Is the MMORPG Dying?
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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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Summary: 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 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 ?