I think the author is feeling pain and expressing it poorly. I think that because I too grieved when WoW "died" for me (the Panda release was the last straw). I respond a bit differently in that I tend to analyze the crap out of things like affect me like that.
There is a sense of place, and to some extent community, in a multiplayer game. Ones that hit the right notes in terms of complexity, variability, and struggle tend to bring their communities together. Ones that tend to be manipulative often alienate communities. I have fond memories of hanging out with a Paladin and working through the content. We had compatible schedules and ended up great friends in the game but to this day I have no idea who they were in "real life."
So what I have come to understand is that a company stumbles upon a mix which like an ensemble cast of unknown actors that just "clicks" makes for a place where the content facilitates people getting to know each other, to help each other, and to compete with each other without getting too much in the way of the relationship side of things.
That gets them a bunch of customers but over time you can't relive the same experiences over and over again and find them "new" any more. You really need to mix it up somehow, and randomness helps but only goes so far. When the glow starts to fade and people drift away, the owner of the place will try new things to get people involved but at the end of the day, they eventually upset the balance and even their more loyal visitors start to taper off and fade away. And for people where the first time they completed a major quest line with new friends, or overcame a raid boss, and remember that time fondly, they can't go back. Just like you can't go back to being 15 again and riding around on bikes in the neighborhood without a care in the world. Nostalgia sets in and you move on, grieving what you lost.
I have played a number of MMOG's, and the RPGs are most notable because your "character" has developed in game and has a gravitas all its own. So how do you make a world where it is always fun to visit? You need a system where the world has its challenges but it isn't static. WoW avoided feeling static because it had so much content, but if you take 10 - 20 'toons' from their starting zone to the maximum character level you pretty much learn all there is to know about the place. And it doesn't change over time. And while it had a lot of variation at the beginning, over time successive updates homogenized more and more of the features such that all the classes and races began to feel like the tier 10, 11, and 12 armor sets which were exactly the same artwork but with different texture maps.
I think the game that was Everquest and WoW and others in the MMORPG vein has crested, the next version of that will have to be very different in order to get the conversion rates those had. That said, once we have procedurally generated worlds rather than scripted worlds I thing you'll find they will remain engaging for a longer period of time.
As someone who played WoW reasonably consistently from launch to a few months after the expansion that gave level 70, people declaring they left because X was so bad... they were there from day 1 (admittedly, early WoW was quite buggy). WoW has always had people saying "well now, THIS is the last straw!".
But yes, you can only do the same thing for so long before moving on. Most courses have a far greater 'intro' level and a much narrower set of ongoing students who stick with it, for example. It's a problem MMOs have, because they're predicated on people sticking around, and content is consumed much, much faster than it can be created.
I think the question is more about our expectations. MMOs frequently cater to the casual gamer now and so the hardcore experience we had when we were young is virtually unattainable now. There are no fresh unique experiences in the MMO. Where other genres bump up the bar, again and again, to thrill us in new and more extreme ways, the MMO fails to make the same leaps so our sort of "tolerance" to the MMO thrill doesn't get exceeded to produce a new peak experience. MMOs have tried to change with games like Terra but ultimately there isn't anything new to feel. For me, it was the way games forced me to work together with other people that was enlightening. There will be a revolution in design at some point as budgets creep up and a hole in the market for something unique causes pent up demand to grow. It's only a matter of time before someone really throws something new at us and we can burn another 1000 hours in a game until that too seems stale. Perhaps VR will be the advent that throws a curves that MMO need to produce immersive social experiences. Who knows but there is pent up demand for sure.
> There are no fresh unique experiences in the MMO.
That's because multiplayer RPGs first became massive multiplayer RPGs, and then became massive multiplayer [games]. You get the drift. Lot's of good things that make roleplaying experience unique went down the drain in the process, and even the name started reflecting it. The massive aspect itself makes it challenging to preserve roleplaying environment. Proper scaling of multiplayer roleplaying game is a tricky issue, and most don't address it well and don't even want to, since it would mean limiting the audience and less profits in result.
I submitted this as I've been feeling much the same way. I recently went through a bunch of my old games trying to put my finger on what I miss about them.
I re-installed Neverwinter Nights 2 and started going around some of the persistent world servers out there, and I really enjoy the role-playing that goes on among players. I've actually been considering resurrecting my DM gear and finding some pencil and paper players.
I've been trying to relive the incredible high of pre-expansion Everquest for a while now, but nothing quite comes close to the massive amount of investment you'd have to put into it, the total lack of help outside of the in-game community (no guides, no in-game extensions, bare-bones UI), and the sheer terror of death that the game would instill in you. UO folks probably can relate to that as well. Those games felt like sandboxes where you'd be thrown into the deep end with tons of real consequences for carelessness, decisions felt meaningful, alliances with other players essential for survival. Nowadays you can grind your way through an MMO on your own, everybody gets their personal rollercoaster ride, everybody gets to win. Probably a big reason why we've seen a resurgence in games like Dark Souls and rogue-likes.
I did "enjoy" EVE quite a bit too, although parts of it felt more like a job rather this incredible treacherous journey through a magical and hostile world. EVE was more about the politics and logistics than the game itself.
I agree with many other first-gen MMORPG old farts that we will simply never be able to re-create that experience in the same format, that era is gone and is best left as a positive memory. Perhaps as others pointed out VR will be that next big leap forward that will allow us to suspend belief once again.
On a side-note, I really do hope that creators keep making titles where the game world is a nasty, hostile, inscrutable place and you and the people around you have to band together and figure it out, nothing is going to spoon-fed you the solution. It makes such a big difference to the end-user experience.
I reinstalled EQ recently to try to relive that experience, and was astonished at how primative the game seemed. My recollection of it is vastly different. 16 years makes a huge difference.
I can get past the somewhat clunky UI and extremely dated graphics, but what always throws me when I try to get back into EQ is the controls. After years of playing EQ2, Guild Wars 2, FFXIV, etc. I've become so accustomed to controls 'just working' out of the box including the ever-present RMB camera controls that going back to the jank that is EQ drives me nuts.
