Oddvintagechap
Member
Because shooters/sport aka twitch gameplay is more popular, generally accepted, and has a bigger umbrella.
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Why did MMOs turn out to be such a fucking dud?
- Thread starter Bragr
- Start date
sublimit
Banned
Back in 2004 MMOs was also a way for a lot of people to socialize .
Today with all the social media around us people really don't feel that they need that much MMOs to socialize.
That's why i think this last gen especially we saw a rebirth of single player games and less online focused games than gen 7.
Today with all the social media around us people really don't feel that they need that much MMOs to socialize.
That's why i think this last gen especially we saw a rebirth of single player games and less online focused games than gen 7.
ZywyPL
Banned
Because apparently not that many people are interested in mindless XP grinding, which MMOs are about in the longer term. And those who were got stuck with WoW since they already invested hundreds-thousands of hours into it, once you put that many hours into a single title you're basically enslaved to it and it's hard/impossible to leave it behind for something new.
Nobody got time for that anymore. Everquest, for myself, was everything. 22 years ago life was different. Raiding and basically living in the game or treating it as a full time job. Raids and grind requiring 50-60 people. Crazy to think that would be possible now.There was a sense of exploration and wonder. Every MMO since then has either dumbed the game down or made it all to repetitive. The costs are crazy and the risks are greater.
Age Of Conan - the first 20 levels of the game, were probably the most fun I've had in an MMO ever. That magic was short lived and can't be repeated.
The success of FFXIV is well deserved, but the beginning was a disaster. The list of turbulent MMO's is long, Everquest 2, Conan, LOTR, Wildstar, DCUO, War Hammer even Star Wars Online. People's attention spans are shorter now, we crave results quickly. Consumption society.
Unless there is a fully VR MMO that revolutionizes everything, I don't see pure traditional MMO's ever coming back in full force.
FFXIV might be the only exception. World of Warcraft is 17 years old, but people still pay subscriptions.
Age Of Conan - the first 20 levels of the game, were probably the most fun I've had in an MMO ever. That magic was short lived and can't be repeated.
The success of FFXIV is well deserved, but the beginning was a disaster. The list of turbulent MMO's is long, Everquest 2, Conan, LOTR, Wildstar, DCUO, War Hammer even Star Wars Online. People's attention spans are shorter now, we crave results quickly. Consumption society.
Unless there is a fully VR MMO that revolutionizes everything, I don't see pure traditional MMO's ever coming back in full force.
FFXIV might be the only exception. World of Warcraft is 17 years old, but people still pay subscriptions.
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Dr. Claus
Vincit qui se vincit
When World of Warcraft came out in 2004, everyone was talking about how MMOs are gonna take over everything, how you will see massive MMOs on every console, and how every franchise will dip its toes into the genre, but that never happened.
A lot of this predicted push for MMOs seemed to stem from how much money World of Warcraft and subscriptions-based models generated and the extreme time engagement players put into the product. But the MMOs after World of Warcraft not only struggled to reproduce the same success or quality but MMO fans stuck around with World of Warcraft and no other MMO reached the same heights (in the west) and the genre didn't evolve much.
But why did publishers and developers stop chasing MMOs? was it too expensive? did they struggle to retro-fit their existing franchises into an MMO genre? was the internet demands too high for most consumers? did micro-transactions and DLC prove more lucrative? were MMOs too PC-centric? did all the mediocre free-to-play MMOs oversaturate and hurt the genre?
This is very much based on the Western market, as in Asia, MMOs are a different beast. And you could argue FFXIV might invigorate MMOs and might have pushed the genre forward recently, especially since it's popular on consoles.
A few reasons it didn’t go far:
1.) Developing MMOs is fucking expensive and time consuming. It took nearly a decade of planning for WoW alone.
2.) sunk cost fallacy. Even if a great mmo releases, people don’t want to leave the game they sunk years of their life.
3.) Lack or innovation. Everyone copied WoW without looking at innovating thr space.
4.) Time commitments. Mmos require a lot of time and gaming as evolved to be very much a “play only our game because FOMO” as well as games being one and done experiences. Completely disposable. Hard to get people to stick to the game at that point.
