechanics that work well with high latency.

We're technologically past that as of now, sort of, America is kind of fucked in terms of infrastructure but in korea this is why they have MMO's with physics and action combat.

Cookie cutter builds, amusement parkesque storylines, grinding, shit communities. Rinse and repeat. It's just not immersive enough, especially when you know what you're getting into.

It died because people want adventure but people want choices too.
Star Wars Galaxies is a great example of how MMOs should handle freedom and choices, sure the combat wasn't exactly great but it worked, everything else about the game was magical. Want to be a bounty hunter and hunt Jedi? Fuck it, you can. Want to scout the area and harvest resources? You most definitely can. Want to build shit and start a city? Holy SHIT you can! Want to start up a hunting party and kill some rancors in the wild? Ojsd-0pg ihnsighn-sg YES! Want to start all over again and choose a different class? Sure, why not.
Star Wars Galaxies would still be played to this day if weren't that for the damn Combat Update and New Game Enhancements update.

If there was an MMO that was exactly like SWG but better and not made in Korea, I'd definitely play it.

WoW got too many addicts and burnt them out on the skinner box. Now Blizzard pulls the SAME shit that SOE did with EverQuest what with the incomplete, shitty paid xpacs that all the addicts buy and then bitch about it for 11 months until the next half-baked paid xpac gets shat out. The difference was that EQ had celebrities who shilled WoW hard and convinced everyone to mass migrate--does WoW have a single noteworthy Uberguild? Nope, because Furor and Tigole cut down the ladder that had given Uberguilds such a vocal influence over EverQuest. Well, I suppose WoW was a hell of a lot more "fun" than old EQ thanks to being casualized evercrack, but every MMO that apes WoW is just a WoW-clone which means it's boring and stale.

You can only be a hardcore loot-grinder once or twice. After that you go to a new game and see a new grind and your brain just goes, "nope" at it because it recognizes the tedium of the task and just doesn't get excited when you get a +5 Vorpal Sword of Bunny-Slaying to replace your +4 Buster Sword of Boar Slaughter. Same probably applies to ARPGs, everybody remembers Diablo2 fondly probably because it was their first skinner box mouse clickan gaem.

>make MMO based on action skills rather than pressing hotkeys and tracking cooldown timers
>actually hard enemies that can't be defeated easily just by being extremely high leveled, again skill based combat system
>accessing / progressing through content is an actual accomplishment with big rewards (for all players?)
>simplified class tree so that there is more focus on one type of fighting
>add VR element
Basically just make SAO and the genre would experience a revival.

But that would mean game developers need to innovate.

They're inferior to proper single player games.

>hurrdurr action
Just go play DmC or some shit, leave actual MMO fans alone.

Because you don't have to deal with tryhards? Let's face it, other people ruin immersive experiences.

That's probably why MMOs are still popular in South Korea. They still have new forms of gameplay to offer, and new things to experience. The F2P business model is also accepted there, since their PC Gaming culture spawned out of pay2play internet cafes. Even pay to win elements are seen as 100% normal. That shit just doesn't fly in the west, unless we're talking about smartphone games, but that's different. Western PC gamers have shittier internet, and zero tolerance for F2P.

Anyways, I'd say MMOs will be making a comeback when VR gets more advanced. Maybe in another 30 years, when something like Sword Art Online, or like the manga Ressentiment becomes possible. Full-Dive VR is the only time playing an MMO again will be popular.

SWG was so based.

>tfw Master Architect/Master Trader with some bounty hunting skills
>Could fend for myself while I set up factories, moisture farms, and mining installments out in the wilds of Tatooine
>tfw used to create dank furniture in mass quantities and sell it to the masses
>tfw was a major player in the server economy just by being good at what I did, not by using addons to "scan" the player market

holy shit, so many things went right with that game. I doubt we ever see anything like it for another decade or so.... it was truly ahead of its time in all social/economic aspects. Until the NGE of course....

Star citizen is looking like a promising mmo. Or it could be a scam for rich idiots.