It really stinks, because no modern MMO gives me the thrill I had playing EQ as a teen. Maybe to an extent it's the rose-tinted glasses, but I really miss having a real penalty for dying (and as much as I love this in EVE every time I resub I quickly lose interest due to the time sink of refitting ships, flying to a dozen different systems to pick up parts, etc.) and I think that was the key. Oh, and not having NPC's just throw up a wall of text or a cutscene to introduce a quest (SWTOR handles this well, and as much as I love FFXIV's great cinematics I really wish they had any interactivity) - having a conversation with an NPC to discover a new quest instead of having a marker over their head made discovering new content actually feel like that, a discovery.
You didn't just suffer a minor penalty on EXP gained and durability loss, you actually lost EXP (which was significantly harder to grind, losing a level could happen and could set a high level player back days).
Before some of the mid life expansions you also lost your gear and had to make the dreaded "corpse run" to retrieve it before it despawned (which took a long time IIRC, 24 hours or more). They later gave you the ability to have an NPC summon your corpse before removing the gear loss entirely.
Death in EQ was very serious in the old days as a result, and it was always wise to have at least one other player that could drag your corpse to a safe place if you were entering a challenging zone.
Ha, the corpse run. I forgot about that. We used terrain to try to get close enough to our corpse to get it without attracting the monster's attention. Basically, without your gear you could get beat down with a wet noodle.
As such it was always a wise idea to keep a spare set of gear in the bank, even if it was objective "worse" than your main set - trying to run back to your corpse naked is always scary, I still remember more than once having to ask a high level guild mate to go drag my corpse out of areas I shouldn't have been in at my level.
Oh, and one thing I forgot, while they added the corpse summoners in Planes of Power (I think?) they weren't cheap at the time, costing anywhere from several plat to close to 100 plat - so it was still usually a good idea to just make the corpse run unless it was literally impossible for yourself or a friend/guild mate/cheaper merc to get to your corpse.
You should look into Pantheon. Old school EQ style game (no maps, heavy group requirement, very limited player driven porting, death penalty etc) in development. If it actually launches I expect to see a lot of older MMO people trying to recapture the thrill. Until then the EQ emulator eq1999 will beat the nostalgia right out of you.
Older MMO's, like Everquest or World of Warcraft, were pretty blatant skinner's boxes. You were lucky if a NPC sending you out to collect bat-wings got a little bit chatty. Some more recent MMO's, such as Bioware's The Old Republic or Cryptic's Star Trek Online, are much more story driven. STO, for example, has enough single-player instanced story-driven content to reach the maximum level, at which point you either quit or dive into the skinner's box that passes for an endgame.
That being said, single player games still seem to set the bar for story-driven content. It's a simple matter of how resources are spent. A MMO has to be able to suck people in long-term and be interesting for at least some players after they've put hundreds of hours into the game. A single-player game can end after 30-40 hours and not be called "too short" by reviewers. The budget for any given minute of gameplay is therefore much lower for MMO's than for single player games.
We're probably going to see a blurring of lines between single player games and MMO's in the near future. Games will have a high production value, story-driven, single player component that's all a lot of people will want to play, but they'll also have an open-ended MMO component. Some games will start players out in single-player and, at the end, dump them into a MMO universe, trained and equipped well past the newbie stage. The upcoming Star Citizen is apparently going to use a model similar to this. This solves the newbie-training problem that MMO's often struggle with while allowing players enamored with a single-player game's universe to continue inhabiting it, albeit by consuming content made with lower production values.
So, no, the MMORPG is not dying. It's just having lots of sex with single player RPG's and producing mutant offspring.
I think Ubisoft's "The Division" meets and melds some of the concepts you're talking about in the direction MMO's seem to be going. You start out grabbing a few solo missions, and the game procedurally teaches you elements of the game by making you...well...go out there and kill bad guys. Periodically in early game you'll be on a mission, pinned down when a bullet whizzes by from out of nowhere, oh look another player walking by decided to come join.
That's when you learn about forming parties. So on and so forth. It's not a perfect experience by any means (especially on PS4 which seems to both fall behind in updates and seem to be the buggiest port), and it does get a bit "grindy" at times, but for me it's been quite a unique experience. You can very well solo some of the missions, but you will be punished for it.
My main critique is that end game (the "Dark Zone") is essentially one giant arena built for "let's see how far I can push the gear envelope today".
One problem with MMORPGs is that they just take so much time. As a young adult working full time and trying to maintain a reasonably balanced lifestyle, I don't know how to find a guild or establish friendships in a game while acknowledging that I'm only gonna be putting in a couple hours a week. Heck, I can't imagine how people with children manage to pull it off. I know I'm not going to be that good, since I'm only interested in playing for fun.
I also find playing for long periods of time gets a bit exhausting. This means that in recent years I've started to gravitate towards more linear stories. I'm not usually interested in collecting stars or points, I just want to shut my brain off for a few hours and kill stuff.
If you play with friends, it can become a bit frustrating too if some of them are more in the "hardcore" side of things. Nobody wants to fight constantly against someone they can never get a chance to beat. It can be fun when playing certain co-op games, but anything highly competitive just gets too overwhelming.
Isn't MMORPGs taking time very much a design issue? Not even inherent in the genre itself, but enforced intentionally to bind users?
Tabletop RPGs have been getting by without "grinding" for decades, yet this is the current focus of most CRPGs (even more so than some past examples).
There are plenty of activities that could be done with a more occasional time investment (quests/dungeons that don't require groups/guilds, fiddling with your own house/manor/hold etc.).
Activities that could be done occasionally is basically a single player game - go play skyrim or fallout 4 - you don't need MMO for that.
MMORPG should be left for the kids with enough spare time to raid 4+ hours a day. Many would disagree, but from my experience it is friends that keep you coming back every day and you can't make them this days with all this casual queues and playing few hours a week.
This - sorta... There are several different types of community that MMORPG's can sustain, but the multi-player bit is the big ingredient. Folks can be selling crafts, raiding or questing, but the critical bit is that n-people should be needed. The bigger n is the more compelling the driver (I think).