Sygma
Member
Yeah guild wars 2 is a mmo but 1 is a corpg. You could wait for the upcoming phantasy star game tho, will be launched in june! That said 2 is free on pc and available everywhere
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Diatribe1974
Member
Because the impatient fuckwits financing them didn't want to wait for the games to be finished. Developers of failed mmos constantly were interviewed stating how much content had to. E cut, just to get it out the door by the launch date they were forced into, then when players burnt through that content and little to nothing to do afterwards, left in droves, thus causing mass layoffs of devs trying to finish up that cut content and new content.
KormaChameleon
Member
APB - Great concept, just poorly executed.
Valonquar
Member
FFXI was a beast. Spend all week desparately trying to get a party, spend an hour traveling to the exp spot on foot because no one could afford a chocobo rental, fight 5 mobs before either someone died, deleveled and rage quit, or someone DCed and didn't return. Once devs realized people just wanted to brag about accomplishments via standing in town wearing shiny gear, it isn't too big of a suprise that the logical leap was for them to directly sell you the shiny gear for cash.
FrankCaron
Member
MMOs did change the landscape. Many major games now are, more or less, subscription-free MMOs. What do you think all these live service games with online multiplayer are? I mean, shit, even Call of Duty: World War II had a damn social hub area with live randoms for PUG-style squads haha.
Hari Seldon
Member
Fundamentally they have stagnated because MMOs are too expensive to make. There is no indy scene to push the genre forward like with FPS. Would Fortnight even exist today without jank ass DayZ mod to Arma sparking the BR craze?
So you have a genre with a huge barrier of entry to develop for, which means only studios with money can enter, and when big money is involve the tolerance for risk taking plummets.
There are other lesser issues which also contribute. Lots of good suggestions in this thread, I'd also add:
So you have a genre with a huge barrier of entry to develop for, which means only studios with money can enter, and when big money is involve the tolerance for risk taking plummets.
There are other lesser issues which also contribute. Lots of good suggestions in this thread, I'd also add:
- Themepark MMOs suffer from the Chick Parabola problem, i.e. the fun of the game is often simply learning the system or world. In modern times, this is shortcircuited with game database websites and youtube guides.
- The only way that devs seems to be able to work around the Chick Parabola is to make the end game so mechanic intensive that even with detailed guides available it requires people to execute things absolutely perfectly. This works for some portion of the player base but certainly not all.
- The other way around this problem is PvP which again only appeals to a portion of the player base and causes gear friction between the PvE and PvP players.
- The holy trinity is fucking stupid and needs to be immediately nuked from orbit. This is the #1 problem with WoW these days.
Regardless, gaming for the most part has resorted to only push better graphics at higher pixels.
Hardware and Technology progressed but vision of game Devs have remained the same. No innovation for last decade or so. I mean you can play Call of Duty and FIFA on mobiles now.
We need a next great MMo, a truly gigantic connected experience.
Hardware and Technology progressed but vision of game Devs have remained the same. No innovation for last decade or so. I mean you can play Call of Duty and FIFA on mobiles now.
We need a next great MMo, a truly gigantic connected experience.
Kenpachii
Member
My experiences with MMO's:
1000 hours lineage 2, great game. grind fest. game runs on social conflict tho. wouldn't play it today anymore.
1000 hours in aion, novelty game that tries to be l2 but fails misserable at it wouldn't recommend it to much of a grind fest
1000 hours in tera, same as with aoin lineage 2 evolution not worth it.
3000 hours in Ragnarok online, great sadly a big grind fast for money. still have a lot of fun with it. Official servers are death so private servers is where its at.
4000 hours in Wow, was fun not anymore. time gates and subs are a thing of the past and absolutely not interesting to me anymore. ( incredible dumb decisions over time that kills it for casual players is also not working well for them )
3000 hours in Black desert online, great game well done. specially fishing was fun. sadly combat is wrist killing so bailed on it and the grind was a bit to extreme.
3000 hours in tree of savior, great game. devs are total donkeys they killing the game on day one with stupid decisions which basically killed the game off
1000 hours guild wars 2, great game specially the last expansion with mounts, never saw such a good overworld, such a good mount system and such a friendly playerbase.
