“I think that the idea that the MMO crowd doesn’t exist is belied by the number of players who are still in World of Warcraft”
I want an MMO where social reputation actually matters. None of this phasing shit where you play with people you’ll never see again. MMOs need a sense of community. Modern WoW is just a single player game that lets you get cursed at by 12 year olds right now.
My MMO wishlist is more survival mechanics. Having to prepare before you leave town. Like in old WoW. You have enough food for you and your pet? Bullets? Potions? Leaving town was an event as was getting to the next one.
Yeah, looking back…25(?) years, Ultima online was my go-to
You could just be making a living by running a shop and stuff.
In that sense it really was like a second world.
We had meetings there, where we discussed and decided together how to proceed with the city or some current problems.The quests weren’t the main thing for me, much more the people there on this specific server
UO didn’t even have quests until, like, the 3rd or 4th expansion. Just being a world drove players to have their own events and make up their own quests, and I have not really played anything that allowed that kind of freedom with the kind of community that embraced what it was like UO.
It’s quite some time ago
I do remember something like, server events, the admin could trigger
Maybe I mixed that up with quests or I actually played a pretty late version
But yeah, UO was absolutely great :-)
I was too young to catch the UO train, but from everything I heard about it I would have loved it.
I’m still loving it
A remake with the same principle would be absolutely awesome
Edit: because of your comment, I’ve checked out, if there are still servers online
Seems to be :-)
this is way the opposite of the type of mmo I want.
I think the article underscores both of your sentiments well - don’t try to be everything for everyone, have a vision and a niche and min max that thing.
I think it really depends. People literally have significantly less time than they did in 2005 when WoW got big. People have to work longer or multiple jobs just to pay sky high rent and mortgage prices with long, stagnated wages.
I get wanting to bring back the nostalgia of a bygone era but these community mmo’s where they were very social were a gigantic time sink that most people simply can’t do now.
Exactly, I miss WoW now and then and especially when I get over-the-top busy with work/life, not because the game is so good but because I miss the simpler life I had back then when my biggest stress was getting realm-first achievements.
MMOs in the early 2000s were an incredibly cheap form of entertainment though. For like $10/month, you got something that you and friends could goof around on for a few hours a night all month, and it was a primary ‘meeting space’ for those friends. I still remember when my online friends shifted away from ICQ, and just moved to WoW as their primary spot to contact each other… like I’d go in to WoW to sort out RL dates with my gf at the time, cause that’s where she’d be in her time off.
Part of the point I’m trying to make is that it’s not necessarily that people have less free time now, or that the cost is a huge burden, but that their attention/disposable income is split between a lot more ‘stufff’ online when they’re off. Social media, in general, wasn’t as big back in the 2000s, and MMOs filled part of that connectivity niche – you’d log in to WoW to catch up with real-life friends. Now you just glance at their facebook page or whatever periodically and pretend like you’ve kept in touch. And before, you’d get by with just the $10/month single MMO subscription and a $5 Netflix subscription shared between all your friends, now you get people that have like 5-6 different ‘streaming’ subscriptions, vpn subscriptions, cloud gaming pc subscriptions, etc etc etc. Heck, just think about the old landline setup vs current cell phones – in the past, the whole family had like a $30/month landline connection with a generic $10-20 handset or two in the house; now each person in the family needs a $50+ cell plan, or you can get a family plan for a slight discount, but you still gotta buy everyone mobile phones every few years, etc.
god so much this.
I’d love to play some Burning Crusade Classic and raid again, and it is admittedly much easier to raid at a high level in that than Classic where you gotta get world buffs in addition to your flasks and potions, but I just don’t have 16-20 hrs per week to dedicate to an MMO right now. I’m just too busy looking for a partner and a better job.
“I think that the idea that the MMO crowd doesn’t exist is belied by the number of players who are still in World of Warcraft”
I’m not saying the MMO crowd doesn’t exist (though I do hold the opinion that trying to launch a new MMO in this day and age is a fool’s errand - so, actually maybe I am saying that!). But this argument is really weak - WoW players aren’t playing because they want “an MMO”, they are playing because they want to play WoW. Either because they’re already so deeply entrenched in it, or because they want to recapture the nostalgia of ages past (see the success of WoW Classic and various pirate servers). There is absolutely no reason to think all these WoW players have any interest in a random new and different MMO.
I am “deeply entrenched” because mythic raiding and m+ dungeons are fun. All the classical MMO features are just chores at this point, which is why it takes less effort to get through them every tier.
Oh a tread about MMOs?
I guess I’ll shamelessly plug Foxhole. Not your traditional MMO. The community is small enough that a lot of people know each other. Also no subscription fee! Please join green team. 👍
Yah, I think foxhole is a really good example of why the idea of “reinventing the MMO” is a really good discussion.
Before foxhole I had largely bounced off of MMOs because a lot were overly focused on “quests”, boss fights, loot tables and other spreadsheet nonsense. The sword and sorcery setting of many also just didn’t grab my attention.
Foxholes focus on collaborative logistics, supply chains, and large scale persistent warfare, not to mention being more grounded as a setting, actually engaged me and got me involved in teamwork and collaboration that was very fun.
Also blue team rules green team drools.
Also blue team rules green team drools.