WOW lost a lot of luster when 40 mans got retired...
I hated 40-man raids. They just weren't fun. Cat-herding 40 people, the endless waiting, dc's, egos and fights. No fun at all.
My best memories of WoW raids were the drunken Friday night guild runs through UBRS. We knew the bosses well enough so that they didn't really require any effort or co-ordination and we were free to chat and talk crap amongst ourselves. Our tank usually got so drunk by the time we got to the end that we were glad the hunter had to kite the boss away.
I had to stop playing because the time commitment required to be an active member of the raid group got ridiculous. Literally every evening and most of every weekend. If you couldn't do that then you couldn't compete. Stuff that, this is a hobby not a job.
This is a bit of a false dichotomy. A game catering better to casual gaming doesn't preclude more "intense" scenarios. With a more varied design, you can both satisfy someone spending 30 minutes after work and a whole group doing a multi-hour mission (which, TBH, shouldn't just be a "raid", either).
Never mind that issues with meaningless grinding are shared by both single-player CRPGS and MMORPGS. (And leveling the whole world along with your PC is a very unsatisfying solution).
> MMORPG should be left for the kids with enough spare time to raid 4+ hours a day.
4 hours a day raiding is bullshit. Most guilds raid 12 hours or so a week. The very competitive guilds traditionally only raid a lot in first 2-3 weeks (w/first week being split farm). They take time off work/uni then. Sco, for example, from best guild Method, is a Scottish fellow who worked in finance for various years (he's now full time earning money with his guild).
With Legion, its the stuff outside of raiding which takes up a lot of time. The endless grind of artifact power, legendaries, and rare epic upgrades.
It is possible to play casual though. I raid 6 hours a week (less than 1 hour a day), and out of 10 we're only 2 bosses behind on Mythic (the toughest difficult). With the last boss being exceptionally hard.
> Isn't MMORPGs taking time very much a design issue?
This is what I liked in the original Guild Wars, because quickly enough you were reaching the level 20 cap, and then while you can acquire more loot and skills, this basically just increase your abilities through player skill by increasing possible tactical possibilities, not through a monotonic increase of avatar power basically based on play time, so you could readily rejoin friends even after a month without playing.
The first design of global agenda has a similar system. Everyone had 40(?) equip slots, that's it. Each item is level 1-4 of power. It's your choice to rock a top level shield but lowest weapons because you can't fit both.
I can't remember what levels affected in that, maybe playzone access. It's nice because your skills as a player were you not the hours in the character.
They ripped that system out for a traditional system.
All games require the customer to devote time. Some more than others. Tabletop RPGs require time spent not in grinding, but other tasks, most notably roleplaying.
It's easier - for a skilled GM - to produce engaging new content for a tabletop RPG than it is to produce the same for an MMORPG.
The GM only needs to come up with an idea that works for their group of - say - 4 players, whereas the MMORPG vendor also needs to come up with artwork and code and ensure that the content is balanced for thousands - or more - of players at different stages of development and with different playing styles.
MMORPGs feature grind because without it the players would run out of content before new content was available: then they'd get bored and quit. Or, if the content was produced quickly enough, it would likely lack sufficient quality control and players wouldn't like playing new content, with the same result.
Of course, the more money the vendor is able to put into creating new content, the less grind the game needs to depend upon. And if the game has many social players, their social interactions provide another mechanism to keep players interested after they run out of content. Eve is a good example of an MMO where player interactions are a big part of what keeps players in the game.
> One problem with MMORPGs is that they just take so much time. As a young adult working full time and trying to maintain a reasonably balanced lifestyle, I don't know how to find a guild or establish friendships in a game while acknowledging that I'm only gonna be putting in a couple hours a week.
One thing you could do is pick a game that Gaiscioch [1] has a significant presence in and join them. Those currently are Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online. (Previous games were, in reverse order, Rift, Warhammer Online, and Dark Age of Camelot. I believe there is still quite a bit of Gaiscioch activity in Rift, but I don't think it is getting the full Gaiscioch treatment any more).
If I had to sum up Gaiscioch as a guild in a short list of keywords, I'd probably pick something like "hard-core casual social".
That's a set of keywords you usually don't find for one guild, so I'll explain in more detail.
What I mean by "casual" is that Gaiscioch has no requirements for how much time you have to put into the game, or how rapidly you have to advance your character, or how well equipped you have to be, or what classes you have to play, or how many alts you can create and play.
What I mean by "social" is that the focus of Gaiscioch is on community. They want to create a friendly gaming environment where everyone from grandparents to children, of all genders, races, religions, etc., is welcome and can have a good time.
What I mean by "hard-core" is two things. First is that Gaiscioch does have people who put a lot of effort into the game. Some of them do the same kind of hard core raiding and pursuit of the endgame that you typically see in an uber guild. As I said above, there is no pressure to participate in that, but if you want to its there.
Second is that Gaiscioch's leaders get heavily into the lore of the game, and organize server-wide community events based on that lore.
Let me give an example.
Warhammer Online was built around the fight between two factions, Order and Destruction. Keeps and fortresses could be seized by players, and when the players of one side accomplished certain goals in that regard, they could gain access to the other side's capital city to loot and pillage. There were four "tiers" of this, organized by level range, so this realm vs. realm conflict could be experienced at all levels.
Gaiscioch, which was playing Order on the Badlands server, organized an ongoing event called the Battle for the Badlands which involved weekly scheduled raids to try to take take Destruction keeps and forts. These raids were announced well in advanced, and well publicized to try to get a lot of people to show up. I believe they were also coordinating with one or two big Destruction guilds to get them to get a big Destruction turnout. These events would not just do the top tier--they would also do lower tier targets so that people who didn't have tier IV characters could join the fun. They put up a website for the Battle of Badlands, and had a scoring system to keep track of who had won each week's event.
These events would draw enough people so that Gaiscioch members were just a minority of the players, but Gaiscioch had enough experienced RvR leaders so that they could generally spread them out among all the Order groups and coordinate with each other, allowing for some large scale strategy and tactics across multiple zones. (I think Destruction had a similar arrangement).