1000 hours of final fantasy 14, mmo could be great, but devs decide to make it a pain to play. Overworld is useless, builds can't be done if you have higher ms then 100, same for raids, absolute zero queue's for dps. Leveling up the main story quest is pretty much straight up horrible to mmo klling. Unless u really like a story line told by npc's that don't move there mouth, no voice acting for 300 hours on your character, don't bother. Random dungeons where also extremely shit, for the simple fact that a story dungeon u had to sit through a story for 30 minutes + again every single time, after 1 hour of waiting. I would not recommend this mmo to anybody unless u are a big ff nerd. Devs could make it into something great, but decide to hold it back to dumb decisions all over the place. A good example is having 2 support and 2 dps when 95% of your playerbase dps is just dumb game design at its core.
500 hours in elder scrolls online, probably best raid/dungeon/gear progression in a game i ever found, u can do 300 raids a day as many as u want. Which means no time gates and making builds far far more player friendly as result. and dungeons queue's as dps are actually doable Absolute having a blast so far. If this game has 3000 hours of content not sure about it as i go fast through it atm its a pretty simplistic mmo as it looks like so far, but it does things just right. Overworld is behind guild wars tho. Game has loot boxes for skins, my main complain so far other then that its been great.
It's safe to say mmo's are my main gem of game solutions, i probably dumped a good 20 grand over the years into it and frankly i made a lot of real life friends from everywhere through it.
The main problem people have in mmo's that make them quit:
1) Not finding party's ( practically any mmo that has healer/tank/dps role ) and u are a dps.
2) Take to long to get to end game content which results in you walking in death content for weeks ( final fantasy 14 )
3) Builded around hardcore players that spend there life playing mmo's and alienate casuals which means huge artificially grinds gamers dont'want to bother with they just want to play.
4) Subscription models that make no sense such as with final fantasy or ragnarok or world of warcraft.
5) not keeping content u grinded for relevant or simple remove content entirely ( wow biggest offender here, the one that takes this into account big time is guild wars and eso )
6) takes to long to do meaningful content when u log in
7) not feeling like u progress fast enough
8) making classes useless on rotation ( wow is a big offender in this )
9) making classes to difficult to enjoy.
10) elitist meta gameplay as focus in your mmo.
11) toxic community's.
12) shallow meaningless guilds and community's that distance players from a mmo ( lineage 2 was probably best guild wise )
At the end of the day, people come home from school / work and want to have some fun time and play and do content with people. Eso and guild wars are by far the best mmo's for this, wow is by far the worst at it.
With the success of world of warcraft, mmo's went into a direction of less social, less meaningful guild interactions or meaning, less conflict between guilds and players and ended up just doing tagged pve content rather then actually having the social aspect of it and conflict which the game should run on.
Which resulted in the natural evolution of dota's and moba's, as they are pretty much max level characters with top gear always without the need to grind, and u go straight into the meat of the game matches against eachother.
What we need is more lineage 2 type of pvp mmo's with world content instead of instance content with guilds vs guilds in the open world etc. That will create conflict / community's / all kinds of social interaction. What we got now is a bunch of grindfest games with pve content all gated behind instances where if u like pvp for example why even bother wasting your time, u better off firing up a dota or moba at that point.
1000 hours lineage 2, great game. grind fest. game runs on social conflict tho. wouldn't play it today anymore.
1000 hours in aion, novelty game that tries to be l2 but fails misserable at it wouldn't recommend it to much of a grind fest
1000 hours in tera, same as with aoin lineage 2 evolution not worth it.
3000 hours in Ragnarok online, great sadly a big grind fast for money. still have a lot of fun with it. Official servers are death so private servers is where its at.
4000 hours in Wow, was fun not anymore. time gates and subs are a thing of the past and absolutely not interesting to me anymore. ( incredible dumb decisions over time that kills it for casual players is also not working well for them )
3000 hours in Black desert online, great game well done. specially fishing was fun. sadly combat is wrist killing so bailed on it and the grind was a bit to extreme.
3000 hours in tree of savior, great game. devs are total donkeys they killing the game on day one with stupid decisions which basically killed the game off
1000 hours guild wars 2, great game specially the last expansion with mounts, never saw such a good overworld, such a good mount system and such a friendly playerbase.