It's ice tea, she's making a joke.

>30 years
I have to live 30 more years to experience this?

Doesn't even have to have VR. Just have a strong physics system, and monster-climbing like Dragons Dogma or Shadow of the Colossus.

The big problem (aside from latency), would be mega-guilds going 40vs 1 on a boss. Raising the boss' level would just make it a bullet sponge, killing the fun of the game. Heavily instancing it would just turn it into a shittier Guild Wars.

Maybe make it so more than 10 people attacking a boss makes it drop nothing? Less people fighting it increasing the value of the item?

my theory is that mmos originally appealed to extrovert nerds, people who wanted to play games, but also wanted to be social and attention whore. this is why when people post nostalgia stories about old mmos it's always about social aspects and e-fame. world of warcraft made the genre too big, so now they had to compete with regular normies who wanted to brag about epics too, but weren't autistic enough to grind for months to get them. since devs made it so everyone could grow epeen it no longer seemed worth it to original players, and since no one actually plays mmos for the gameplay there was no appeal left.

>huge open empty maps with lots of travel time
As long as the scenery is pretty I actually like this. Makes you feel like you're on a journey.

Because Blizzard continued releasing expansions to WoW long past its expiration date instead of making a proper sequel.

>make MMO based on action skills rather than pressing hotkeys and tracking cooldown timers
I still prefer pressing hotkeys and tracking cooldowns, in the end, it ends up with a much higher skill cap, for PvP anyways.

Underated post

There's hardly anything to do in modern mmos. The old ones could be complex, sometimes to their detriment but it helped build dedicated followings.

I feel like I missed out on the magical hayday of mmos though. I didn't have a computer or internet in the early to mid 00's and never experienced the crazy adventures, up all night raids etc. I was the prime age for that. Now it's gone forever.

I hear you brudder.
The only thing I wish SWG did better was more options for building towns, they were all just blocks of buildings. Should have added some options for walls, sidewalks, maybe a tool to level, rise and lower the ground for some stairs or something.

Other than that, magical.

I never got to play SWG, but I suspect I would have not liked it because I'm an extremely anti-social autist who can't talk to or interact with other people on any meaningful or even cordial level. About all I can do is bitch about the low intelligence and lower skill level of the shitters I get in matchmaking in other games.

Also SWG nerds like to gloss over the fact that, just like Ultima and its spinoffs, you basically have to spend the first week you play afk macroing skills up, not actually playing the game but grinding the faggot ass skills, just to be viable. With very few exceptions, you don't see someone in those games start as a newbie (especially with a crafter/social type character) and gradually level up as they craft and sell or buff. No one is interested in gear from anyone below master artisan, no one is interested in buffs from someone below master doctor or master entertainer, not even if they are cheap as fuck. You have to use macros and a bot to afk grind your stupid fucking character to max levels before you can even START playing the game.

Same shit in ultima and the others. One of the major reasons I dislike them.

Also open pvp games bring out the absolute worst in people; everyone ganks like a douchebag for no reason, and for no benefit, just because LOLIKILLUTROLOLO. I admit this is a bigger problem NOW than in previous times, when the people who played MMOs weren't ritalin-infused idiot 12 year olds that can't see the grand scheme of things.

Things are moving fast, but not fast enough. Head tracked VR just came out commercially this year. How will they solve hands/feet moving? I remember seeing a TED talk where a guy used a controller that read his brain-waves, but barely worked. That's great, but just a start.

We now need to put all that together, added with zero-lag internet. I can't see it happening any time soon, but 30 years sounds about right. The tech is out there, but is in its infancy. More than that, it's basically a fetus.

Maybe additional clones of the boss every X number of players participating? We could take some notes from Log Horizon and have a very large raid party be attacked by multiple bosses at the same time coming up from the lower levels of a dungeon. In that sense, a large and dedicated party could shorten their attempts to clear a floor's primary dungeon by facing all bosses at the same time instead of having to run around, while smaller groups can still do bosses one at a time. This is for each instance of a raid group of course and the first one to win in realtime is the one who will be recorded in the public game history.