For a large fraction of the Badlands population (both Order and Destruction), these events were the high point of their Warhammer Online experience.
I played Ultima Online for over a decade. Missed the start by a year, but after that pretty much saw it through the highs and the eventual decline. Stopped playing during grad school as I just couldn't do the hours needed and balance that with the career, school, relationships, etc.
UO started out brilliantly simple - not much of a story line, some basic rules and a never ending cycle of PvP. This total risk of losing everything and having to start over, including houses being robbed and such, actually resulted in an almost life-like story line that players made themselves.
Guilds formed, turf was claimed, order maintained or chaos wrought. Playing completely solo was really tough, just like surviving in the real world is harder by yourself.
But the team managing the game seems to have decided that the difficulty and PvP were liability and not assets. They tried to retrofit the quests and what not to the game that really didn't need them. The result was, just as the article laments of more modern games - boring, predictable, safe experience. But what's the point?
After enough complaining by the "old guard" UO team made Seige Perilous shard (server) with old style rules and punishingly tough economics. This kept me playing for another 6 years...
I tried some newer games, but the safe/boring environment doesn't really let human creativity/nature come out. There really isn't much of "role playing".
If I ever have time for games again, private UO servers with pre-trammel rules will probably be it for me. If they still exist that is.
I played UO for years as well. I was on Lake Superior for a couple years until they introduced Trammel. Then I tried Siege for a few weeks but didn't have the foundation to get established with a group of people so it just turned out brutal and frustrating.
Later on (early 2000s) I played on IPY, the extremely popular pre-Trammel free shard. From the get-go I had a friend with me and he introduced me to a friend of his from World of Warcraft. The 3 of us met another group of people and we joined up to form a guild. We were so successful that we all became friends and played on multiple subsequent free shards together. A few years ago I even took a trip down to the Bay Area to stay with some of them; they've become lifelong friends.
Playing UO with a group of people you know really well that know how to work together as a team is a thrill like no other. Taking trips to a dungeon together and getting into street battles along the Vesper strip is just fantastic. On several occasions we found our whole group red (branded as murderers) and being chased by a mob of people from town.
UO is the only MMORPG I'm aware of where you can actually steal items from other people. I had a ton of fun playing a thief who could also cast spells. So many people expected a thief to run away instead of fighting back! They got a nasty surprise when they attacked me.
A bit out of context but it reminds me how I met my current team 8 years ago on Crysis and the awesome memories I have with. We see each others for a full week every year, and I'm even flatsharing with one of them.
I didn't know anyone when switching to Seige. My guild basically disintegrated on Pacific server with most moving on to EQ, which I didn't really connect with.
But doing Seige solo for a bit somehow added to the fun. Really wish I had the time to get back into it!
Procedural generation and perhaps some better AI will help a lot. No Man's Sky was basically just a crude demo.
AI bots where you can model actual game theories, and dare I say, philosophies, of people would be really cool, and I think would just take some investment from a visionary company.
Procedural generation has proven to be something considerably less than a silver bullet. Some games implement it well, and many do not. Spore was another big launch that promised the world on the back of procedural generation... and failed quite remarkably to deliver.
Largely an article devoid of content. He sums it up by saying. "The next successful massively multiplayer online game, whatever that is, will have to be innovative, it will have to be more compelling than collection quests, and it will have to take risks."
He ignores all the MMO's that have been innovative and risk taking ventures. EVE, Guild Wars 2 ,Black Desert, Wildstar - just to name a (very) few, all have something different enough about them to make them reasonably unique.
Even World of Warcraft is evolving. The latest expansion offers more to do than any other expansion that came before it, and they are adding more dungeons and more story lines all the time. It still has Collect 10 Rat Asses quests, but that's not the game's focus.
MMO's aren't dying; there's never been a greater choice of high quality entertainment in this genre.
I think the MMORPG concept could get a nice boost from live AR (Ingress/Pokemon Go). I think it would be pretty cool to form a group, walk around and fight spawning mobs and play some sort of instances. Would probably easy to monetize with in game purchases (I think the traditional monthly fee wouldn't work as well). Blizzard is probably already working on something like this :)
There's also potential for a non-grindy version where quests span the globe and unique NPCs are spread around the world (and the world could mirror earth...northern Europe being Vikingy etc.)
I played DAOC a lot but due to that experience stayed away from the WoW crack pipe. Still want to try EVE some day but that would probably require me being retired :P
I used to play bare bones EverQuest and World of Warcraft for a few years. I dabble with Guild Wars 2 these days. Questing and exploration is fun. When it comes to raiding and forming groups, that is where the pain starts. The time investment required is high. All games become a grind one way or another as players are able to consume content faster than developers can produce it. At least with living world, Guild Wars 2 is able to keep kindling the interest of the player base every now and then in between expansion packs.
Other ideas and concept they can be using:
- Grinding for world understanding/knowledge instead of XP (don't open use your browser ;D)
- Allow player skill to have a larger effect on your performance.
- Make interesting/hard to play classes.
- Make grinding fun, and thus battles engaging. (Allowing people to have boring grinds can be achieved with different classes.)
- Consider skill-based classes, rather then templates.
My theory is that the time sink of life is impacting the time sink of MMOs, but the way to solve time sink issues is through pure skill gameplay design, which is inherently difficult to do in an mmo from an back end architecture perspective. Increases in compute power are going to keep MMOs from dying though, because it won't be long before someone merges the two. Its just that the standard template for an mmo has infected designers minds, so few even attempt to break the mold.