1000 hours of final fantasy 14, mmo could be great, but devs decide to make it a pain to play. Overworld is useless, builds can't be done if you have higher ms then 100, same for raids, absolute zero queue's for dps. Leveling up the main story quest is pretty much straight up horrible to mmo klling. Unless u really like a story line told by npc's that don't move there mouth, no voice acting for 300 hours on your character, don't bother. Random dungeons where also extremely shit, for the simple fact that a story dungeon u had to sit through a story for 30 minutes + again every single time, after 1 hour of waiting. I would not recommend this mmo to anybody unless u are a big ff nerd. Devs could make it into something great, but decide to hold it back to dumb decisions all over the place. A good example is having 2 support and 2 dps when 95% of your playerbase dps is just dumb game design at its core.
500 hours in elder scrolls online, probably best raid/dungeon/gear progression in a game i ever found, u can do 300 raids a day as many as u want. Which means no time gates and making builds far far more player friendly as result. and dungeons queue's as dps are actually doable Absolute having a blast so far. If this game has 3000 hours of content not sure about it as i go fast through it atm its a pretty simplistic mmo as it looks like so far, but it does things just right. Overworld is behind guild wars tho. Game has loot boxes for skins, my main complain so far other then that its been great.
It's safe to say mmo's are my main gem of game solutions, i probably dumped a good 20 grand over the years into it and frankly i made a lot of real life friends from everywhere through it.
The main problem people have in mmo's that make them quit:
1) Not finding party's ( practically any mmo that has healer/tank/dps role ) and u are a dps.
2) Take to long to get to end game content which results in you walking in death content for weeks ( final fantasy 14 )
3) Builded around hardcore players that spend there life playing mmo's and alienate casuals which means huge artificially grinds gamers dont'want to bother with they just want to play.
4) Subscription models that make no sense such as with final fantasy or ragnarok or world of warcraft.
5) not keeping content u grinded for relevant or simple remove content entirely ( wow biggest offender here, the one that takes this into account big time is guild wars and eso )
6) takes to long to do meaningful content when u log in
7) not feeling like u progress fast enough
8) making classes useless on rotation ( wow is a big offender in this )
9) making classes to difficult to enjoy.
10) elitist meta gameplay as focus in your mmo.
11) toxic community's.
12) shallow meaningless guilds and community's that distance players from a mmo ( lineage 2 was probably best guild wise )
At the end of the day, people come home from school / work and want to have some fun time and play and do content with people. Eso and guild wars are by far the best mmo's for this, wow is by far the worst at it.
With the success of world of warcraft, mmo's went into a direction of less social, less meaningful guild interactions or meaning, less conflict between guilds and players and ended up just doing tagged pve content rather then actually having the social aspect of it and conflict which the game should run on.
Which resulted in the natural evolution of dota's and moba's, as they are pretty much max level characters with top gear always without the need to grind, and u go straight into the meat of the game matches against eachother.
What we need is more lineage 2 type of pvp mmo's with world content instead of instance content with guilds vs guilds in the open world etc. That will create conflict / community's / all kinds of social interaction. What we got now is a bunch of grindfest games with pve content all gated behind instances where if u like pvp for example why even bother wasting your time, u better off firing up a dota or moba at that point.
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MMO are for a certain type of person that doesn’t need instant gratification and I don’t think the younger generation has as many as those type of people anymore, mainly because they have had everything they’ve wanted at their fingertips their whole life.
I still play ff14 and I enjoy being a completionist, I like collecting mounts, minions, TT cards, even though they have no bearing on the game. But also only play 1 class because I don’t have the muscle memory to adjust rotations for each class anymore.
I still play ff14 and I enjoy being a completionist, I like collecting mounts, minions, TT cards, even though they have no bearing on the game. But also only play 1 class because I don’t have the muscle memory to adjust rotations for each class anymore.
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Valonquar
Member
Current Raiding endgame in FFXIV definately following this rule. This is the strat for the first HALF of the fight and it is full retard.