If it takes real time and effort to move up each floor, the developers could actively scale the boss stats manually rather than letting the game decide. That way a mere 100 floors could last for a huge amount of real time and they could buy some time with an especially hard boss in order to make new floor content.

>Why did MMOs die?

WoW actually being the second coming of Jesus so all anyone wants anymore is WoW

>I remember seeing a TED talk
Opinion discarded.

Every now and then, a beautiful little thread will pop up and people will just tell stories and reminisce about Star Wars Galaxies.
Hearing about it, flaws and all, makes me sad that I never got to experience it.

Then I saw the fan server stuff, but there were/are loads of issues and a much smaller player base and I just don't know.

ToR can get fucked, though.

I always end up hating mmos that try to spout that action skill based combat.

Because it ends up being only 10 moves, easily predictable and actually a lot of the time shallower than 50 skills on cooldowns.

And the sense of progression gets muted because the same shit the whole game.

The thing was, you did everything in groups. And there was no auto-group finder. There was a Mining Outpost on Dantooine where everyone went and met up to share quests and hunt the local wildlife for exp. Multipassenger vehicles were already a thing then, so you would drive your squad of 8 people out there in a couple V8's and slaughter everything in sight together. If you strayed off alone, you'd get killed. It created a very tight-knit community that I have never seen in a game since. Truly one of a kind. I hope someday soon to see something like it again.

>it ends up with a much higher skill cap
>mmo drones actually believe this

Because every time they leave their home region jews get ahold of them and force walls on them. Remember the dragon age npc who literally told you to go buy dlc?

That shit happens all over NA and EU mmos in the form of cash shop.

The original regions they come in ALWAYS have better prices on everything and better drop rates (generic china mmo don't count)

Blade and Soul was better in every region not US AND EU(china is a mixed bag but was still better by far)

Tera was better and less buggy in regions not NA EU

Lineage is still GOING in it's home regions and making mad cash

Fucking lineage 2 is even still going.

We just have too many jews in the west bro. They eat it up cash shop it out to whales and repeat.

the days of talesweaver and RO are dead bro.

People hate journeys nowdays.

Muh fast travel otherwise its soooo "tedious"

and then they bitch about the lack of immersion in the world.

>youtube.com/watch?v=fVhggGSjXVg

TED, not the cancer that is TEDx. And from 6 years ago, before shitty liberal arts speakers ruined the name.

Watch the video, it's literally what I said. The beginnings of a controller that reads your mind. You're looking at what will be the Matrix in 30 years.

>I hope someday soon to see something like it again.
It'll never happen. There is no audience for it anymore beyond the nostalgia-goggle wearing autists that post in threads like this, and we aren't a big enough audience for any publisher or dev to make a game for. Modern video game industry won't even THINK about making a video game unless it panders to the lowest common denominator, because profit trumps everything these days.

Anybody got that pasta about 100 classes and a trillion perfectly balanced combat roles and whatnot?

All they would have to do is either stop fucking shilling out 1 every two weeks that is free to play and you buy EVERYTHING like fucking clothes, and if they make a retail game, make it akin to final fantasy with either a really decent story like 7 with mediocre combat or go all out and craft a combat system that isn't just "click cklick clckickcickciclciclclclkkkkkk clkick and press a key for ability" and make the player actually care about fights with strategy or character development.

what anime lol

The thing that made MMOs great was the communities. Making friends, spending hours in a dungeon/together.

But that generation (millenials, mid 80s to early 90s kids) grew up, started families and such and had less and less time.

Now here comes Generation Y (late 90's-now kids) getting into their adult years with their shoot shoot bang bang more guns and perk lifestyles and... no one wants to group anymore, no one wants to form close nit bonds with one another to survive in a harsh world. if the lack of friendship/willingness to stay with folks is not there, people break up because loot or because someone targets the guildmasters girlfriends avatar too long.

MMOs have also changed to accommodate the fast paced Generation Y's standards by watering down content, and having group content being slogfests of jamming your dick on your biggest AoE button and getting your points to buy point gear.