Bonus: for those of you missing UO and that dynamism, and hardcoreness, Mortal Online is worth a look. (F2p skill cap of lvl 60)
WoW is currently trying to appeal to a wide audience rather than a specific group of players that something like a pure skill system would require. They've built in their time sink grinding that is always there but they've also doubled down on the lore and immersion while breaking content into chunks that are designed for players of different skill levels, time constraints and interests. You can see this with the inclusion of much more voice acting, artifact knowledge research, artifact weapons that grow with the player. There are normal, heroic, mythic and looking for group dungeons and raids all of which have different levels of difficulty and mechanics to overcome. For those players looking for a skill based challenge without the time sink of raiding the mythic + dungeon system is also new. In this system there are keys which unlock a dungeon at a specific difficulty. As the level of the key increases the difficulty of the dungeon increases and something called affixes are added. These affixes change the way the dungeon operates from decreasing healing to increasing mob difficulty overall or depending on how many are engaged at one time and several others. Additionally as you move up the difficulty you go from no affixes up to three affixes at once.
For the first time in a long time I find WoW to actually be compelling and worth spending time in game. I'll likely only play through each of the classes to max level and all of their story lines while experiencing the raid dungeons from the very casual looking for group version but everything is accessible and can be done at my own pace. Not all of the story lines are well done and I think they need to consider if they are giving equal writing time to each class but that's never been the strongest suit for Blizzard.
This "article" pretty much says nothing but stating the obvious. Playing the same thing for 10 years grows old, WoW seized the MMORPG market preventing innovating titles from commercial success. How can he not see that he is part of the problem he writes about ?
If you think a submission is inappropriate for HN, flag it and move on. The community is made up of members with all kinds of different interests. This submission has clearly attracted the interest of some.
MMORPG publishers stopped releasing even approximate subscriber numbers years ago, and the best you'll find with a Google query like "mmo subscriber numbers" are statistics almost a decade old, heavily footnoted with notices that numbers are educated guesses at best.
However, as far as anybody can tell, there is a definite downwards trend and the biggest player, World of Warcraft, has been hemorrhaging subscribers for years, currently down to an estimated 5.5 million from a peak of 12 million in 2010.¹)
It used to be that the MMO playerbase would migrate. A new MMO game would come out and everybody flocked to the new hotness, and if the game was any good, they'd stick. But World of Warcraft changed that. People still bought new MMOs as they came out, but they played them precisely as long as the number of months of free subscription included in the box, and then moved right back to WoW, leaving the challenger to wilt and eventually switch to a free-to-play model.
However, the droves that are leaving MMOs the last couple of year don't seem to be going to other MMOs, they just evaporate.
The people that enjoy raid-style content with a large multiplayer component probably end up in MOBAs²) like LoL (League of Legends) and DOTA (Defense of the Ancients), which offer all of the tension and drama of typical MMO end-game content without any of the boring grinding needed to unlock it. And according to Steam, DOTA 2 is the most played PC game in the world.³)
Others have moved to MMO-FPS games like The Division on PC and Destiny on consoles, and the rise of casual and mobile gaming coincides with the fall of MMORPGs. But as far as I can tell that still leaves millions of players that simply stopped playing.
My guess is that the world is just sick and tired of MMORPGs and I think it will take the death of WoW and a few years without any big MMO releases before a new generation of players can make any new MMO popular.
The impression i have of WoW is that over the year it has become IRC with colorful avatars. People i used to do LAN parties with etc are virtually impossible to reach online outside WoW.
I think there is a twin problem of too many convenience features added, and the advent of Youtube and community wikis.
The former has turned the process of getting from one end of the map other, and that of forming groups for dungeons and such, virtually effortless.
As best i recall, if you wanted to travel to another city without doing it overland in EQ, you had to locate a player character wizard with the right spell unlocked and the right reagents on hand. Similarly if you died far out in the wilderness you had to rely on a PC necromancer services to recover the corpse and gear.
These days you can just click a npc, pay some in game currency and presto, either problem solved.
Similarly you can these days just put a checkmark next to the dungeons wanted, hit "find group" and be teleported to the entrance.
The other issue is access to outside information.
Just about every puzzle and dungeon will have multiple video guides up on Youtube etc within days of game launch or update. And most games these days have wikis that are either officially or community maintained.
These things kill all sense of wonder and exploration, as one can always alt-tab to the browser to tell what one need to do next.
edit:
Never mind that most overland areas are specifically designed to be soloed no matter what class or gear one have chosen. Just follow the virtual breadcrumbs of quest markers and you will be max level and can start on "endgame" before you know it. At that point the MMO turns into an overly elaborate lobby game, as nobody ventures out into the overland areas ever again.
And we can see this in how more recent MMOs are set up with quite elaborate shard/instance load balancing. Meaning that they can scale the server farm up or down without ever taking a whole "realm" or named server offline.
There are some MMORPGs out there that have attempted to innovate by introducing elements from other genres. Some names off the top of my head, Starbreak, Steambirds alliance, Blade & Soul.
Also, maybe those .io games, where you can just pick up and play have gotten the attention of the younger generation? Especially since they are easier to access and dont require downloading of a client nor signing up for an account
I waited for so long for WoW to be released and when it finally came and it continiously cost money to play, I didn't start with it, because I was poor.
This problably saved my life, lol.
2-3 years after the release I met so much people who lost jobs, dopped out of university or destroyed their relationships with it.
On the other hand I also met a few that got jobs at Blizzard, starting with being a GM and later getting into other things like admin stuff etc.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadSummary: are mmos dying? They could be, because they're repetitive and that's boring. Write better stories.
There is a sense of place, and to some extent community, in a multiplayer game. Ones that hit the right notes in terms of complexity, variability, and struggle tend to bring their communities together. Ones that tend to be manipulative often alienate communities. I have fond memories of hanging out with a Paladin and working through the content. We had compatible schedules and ended up great friends in the game but to this day I have no idea who they were in "real life."
So what I have come to understand is that a company stumbles upon a mix which like an ensemble cast of unknown actors that just "clicks" makes for a place where the content facilitates people getting to know each other, to help each other, and to compete with each other without getting too much in the way of the relationship side of things.
That gets them a bunch of customers but over time you can't relive the same experiences over and over again and find them "new" any more. You really need to mix it up somehow, and randomness helps but only goes so far. When the glow starts to fade and people drift away, the owner of the place will try new things to get people involved but at the end of the day, they eventually upset the balance and even their more loyal visitors start to taper off and fade away. And for people where the first time they completed a major quest line with new friends, or overcame a raid boss, and remember that time fondly, they can't go back. Just like you can't go back to being 15 again and riding around on bikes in the neighborhood without a care in the world. Nostalgia sets in and you move on, grieving what you lost.