The Hamburglar
Banned
would be great if blizzard dropped wow and released a new mmo or whatever titan was.
xellos2099alpha
Member
The door boss was always consider to be harder than the Oracle of Darkness herself. I took me forever to clear e12s but this is my 11 week of reclear already. If you want to talk about diffucuity, choose either the ultimate fight or Alexender tier, Pepsiman was consider to be full blow retard and aka static breaker.
The Hamburglar
Banned
BabyYoda
Banned
I can only speak for myself, but no other mmo grabbed me like WOW and man did I try to like them. They all fell/fall far short of the all round quality that early WOW hit. There's probably a few hundred reasons why WOW had the mega success that no others have come close to. Needless to say, don't start out trying to make an mmo as a developer, you have to build up to it over several years of successful games in a particular ip, do that before you even think about starting an mmo.
Other than that, be brilliant/genius/creative and passionate and you'll likely still fall far short, timing is everything. I think we'll eventually get an mmo bigger than WOW, but I suspect it will look barely like it's in the same genre as WOW, it will be so different, perhaps it will coincide with some new breakthrough in technology as well.
The fact that even Blizzard have failed to repeat it's success shows that not even they know exactly how they did it, even before most of their veterans left, something like that comes around only once or twice a generation (40 years),
Other than that, be brilliant/genius/creative and passionate and you'll likely still fall far short, timing is everything. I think we'll eventually get an mmo bigger than WOW, but I suspect it will look barely like it's in the same genre as WOW, it will be so different, perhaps it will coincide with some new breakthrough in technology as well.
The fact that even Blizzard have failed to repeat it's success shows that not even they know exactly how they did it, even before most of their veterans left, something like that comes around only once or twice a generation (40 years),
Kumomeme
Member
there is probably a mindset from management that think where everything can be patched later which is ruined the game.
Polygonal_Sprite
Gold Member
“console, and how every franchise will dip its toes into the genre, but that never happened.”
You must have missed all the AAA games of the last ten years that use open Worlds, talent trees, green / blue / purple gear and have damage numbers on screen aswell as games like Borderlands, Destiny, The Division, Anthem etc which are shooter versions of WoW...
WoW is probably the most influential game of the past twenty years.
You must have missed all the AAA games of the last ten years that use open Worlds, talent trees, green / blue / purple gear and have damage numbers on screen aswell as games like Borderlands, Destiny, The Division, Anthem etc which are shooter versions of WoW...
WoW is probably the most influential game of the past twenty years.
PleaseWaitStation4
Banned
Most of the money made went directly to the CEOs' and none of it was used to expand the genre or on R&D, except the FF MMOs. Cratered genre.
Sleepwalker
Member
I used to play a ton of Ragnarok Online in my teens, I recently got the itch to play a MMO again and its kinda sad that my options are more or less the same as they were 15 years ago with a few exceptions like BDO and FFXIV.
I honestly don't even know where to start as I've been away for years and basically all my friends that I made playing have moved on. As have I really but I'm getting hit by nostalgia.
I really hope we get a VR alternative for a mmorpg at some point in the future. I feel that would be amazing and revitalize the genre somewhat.
I honestly don't even know where to start as I've been away for years and basically all my friends that I made playing have moved on. As have I really but I'm getting hit by nostalgia.
I really hope we get a VR alternative for a mmorpg at some point in the future. I feel that would be amazing and revitalize the genre somewhat.
Blond
Banned
Mobile happened and the market that sustained these things moved elsewhere. Casual gamers despite what everyone thought really carried a lot of say in the industry, stuff like Destroy All Humans doesn’t exist anymore for a reason (yes I know there was a remake) because where’s the market?
Ghost of Caelid
Banned
MMO's have alot of potential but similar to many genres, one formula became so popular that they essentially are mostly the same, grind fest. I'd love to see an MMO that innovates on the concept of what an MMO is but its faaaaaaaar to expensive in order too. I don't think there will be from any of the major developers.
JTCx
Member
But the pepsiman music is so good.
Zug
Member
I'm having a blast playing Everquest/project 1999 : https://www.project1999.com/
It's everything all the new MMOs failed to be, and also what Blizzard failed to achieve with Wow classic.