The worst part of all of this is the basic homogenization of classes, its much easier to make them all the same and use different colors rather to balance them.


To you, OP, get on your electric rocking chair and just remember the good times you used to have and let it go because every incarnation of the genre will only make you sadder than the last.

That's why I said we need VR, possibly two-way neural interfaces.

Normally a game has [press buttan] -> [do action], but if swinging a sword was a physics based action that is freeform and highly dependent on the player's own skill at swinging swords, whether it is with a silly motion controller or the golden ideal of a neural interface, then the whole game changes. It will add that unpredictability factor that makes real life so much different from games, while still keeping some predictable videogame things to ensure that combat isn't 90% luck.

>you basically have to spend the first week you play afk macroing skills up
That's not entirely true, only artisan and entertainer really needed massive grinding and even then it wasn't necessary because you had multi-classing.

>No one is interested in gear from anyone below master artisan, no one is interested in buffs from someone below master doctor or master entertainer, not even if they are cheap as fuck
I will admit that this was a problem, markets were flooded with shit, but at least we had the market so players could pay for what they wanted and only those who worked hard at making the best gear or best buffs got the money.
What they should have done, and I don't remember if they had this or not as I never really played passive classes is a recycling option so the materials don't go to waste. However, one thing did sell well for lower tiered passive characters was things like clothes, I was big into buying clothes, making my character look cool as fuck.

SWGemu is good for what it is, but it's just not there yet. Then again I haven't played the emu since like 2012 so it might have changed a lot.

camelot unchained & star citizen
check back when they're fully released in 2017-2019

Skill based combat in general, isn't there yet. Dark Souls is the name that gets constantly brought up, but is it really skillful, or a fast-paced game of concentration? Memorizing boss patterns is a skill, but is it the skill based combat we want?

I still haven't seen a game that has proper sword fighting in it. With parries and counters that don't feel janky or scripted, but flow and beat like the rhythm of a drum. Chivalry is awkward and cheap, while For Honor looks like typical Ubisoft 'safe, bland design choices'. The most exciting is Kingdom Come, but we'll see if that one lives up to its hype.

Skill based combat doesn't exist in MMOs because it doesn't really exist in any game yet. I want to see it done properly in single player before it's implemented in 10000+ people servers.

because in the end of the day it's just pointless grind for gear, badges, etc. which soon become obsolete and you forced to do it all over again

because they heavily reliant on tight communities

because most developers never tried to do something different from wow or/and made stupid for a mmo decisions(like spending tons of money on voice acting)

because they simply lived through their life cycle

Yes, they will probably return at some point in the future

>mfw I won't find another game like The Realm Online

How fucking hard is it to make an MMO that's more Final Fantasy than the fucking Final Fantasy MMOs?

I hate PvP-based MMOs

Albion Online

I hate PvE based MMOs that divert resources to some shitty PvP side-game.

Perfect, your the demographic developers can target to make mmo's more team based and gives you insensitive to work together with team attacks and watching out for each other instead of just grinding for 9000000 hours and slaughtering a level 12 guy in 1 min.

>haven't played the emu since like 2012 so it might have changed a lot
Last I heard, last year or so, it was still about the same meaning it's "getting there".

MOBA killed them.

It's far easier to get idiots addicted to 20-30 minute matches than to ask them to sell your soul to the game.

Anybody else agree that MapleStory has a nicely designed world accompanied with great music? I remember first playing it and getting an immediate Tomba feeling.

>Generation Y
that would be the mid 80s to early 90s millenials you referred to.
post 1996 is its own generation entirely

Arena in WoW is the real skill tester and it's just a "side game." The best players in WoW are Gladiators. It can't be argued.

>posting the shit post-BB map

They're expensive, and unless you're Blizz and can afford to not have micro-transactions for a while, your MMO is gonna immediately be categorized as F2P shit.

By that you mean faction-based MMOs, or MMOs where fighting other players is the main appeal?