I have played a number of MMOG's, and the RPGs are most notable because your "character" has developed in game and has a gravitas all its own. So how do you make a world where it is always fun to visit? You need a system where the world has its challenges but it isn't static. WoW avoided feeling static because it had so much content, but if you take 10 - 20 'toons' from their starting zone to the maximum character level you pretty much learn all there is to know about the place. And it doesn't change over time. And while it had a lot of variation at the beginning, over time successive updates homogenized more and more of the features such that all the classes and races began to feel like the tier 10, 11, and 12 armor sets which were exactly the same artwork but with different texture maps.
I think the game that was Everquest and WoW and others in the MMORPG vein has crested, the next version of that will have to be very different in order to get the conversion rates those had. That said, once we have procedurally generated worlds rather than scripted worlds I thing you'll find they will remain engaging for a longer period of time.
As someone who played WoW reasonably consistently from launch to a few months after the expansion that gave level 70, people declaring they left because X was so bad... they were there from day 1 (admittedly, early WoW was quite buggy). WoW has always had people saying "well now, THIS is the last straw!".
But yes, you can only do the same thing for so long before moving on. Most courses have a far greater 'intro' level and a much narrower set of ongoing students who stick with it, for example. It's a problem MMOs have, because they're predicated on people sticking around, and content is consumed much, much faster than it can be created.
That's because multiplayer RPGs first became massive multiplayer RPGs, and then became massive multiplayer [games]. You get the drift. Lot's of good things that make roleplaying experience unique went down the drain in the process, and even the name started reflecting it. The massive aspect itself makes it challenging to preserve roleplaying environment. Proper scaling of multiplayer roleplaying game is a tricky issue, and most don't address it well and don't even want to, since it would mean limiting the audience and less profits in result.
I re-installed Neverwinter Nights 2 and started going around some of the persistent world servers out there, and I really enjoy the role-playing that goes on among players. I've actually been considering resurrecting my DM gear and finding some pencil and paper players.
I did "enjoy" EVE quite a bit too, although parts of it felt more like a job rather this incredible treacherous journey through a magical and hostile world. EVE was more about the politics and logistics than the game itself.
I agree with many other first-gen MMORPG old farts that we will simply never be able to re-create that experience in the same format, that era is gone and is best left as a positive memory. Perhaps as others pointed out VR will be that next big leap forward that will allow us to suspend belief once again.
On a side-note, I really do hope that creators keep making titles where the game world is a nasty, hostile, inscrutable place and you and the people around you have to band together and figure it out, nothing is going to spoon-fed you the solution. It makes such a big difference to the end-user experience.
It really stinks, because no modern MMO gives me the thrill I had playing EQ as a teen. Maybe to an extent it's the rose-tinted glasses, but I really miss having a real penalty for dying (and as much as I love this in EVE every time I resub I quickly lose interest due to the time sink of refitting ships, flying to a dozen different systems to pick up parts, etc.) and I think that was the key. Oh, and not having NPC's just throw up a wall of text or a cutscene to introduce a quest (SWTOR handles this well, and as much as I love FFXIV's great cinematics I really wish they had any interactivity) - having a conversation with an NPC to discover a new quest instead of having a marker over their head made discovering new content actually feel like that, a discovery.
Before some of the mid life expansions you also lost your gear and had to make the dreaded "corpse run" to retrieve it before it despawned (which took a long time IIRC, 24 hours or more). They later gave you the ability to have an NPC summon your corpse before removing the gear loss entirely.
Death in EQ was very serious in the old days as a result, and it was always wise to have at least one other player that could drag your corpse to a safe place if you were entering a challenging zone.
Oh, and one thing I forgot, while they added the corpse summoners in Planes of Power (I think?) they weren't cheap at the time, costing anywhere from several plat to close to 100 plat - so it was still usually a good idea to just make the corpse run unless it was literally impossible for yourself or a friend/guild mate/cheaper merc to get to your corpse.
That being said, single player games still seem to set the bar for story-driven content. It's a simple matter of how resources are spent. A MMO has to be able to suck people in long-term and be interesting for at least some players after they've put hundreds of hours into the game. A single-player game can end after 30-40 hours and not be called "too short" by reviewers. The budget for any given minute of gameplay is therefore much lower for MMO's than for single player games.
We're probably going to see a blurring of lines between single player games and MMO's in the near future. Games will have a high production value, story-driven, single player component that's all a lot of people will want to play, but they'll also have an open-ended MMO component. Some games will start players out in single-player and, at the end, dump them into a MMO universe, trained and equipped well past the newbie stage. The upcoming Star Citizen is apparently going to use a model similar to this. This solves the newbie-training problem that MMO's often struggle with while allowing players enamored with a single-player game's universe to continue inhabiting it, albeit by consuming content made with lower production values.
So, no, the MMORPG is not dying. It's just having lots of sex with single player RPG's and producing mutant offspring.
That's when you learn about forming parties. So on and so forth. It's not a perfect experience by any means (especially on PS4 which seems to both fall behind in updates and seem to be the buggiest port), and it does get a bit "grindy" at times, but for me it's been quite a unique experience. You can very well solo some of the missions, but you will be punished for it.
My main critique is that end game (the "Dark Zone") is essentially one giant arena built for "let's see how far I can push the gear envelope today".
I also find playing for long periods of time gets a bit exhausting. This means that in recent years I've started to gravitate towards more linear stories. I'm not usually interested in collecting stars or points, I just want to shut my brain off for a few hours and kill stuff.
If you play with friends, it can become a bit frustrating too if some of them are more in the "hardcore" side of things. Nobody wants to fight constantly against someone they can never get a chance to beat. It can be fun when playing certain co-op games, but anything highly competitive just gets too overwhelming.