I want a good MMO, but I also don’t want to pay a lot to play it properly.
Guild Wars 2
Guild Wars 2 is the only MMO that doesn’t aggravate me.
- Feels like a real video game. You can dodge and stuff.
- Other players can only help. No “kill stealing”
- Other players are frictionless. They show up, do whatever, leave. No need to make a formal party
- Level cap doesn’t go up. No need to chase stats forever.
You do have to buy the expansions, but the core game is free now.
Warframe
I love wow but I don’t want to pay ten euro a month even though I have time to play every 2 months
Make a SMALL mmo for heaven’s sake ! How many crazy scale MMOs need to fail before someone learns that lesson ? Make a really, really polished slice of an MMO, and build up from there.
I like that idea too, more of a MMO than a MMO.
(Mediumly Multiplayer Online, I mean, none of that massively nonsense, let’s call it… that…hmm? No I won’t apologize, hey, get your hands off me!.. Jazz tossed out of Bel Air snippet)
I like mmos as virtual worlds to hang out in. The more real the world is. cycles of day and npcs behaving what would be normal. animals. it is like the most important. almost equally important is a a lot of customization in character ability and costuming. Its also important that there are roles so that one person can’t do it all. gameplay honestly, to me, is basically the last thing but it does need to be fun but not to hard for casuals to be a part of it.
I miss fun grinding. Now all grinding feels like I gotta log in everyday or fall behind on events or something stupid and I ain’t about that. I wanna get addicted for two weeks and be able to come and go without having to battle “the meta” all the time
yes I understand the carrot thing but they really need to make it more like cooperative content. honestly whats kinda funny is one thing I liked about champions was it was kinda in maintenance mode and most everything the brought out new was costuming. So the main gear was on this cosmics grinding that could pop ever 4 hours. You could pretty much do it as you feel like. They kinda started doing vehicles and nice things with the yearly events and that was kinda annoying. when its just costuming its easier to be like. nah ill skip it. Oh then also the even currency would not expire so if you had time one year you could build it up and if you did not have time some year you could still get the stuff. unfortunately they kinda made it more grindy at some point although still not to bad. seriously though you should be able to try and get the gear at any time of year if you can find folks to play the content to help you out. quick edit but another thing is the offline/online thing is best. You should know you can still play with the stuff you bought or grinded 20 years later.
Yah we just need something new that brakes away from the wow style RPG, some are trying but I don’t think they go far enough.
New World was super good. Amazon canned it when it was at its peak too.
What made it worth playing? I never played it but it looked like a fairly buggy, uninspired cookie-cutter MMO to me, so I’d be really interested to hear what I was missing.
The audio was fantastic, chopping trees and mining ore was rewarding just hearing it. Visually it was beautiful. The combat was super good too, not just hitting numbers on the keyboard. Wars were a blast if you were in a decent company. Dungeons and OPR (basically a two team hold the positions death match) were solid. The server population issues they had due to the architecture took forever to overcome though and queues could be long. They never fully overcame this.
I never got into WoW or really any others before. The only other one was Wild Star because it was quirky and unique and also had a combat system that wasn’t just pushing keys and made positioning matter, but new world took it up another notch from there.
I’m so glad that you mentioned WildStar, because that was the last MMO that I fell in love with. I watched all my old stream videos recently and had a moment.
They make a good point about how massive multiplayer games shouldn’t try to compete with wow, nor to try and implement every feature that wow has, but I think it goes beyond that. I think they need to question the pre existing assumptions of what an MMO is. Like, fundamentally, it’s a mass multiplayer online game, but so much of what gets associated with that concept is not really inherent to it.
Quests, bosses, grinding NPCs for equipment, ect ect. What the shape of content even looks like for these kinds of games.
There is so much potential in the concept of a big world with lots of players all interacting and it is held back by attempting to hew to a certain formula that looks very similar to WoW. Specifically the reliance on NPCs to fill out the world and to act as a source of resources.
Someone brought up foxhole and I think that’s a really good example. It is made by a small team(like… 10 people if I recall?) and it completely lacks a lot of the stuff normally expected in an MMO. No NPCs, no leveling or skill points, no quests or missions. All of the purposes those systems normally fulfill are handled through largely player driven dynamics. It’s a profoundly collaborative game built on team based PVP and an entirely player driven economy. Importantly, you are not playing a hero or unique character, nor collecting particularly valuable equipment overtime. You are cannon fodder, and you will die. In some ways, you are the NPC. Some parts of it definitely share heritage from the genre, but it expands on a lot of stuff that I feel is under developed in most.
It’s a departure from the normal formula and I think it shows that the potential audience for MMOs is actually much larger than the current crop, as a lot of people who play were never into other MMOs. The genre has pigeonholed its self by attempting to chase an existing audience that are used to a certain dynamic, but there is so much more potential that is left on the table.
I’m replaying Crosscode and just yesterday I thought that the MMO that game is set in would be cool as an actual pixel art MMO.
The big thing about MMOs is that they (try to) create communities, and being part of a community is a surefire way to make people stay.
Give too much freedom for a single player and the community as a whole falters. Give them enough to do without groups, but leave the “good stuff” as something exclusive to groups and don’t give dungeon finders or similar auto-grouping tools. I say this as someone who spent way, way too much time playing WoW like a single-player game