It's free, and there's an official agrement with the current owner of the EQ franchise.
It's everything all the new MMOs failed to be, and also what Blizzard failed to achieve with Wow classic.
It's free, and there's an official agrement with the current owner of the EQ franchise.
Havoc2049
Member
The genre is far from dead. The very nature of the genre has the games lasting for years, so there will always be games in the genre that look dated.
The 10 most played MMORPGs in 2021.
Games on the list:
Star Wars The Old Republic
Phantasy Star Online 2
Albion Online
Black Desert Online
Guild Wars 2
The Elder Scrolls Online
RuneScape
Destiny 2
Final Fantasy XIV
World of Warcraft / WoW Classic
The 10 most played MMORPGs in 2021.
Games on the list:
Star Wars The Old Republic
Phantasy Star Online 2
Albion Online
Black Desert Online
Guild Wars 2
The Elder Scrolls Online
RuneScape
Destiny 2
Final Fantasy XIV
World of Warcraft / WoW Classic
WOW introduced the world to the "? or was it !" quest mechanic and immediately changed the game. At first WOW's quality of life and structure was exciting. But it was a definite generational change from what came prior. Everquest, Star Wars, Ultima, Camelot (whichever else I forgot) all became too hard and difficult for the casual gamer. If I recall, WOW's influence was so great, Everquest 2 changed a lot of things, including adding quest markers. LOTOR found a nice middle ground, you actually had to read.
Age of Conan took it a step further and made quest items glow and simplified things even more. But the music, my god the beautiful music.
No genre in the world is impacted more with a poor launch. People never forget, lack of content, bugs, server issues, etc. The first 4-8 weeks are crucial to keep customers attention and the re-sub. Companies are also quick to pull the plug as MMO's are a long term return on investment, slow burn. But they seem to forget that and just chase the quick Call of Duty or Assassins Creed sales.
The graveyard of failed attempts is so massive. RIFT, LOTOR, SWTOR, War Hammer, Wild Star and Secret World are some that come to mind. All had some sort of issues.
DC Universe Online, I still have a weak spot for it. It started off so well, so strong. Then the hack occurred and nearly killed the game. It was offline for over a month. When it returned, the damage was done. It also was missing some end game content as well near the start. But the list of failures can go on.
Secret World actually made people have to think and quest too.
Nobody has time for 8-10 hour raids, or raids that took 2 days or 40-60 people. People consume content too quicky.
Not every game can be FFXIV and survive the disastrous launch. That was a miracle, it took deeper pockets and faith.
MMO's are dead and live on through GaaS. People grew up.
Age of Conan took it a step further and made quest items glow and simplified things even more. But the music, my god the beautiful music.
No genre in the world is impacted more with a poor launch. People never forget, lack of content, bugs, server issues, etc. The first 4-8 weeks are crucial to keep customers attention and the re-sub. Companies are also quick to pull the plug as MMO's are a long term return on investment, slow burn. But they seem to forget that and just chase the quick Call of Duty or Assassins Creed sales.
The graveyard of failed attempts is so massive. RIFT, LOTOR, SWTOR, War Hammer, Wild Star and Secret World are some that come to mind. All had some sort of issues.
DC Universe Online, I still have a weak spot for it. It started off so well, so strong. Then the hack occurred and nearly killed the game. It was offline for over a month. When it returned, the damage was done. It also was missing some end game content as well near the start. But the list of failures can go on.
Secret World actually made people have to think and quest too.
Nobody has time for 8-10 hour raids, or raids that took 2 days or 40-60 people. People consume content too quicky.
Not every game can be FFXIV and survive the disastrous launch. That was a miracle, it took deeper pockets and faith.
MMO's are dead and live on through GaaS. People grew up.
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FreedomOfSpeech
Banned
WoW was cool, then it got lame, but it already had the numbers of people.
It also came along at the perfect moment, people were just going online in a massive way.
Everquest was too early, for example.
So after WoW, everything had to be at least as good. Well...
It also came along at the perfect moment, people were just going online in a massive way.
Everquest was too early, for example.
So after WoW, everything had to be at least as good. Well...
Kokoloko85
Member
Because the combat sucks and most the missions are samey... again with shitty combat