Tabletop RPGs have been getting by without "grinding" for decades, yet this is the current focus of most CRPGs (even more so than some past examples).
There are plenty of activities that could be done with a more occasional time investment (quests/dungeons that don't require groups/guilds, fiddling with your own house/manor/hold etc.).
MMORPG should be left for the kids with enough spare time to raid 4+ hours a day. Many would disagree, but from my experience it is friends that keep you coming back every day and you can't make them this days with all this casual queues and playing few hours a week.
WOW lost a lot of luster when 40 mans got retired...
My best memories of WoW raids were the drunken Friday night guild runs through UBRS. We knew the bosses well enough so that they didn't really require any effort or co-ordination and we were free to chat and talk crap amongst ourselves. Our tank usually got so drunk by the time we got to the end that we were glad the hunter had to kite the boss away.
I had to stop playing because the time commitment required to be an active member of the raid group got ridiculous. Literally every evening and most of every weekend. If you couldn't do that then you couldn't compete. Stuff that, this is a hobby not a job.
Never mind that issues with meaningless grinding are shared by both single-player CRPGS and MMORPGS. (And leveling the whole world along with your PC is a very unsatisfying solution).
4 hours a day raiding is bullshit. Most guilds raid 12 hours or so a week. The very competitive guilds traditionally only raid a lot in first 2-3 weeks (w/first week being split farm). They take time off work/uni then. Sco, for example, from best guild Method, is a Scottish fellow who worked in finance for various years (he's now full time earning money with his guild).
With Legion, its the stuff outside of raiding which takes up a lot of time. The endless grind of artifact power, legendaries, and rare epic upgrades.
It is possible to play casual though. I raid 6 hours a week (less than 1 hour a day), and out of 10 we're only 2 bosses behind on Mythic (the toughest difficult). With the last boss being exceptionally hard.
This is what I liked in the original Guild Wars, because quickly enough you were reaching the level 20 cap, and then while you can acquire more loot and skills, this basically just increase your abilities through player skill by increasing possible tactical possibilities, not through a monotonic increase of avatar power basically based on play time, so you could readily rejoin friends even after a month without playing.
I can't remember what levels affected in that, maybe playzone access. It's nice because your skills as a player were you not the hours in the character.
They ripped that system out for a traditional system.
The GM only needs to come up with an idea that works for their group of - say - 4 players, whereas the MMORPG vendor also needs to come up with artwork and code and ensure that the content is balanced for thousands - or more - of players at different stages of development and with different playing styles.
MMORPGs feature grind because without it the players would run out of content before new content was available: then they'd get bored and quit. Or, if the content was produced quickly enough, it would likely lack sufficient quality control and players wouldn't like playing new content, with the same result.
Of course, the more money the vendor is able to put into creating new content, the less grind the game needs to depend upon. And if the game has many social players, their social interactions provide another mechanism to keep players interested after they run out of content. Eve is a good example of an MMO where player interactions are a big part of what keeps players in the game.
One thing you could do is pick a game that Gaiscioch [1] has a significant presence in and join them. Those currently are Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online. (Previous games were, in reverse order, Rift, Warhammer Online, and Dark Age of Camelot. I believe there is still quite a bit of Gaiscioch activity in Rift, but I don't think it is getting the full Gaiscioch treatment any more).
If I had to sum up Gaiscioch as a guild in a short list of keywords, I'd probably pick something like "hard-core casual social".
That's a set of keywords you usually don't find for one guild, so I'll explain in more detail.
What I mean by "casual" is that Gaiscioch has no requirements for how much time you have to put into the game, or how rapidly you have to advance your character, or how well equipped you have to be, or what classes you have to play, or how many alts you can create and play.
What I mean by "social" is that the focus of Gaiscioch is on community. They want to create a friendly gaming environment where everyone from grandparents to children, of all genders, races, religions, etc., is welcome and can have a good time.
What I mean by "hard-core" is two things. First is that Gaiscioch does have people who put a lot of effort into the game. Some of them do the same kind of hard core raiding and pursuit of the endgame that you typically see in an uber guild. As I said above, there is no pressure to participate in that, but if you want to its there.
Second is that Gaiscioch's leaders get heavily into the lore of the game, and organize server-wide community events based on that lore.
Let me give an example.
Warhammer Online was built around the fight between two factions, Order and Destruction. Keeps and fortresses could be seized by players, and when the players of one side accomplished certain goals in that regard, they could gain access to the other side's capital city to loot and pillage. There were four "tiers" of this, organized by level range, so this realm vs. realm conflict could be experienced at all levels.
Gaiscioch, which was playing Order on the Badlands server, organized an ongoing event called the Battle for the Badlands which involved weekly scheduled raids to try to take take Destruction keeps and forts. These raids were announced well in advanced, and well publicized to try to get a lot of people to show up. I believe they were also coordinating with one or two big Destruction guilds to get them to get a big Destruction turnout. These events would not just do the top tier--they would also do lower tier targets so that people who didn't have tier IV characters could join the fun. They put up a website for the Battle of Badlands, and had a scoring system to keep track of who had won each week's event.
These events would draw enough people so that Gaiscioch members were just a minority of the players, but Gaiscioch had enough experienced RvR leaders so that they could generally spread them out among all the Order groups and coordinate with each other, allowing for some large scale strategy and tactics across multiple zones. (I think Destruction had a similar arrangement).
For a large fraction of the Badlands population (both Order and Destruction), these events were the high point of their Warhammer Online experience.
[1] http://www.gaiscioch.com/about/
UO started out brilliantly simple - not much of a story line, some basic rules and a never ending cycle of PvP. This total risk of losing everything and having to start over, including houses being robbed and such, actually resulted in an almost life-like story line that players made themselves.
Guilds formed, turf was claimed, order maintained or chaos wrought. Playing completely solo was really tough, just like surviving in the real world is harder by yourself.
But the team managing the game seems to have decided that the difficulty and PvP were liability and not assets. They tried to retrofit the quests and what not to the game that really didn't need them. The result was, just as the article laments of more modern games - boring, predictable, safe experience. But what's the point?
