The new style of mmorpg vs the old

This is not to bash the way the mmorpg games are set up now, but for a while been trying to play different games some are decent.

but come on ? I think the new style is pretty dry........... you can get top level very quickly you are already over powered within a month of playing just by playing on your days off and a few hours a day... less time consuming no real adventures most games all u have to do is spend a little money to get to powerful or tons of money for scrolls just in case it fails... items are too easy to get ... too easy to level up....

then some games are just strictly pay to win......

i remember the old way it was more balanced out, i know some games there are people soloing bosses now... you would have to be very experience player to do that long time ago now everyone can do it...

i love the graphics more now i love the creativity in some of the games now i can say that but for the most part i liked the more of heavy grinding pqing i think the op just destroyed the social effect on games as well

what your opinion on the new way and old way ?

Ultima Online, Everquest > Current WoW and FFXIV and Elder Scrolls online

imo I can't go back to mmo's anymore they are too boring now and lost their magic and freshness

agree wow gotten terrible to me !

I think it depends what you're after.

Playing Elder Scrolls Online atm, really enjoying it. But that's as a primarily solo player who enjoys the universe Bethesda created, at a leisurely pace.

If you're someone looking for high end gear, dungeon and guild raids and what not, it's terrible

@ProtossRushX: Ultima Online was the best.

correct

@papermario: Nothing has ever lived up to my experience with Everquest.

Corpse runs, needing a wizard/druid to teleport you around, or a necro to help recover a corpse, etc.

The thing modern MMOs lack the most compared to the old ones, is the sense of community.

Now you queue up for a dungeon, 3-5 random people are dropped in your group, and the party sets off without so much as a "hello".

After the run, successful or not, you very likely will never see those folks again.

If you like old school RPGs, keep your eye on Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen. It's being developed in no small part by Brad McQuaid, the guy responsible for Everquest, and Vanguard Saga of heroes.

I would however stay cautiously optimistic, as Vanguard was a total buggy mess when it launched, and never recovered. Even though it had the potential to be one of the best MMOs ever.

agreed... 3-5 people random never see them again then because nobody really needs any help as much... old days your trying to get as many good potential people you need or networking just in case you need loads of help

Like the action MMORPG's better. Tab target systems are out of date and boring.

I've been playing TERA lately, and it's much better (mainly in terms of combat) than older MMO's like WOW or FFXI.

I love the story and classes in Final Fantasy 14.

I also love the action combat and art in Tree of Savior.

Two vastly different MMO games that I love.

MMO Games seem in a good place to me.

not really.... you only named a few games....

Not sure how many MMO games one needs to be happy. For me one or two is for than enough.

I also really like Trove and Rift as well.

The old way required you to devote literally hundreds of hours into a needlessly long character grind with grueling punishments to level up. This may have worked when an MMO could be sustained by a few thousand high schoolers and college kids paying a monthly fee, but it does not work when they need tens of thousands of subscribers or hundreds of thousands of transactions a year on an in-game store to keep the servers up and the game developing. Games are out to make a profit. It's really easy to be profitable when your dev team is twenty people working in a small office.

MMO gamers seem to always dream of the old MMOs when they were younger and had time to spare. Today you most likely don't have a fifth of the time to dedicate to video games. You can't make an MMO that gates people out of content and requires illiterately hundreds of hours of grinding to achieve a higher level. That's unacceptable and any "hardcore" MMO that gates players that badly (Wildstar was the most recent culprit of this) ends up failing miserably.

Times have changed. Personally I think the old school style of MMOs where everybody is lodged into great big instances with hundreds of players are dead. Heavy instancing today is being favored as the developers can craft a much more consistent play experience for a larger body of people.

New way is way better.

i disagree, i know people who spent plenty of money on games that they spent hundreds of hours on once u play the games for a while u going to eventually pay money, plenty of games were making heavy profit for cosmetic stuff. you can always find time to play the video games also when i did played for hours most people did grind but then you also forget no one grinded the whole 10 hours we did other stuff as well not just grind

you may consider it a punishment but then again once someone plays they used to it, the reason mmo fail now because the lack of promotion "wildstar" i never even heard of that game in my life plus its tons of mmo's now also the population of people of mmo's are lower other then WOW and a few other mmo's.

this is not true that a large body of players are actually playing i played many games i played in guilds you will see a guild many members and over a month and the half they quit the game due because its either pay to win or too simple..

your basically saying you have to make a game pay to win in order for it to be decent and skip all the grinding smh

@papermario: I'm not saying you have to make an MMO pay to win to make it profitable. I actually don't know how you came to that conclusion.