They died because they all wanted to copy WoW but didn't realise that WoW is legitimately a terrible game, and now all MMOs are:

>Collect 10 wolf ass hairs
>Turn them in for a meaningless reward
>Repeat ad hominem

I think a lot of MMO devs need to be honest with themselves and realize they're making a shitty single player rpg with end game raiding content and a couple of team based instances.

Not that I personally think this is a bad idea in theory, but since they don't commit fully the end result is shit.

a generation gets its name when they enter adulthood, not when they were born in it.

While I did get the generation name wrong, Generation Z (not Y) are the late 90s-now generation.

Millenials are folks who were born mid 80s-early 90s.

I had to google this after your post, but yeah, millenials are in their 20s-30s now

true, but my guess for why it's like that is because people seem to lack imagination, so you're better off forcing them to do some meaningless shit and give them a reward for it, then force them to think of what to do themselves and rely on the community

How would he know how urine tastes.

The kind of MMORPG that would be ideal for me is probably not going to fly with most of the post-WoW community. Basically, I want a game that puts the social aspect of MMOs as a first priority, as in almost every part of the game relies on social interaction. Some major parts would include needing a party to level up by killing monsters, needing a certain amount of party members to do puzzles in dungeons, etc. In terms of gameplay itself, I'd like it to be slower and less "hit a button every second" or action-rpg stuff. Every ability and spell should have enough impact that it's fine not to be constantly using one after another. This is to provide people time to talk while in combat so it's not as frantic as a lot of other games. Having a hotbar is fine since no one likes having to dig through menus just to use a spell, but I don't want to be constantly pushing buttons. Lastly, for the character customization, I want the ability to level all classes on one character and dual-classing.

And here I thought Ako would replace Tomoko as my waifu. Huge airhead and can't do anything by herself, wouldn't recommend.

...

beacause:

- nowadays people look for quick accessible games. mmos require time to get into the greater parts

- most players dislike the idea of doing simple boring tasks over and over. mmos are grindy and some of them haven't optimized their grind to be more fun

- lack of depth/competitiveness a.k.a the endgame is not that hard so hardcore groups don't find the thrive to be first for a certain pve achievement also no competitiveness naturally means no dedicated playerbase

- fads. mmos were a fad genre around mid 2000 before facebook/mobile games were a thing (casual players moved on, dedicated stayed just to see everything crumble)

- nothing interesting happens around them anymore. things like the falador massacre atracted players because they felt that playing runescape would be a fun ride with fun happenings

>that feel when you like WoW
>That fell when the only other MMO than WoW that you liked died because it was rushed as fuck
>Only other hope for a game like that mmo is kickstarter project being constantly changed

RIP WAR, was looking forward to everquest 2 it's dead and now am looking forward to crowfall.

I just want a fucking MMO where I can siege shit with my buds in a persistent fantasy universe.

We had Tree of Saviors. I remember I was so hyped up for it.

But then the class system was garbage and I just stopped playing after about 1 month.

>everquest 2

meant everquest next.

After Tree of Blunder, I'm never hyping myself for another mmo again.

Also, updates should focus on side-content rather than just higher levels of progression. Since everyone can level multiple classes on the same character, they should introduce more dungeons and leveling content to make the levels less boring, like alternate leveling areas for the same range of levels. Also, don't screw up the game by using item levels, but instead have good gear design where lower level items can be useful for a min-max build or at least can be used for longer than five levels or so.

Anybody that has played Brave Fencer Musashi knows this feeling of unadulterated pain.

it's called mmorpg you fucking autist

Look up Mordhau. Combat looks extremely fluid from the three videos devs have uploaded on youtube, and graphics pretty much AAA-tier, but made by indie devs.

Shit wrong thread.

But she's an idiot. Cute none the less, but would you date a braindead girl? After the initial 'You can fuck a vegetable whenever you want' phase wears off, what are you left with?

If we're talking about stuff from IMC Games, I liked Sword of the New World. It was really fun.

I hear Korea is still getting expansions.

>Star Citizen
Mein neger