After enough complaining by the "old guard" UO team made Seige Perilous shard (server) with old style rules and punishingly tough economics. This kept me playing for another 6 years...
I tried some newer games, but the safe/boring environment doesn't really let human creativity/nature come out. There really isn't much of "role playing".
If I ever have time for games again, private UO servers with pre-trammel rules will probably be it for me. If they still exist that is.
Later on (early 2000s) I played on IPY, the extremely popular pre-Trammel free shard. From the get-go I had a friend with me and he introduced me to a friend of his from World of Warcraft. The 3 of us met another group of people and we joined up to form a guild. We were so successful that we all became friends and played on multiple subsequent free shards together. A few years ago I even took a trip down to the Bay Area to stay with some of them; they've become lifelong friends.
Playing UO with a group of people you know really well that know how to work together as a team is a thrill like no other. Taking trips to a dungeon together and getting into street battles along the Vesper strip is just fantastic. On several occasions we found our whole group red (branded as murderers) and being chased by a mob of people from town.
UO is the only MMORPG I'm aware of where you can actually steal items from other people. I had a ton of fun playing a thief who could also cast spells. So many people expected a thief to run away instead of fighting back! They got a nasty surprise when they attacked me.
But doing Seige solo for a bit somehow added to the fun. Really wish I had the time to get back into it!
AI bots where you can model actual game theories, and dare I say, philosophies, of people would be really cool, and I think would just take some investment from a visionary company.
He ignores all the MMO's that have been innovative and risk taking ventures. EVE, Guild Wars 2 ,Black Desert, Wildstar - just to name a (very) few, all have something different enough about them to make them reasonably unique.
Even World of Warcraft is evolving. The latest expansion offers more to do than any other expansion that came before it, and they are adding more dungeons and more story lines all the time. It still has Collect 10 Rat Asses quests, but that's not the game's focus.
MMO's aren't dying; there's never been a greater choice of high quality entertainment in this genre.
Why this piece got so far up I can't say, but I suppose interesting headlines count the same as interesting writing.
I played DAOC a lot but due to that experience stayed away from the WoW crack pipe. Still want to try EVE some day but that would probably require me being retired :P
Bonus: for those of you missing UO and that dynamism, and hardcoreness, Mortal Online is worth a look. (F2p skill cap of lvl 60)
For the first time in a long time I find WoW to actually be compelling and worth spending time in game. I'll likely only play through each of the classes to max level and all of their story lines while experiencing the raid dungeons from the very casual looking for group version but everything is accessible and can be done at my own pace. Not all of the story lines are well done and I think they need to consider if they are giving equal writing time to each class but that's never been the strongest suit for Blizzard.
This "article" pretty much says nothing but stating the obvious. Playing the same thing for 10 years grows old, WoW seized the MMORPG market preventing innovating titles from commercial success. How can he not see that he is part of the problem he writes about ?
However, as far as anybody can tell, there is a definite downwards trend and the biggest player, World of Warcraft, has been hemorrhaging subscribers for years, currently down to an estimated 5.5 million from a peak of 12 million in 2010.¹)
It used to be that the MMO playerbase would migrate. A new MMO game would come out and everybody flocked to the new hotness, and if the game was any good, they'd stick. But World of Warcraft changed that. People still bought new MMOs as they came out, but they played them precisely as long as the number of months of free subscription included in the box, and then moved right back to WoW, leaving the challenger to wilt and eventually switch to a free-to-play model.
However, the droves that are leaving MMOs the last couple of year don't seem to be going to other MMOs, they just evaporate.
The people that enjoy raid-style content with a large multiplayer component probably end up in MOBAs²) like LoL (League of Legends) and DOTA (Defense of the Ancients), which offer all of the tension and drama of typical MMO end-game content without any of the boring grinding needed to unlock it. And according to Steam, DOTA 2 is the most played PC game in the world.³)
Others have moved to MMO-FPS games like The Division on PC and Destiny on consoles, and the rise of casual and mobile gaming coincides with the fall of MMORPGs. But as far as I can tell that still leaves millions of players that simply stopped playing.
My guess is that the world is just sick and tired of MMORPGs and I think it will take the death of WoW and a few years without any big MMO releases before a new generation of players can make any new MMO popular.
¹) https://www.statista.com/statistics/276601/number-of-world-o...
²) Multiplayer Online Battle Arena.
³) http://store.steampowered.com/stats/
The former has turned the process of getting from one end of the map other, and that of forming groups for dungeons and such, virtually effortless.
As best i recall, if you wanted to travel to another city without doing it overland in EQ, you had to locate a player character wizard with the right spell unlocked and the right reagents on hand. Similarly if you died far out in the wilderness you had to rely on a PC necromancer services to recover the corpse and gear.
These days you can just click a npc, pay some in game currency and presto, either problem solved.
Similarly you can these days just put a checkmark next to the dungeons wanted, hit "find group" and be teleported to the entrance.
The other issue is access to outside information.
Just about every puzzle and dungeon will have multiple video guides up on Youtube etc within days of game launch or update. And most games these days have wikis that are either officially or community maintained.
These things kill all sense of wonder and exploration, as one can always alt-tab to the browser to tell what one need to do next.
edit: Never mind that most overland areas are specifically designed to be soloed no matter what class or gear one have chosen. Just follow the virtual breadcrumbs of quest markers and you will be max level and can start on "endgame" before you know it. At that point the MMO turns into an overly elaborate lobby game, as nobody ventures out into the overland areas ever again.
And we can see this in how more recent MMOs are set up with quite elaborate shard/instance load balancing. Meaning that they can scale the server farm up or down without ever taking a whole "realm" or named server offline.
Also, maybe those .io games, where you can just pick up and play have gotten the attention of the younger generation? Especially since they are easier to access and dont require downloading of a client nor signing up for an account
This problably saved my life, lol.
2-3 years after the release I met so much people who lost jobs, dopped out of university or destroyed their relationships with it.
On the other hand I also met a few that got jobs at Blizzard, starting with being a GM and later getting into other things like admin stuff etc.