Here's the thing. History has shown those MMOs that focus on a hard grind are no longer popular. We do know that back in the "hayday" of MMOs, the audience was much smaller and games could be supported by much fewer players. This means you could build a more "hardcore" experience and still be successful. As game development and maintenance costs increased, MMOs needed to maintain a larger player base to stay profitable. Remember, nobody is in this business to break even.

MMOs have almost always been niche. World of Warcraft broke that mold, but that's pretty much the only one that has. You'll find that many of the players of Final Fantasy 14 A Realm Reborn and Guild Wars 2 (the #2 and #3 MMOs behind WoW) are made up of a lot of former WoW players. Generally if you like MMOs, you stick to MMOs. The audience for them is large enough to sustain some big ones, but not large enough to sustain a lot of little smaller MMOs with a more niche focus.

As for where they make their money, a lot of F2P MMOs with cash shops start out with a boom then trickle to nothing shortly after launch. Most game studios don't collected all of their revenue and save it for when they aren't making money. They are owned by larger companies who take the initial profit to pay off the R&D costs they invested into the game and then profit beyond that. A successful F2P game needs to have a more consistent revenue stream to stay active and get new content developed. Traditional subscription based MMOs just need to keep the subscriber count high enough to make more money than it costs to run the game with the initial purchase of the game going to the R&D costs of the game's development.

That's just how it works out. As to why people don't play MMOs for long after launch varies from game to game. Guild Wars 2 was able to retain an audience, but most MMOs are unable to sway people to quit their existing MMO to play it. World of Warcraft and FF14 AAR have the market cornered for the more traditional "theme park" MMOs. It's really hard to drag people away from those games for long enough time to establish a community in a new MMO. New games have to somehow stand out from them while still appealing to the same audience. It's difficult and so far only Final Fantasy 14 has managed to do that, partly because Square Enix kept reinvesting into it rather than letting it die. Most MMOs don't have the fortune of a parent company willing to reinvest into a failed product.

It it true that most new MMOs that come out lack the appeal for MMO gamers. This is usually because creating the content that caters to the MMO gamers also requires a lot of development time. Developers take months and years to develop content that experienced gamers blow through in a few weeks at most. This leaves them going back to much larger MMOs like WoW and FF14. It's hard to compete.

This is why I'm saying the traditional MMO is basically dead. If you liked WoW or WoW-like MMOs, then WoW is still around and getting routine content updates. You also have Final Fantasy 14. Trying to directly compete against these games is pointless. They are better polished, have established communities, and have far more content than your new MMO is going to have. Trying to make a deeper, more "hardcore" experience that appeals to a small subset of the already small-ish MMO community is not going to net you enough sales or consistent revenue to keep the game going for long. No publisher bothers to invest in those kind of MMOs because there is just no money to be made there.

We're seeing some crowdfunded MMOs try to bring back the more "sandbox" and PvP focused MMOs with games like Camelot Unchained and Crowfall. These games stand apart from WoW and Final Fantasy because they take a completely new direction.

However, most of the fun of an MMO comes from persistent character development, loot, and smaller scale co-op. Games like The Division and Destiny have been able to achieve a level of these kind of features without the traditional MMO interface. I predict we'll see more co-op focused RPGs in the future that provide the same level of persistent character development, loot, and co-op encounters that a traditional MMO does all while avoiding the pitfalls of traditional MMO game design.

Neither one of those games is actually a 'modern' MMO. WoW is styled in the old style of EQ, its just not grindy.

The leveling system is a hold over from the past where these games were trying to duplicate PnP RPGs because they didnt have computers that could put the statistical info in the background. The MMO genre stagnates because developers wont let go of that formula. Combined with the fact that these old style games are really using turn-based style combat thats just sped up instead of real action orientation.

A modern MMO IMO would have action combat and be more about the acquisition of powers rather than gear. It would also have player created content and an an actual environment where you can interact with everything. think a hybrid of Neverwinter Nights, Breath of Wind, Ark and inFamous or something like that.

A few have tried and got certain aspects of it down but non have put the whole formula together. Part of the issue is the MMO community is really divided between PvErs and PvPers. The PvE peeps want the content to be great like WoW raids. The PvPers want old school Ultima or Shadowbane.

I think a big help would be if the devs just admitted these two groups need seperate games and then made the best of that particular type of game, rather than trying to cater to both sides in one game.

They made MMOs more casual to rake in that money. Instead of getting into adventures with potential friends that required multiple people, you can now do everything yourself. And then they also try to make group efforts have rewards, so groups of people still play. Basically, they are just trying to appeal to every single person out there for maximum profit.

While modern mmos are definately mechanically superior and have much more quality of life than the mmos of old.

They are missing that special something. It doesnt feel like you are exploring a world anymore, partially due to how they funnel you through content nowadays. But part of the reason is also the democraticiation of knowledge. Everybody knows everything nowadays, the explorative aspect is gone, and this is in no way due to how mmorpgs are designed, but rather the advancement of technology.

Really think people are too nostaligic by this.. I too have played ones like EQ back in the day and have fond memories of it.. But if you seriously think WoW now is worse than the original EQ.. Oh boy.. EQ1 the majority of the time was 100% group based with only a few solo classes.. And the content consisted of you basically grinding mobs in high traffic areas for hours.. Camping for drops such as for epic class quests took literally upwards of people for 8 hours to days.. Where basically all they did was wait for the mob, if a Place holder spawned.. You killed it.. Rinse and repeat.. Not to mention the majority of classes you played (especially melee classes) consisted of you auto attacking the entire time with maybe a kick or a taunt pressed every 10 seconds or longer..

Quests as we know now are basically non existent in the current format and story was incredibly barebones to how we perceive it now.. Especially if you are bitching about over poweredness.. In games like Everquest there were very few items that were bound and had level requirements.. Meaning you would constantly see low levels run by with gear that was worth well over 100k plat..

@sSubZerOo: I agree to a degree, but I can see the argument from both sides really.

The thing that I liked about MMOs was that they required group cooperation and the communities made the games what they were. What WoW did by making MMOs solo friendly was a quality of life improvement sure (anyone that remembers camping for hours in line for a spawn feels me) but on the down side it also brought more douchebaggery since solo players can basically act like asshats and ruin other people's experience by just being dicks and ninjaing loot etc.

In the old style community, being forced to group meant you were also forced to know people and not act stupid or word would get around and people would black ball you. With a harsh level grind, it was actually not worth it to ruin your character. In WoW you can do stupid stuff and level back to cap in a week at best with a new character or account.

This is why I think a 'new' MMO would need to be like Ark so the community could police itself. In Ark if you do stupid stuff on a pvp server you basically get shackled and put in a cage forever.

This is why I think a modern MMO would need to ditch the visible stats formula. Instead of being able to min/max and read spreadsheets, all the stats should be hidden and the game should use physical/visual ques. A magic sword shouldnt just be purple in your inventory screen and you know its DPS. You know its magic because it glows blue when orcs are near and you can cut a stone in half with it without it breaking like a normal sword does when you hit a stone.

Instead of seeing exact stats, a strong character would get muscular. A weak character would struggle and move slowly when carrying a lot of weight. Thats the kind of stuff I want to see in a 'new' MMO.

Instead of the themepark design, characters should be vested in the game and actually be able to become the raid bosses themselves, their dungeon full of minions they stocked in it. The acquisition of gear wouldnt be your motivation it would be the acquisition of power.

Events in the world could then be dynamic and could continually be added. The big dragon isnt a farmable boss, he's a one time thing that makes you famous for killing him. That sort of thing. you had to be there and be part of the experience. Thats what actually is missing in MMOs. The actual RPG part.

seem like in order to make these games profitable they most of the times make it pay to win... the population on mmorpg are pretty low to me in my opinion...

the grindy days are no longer popular because that's the direction devs put it in people had no problem the audience were big at my time in the haydays, people were walking around with cash stuff all over the place people were spending money for cosmetic stuff so i know for sure they was making a decent amount the more people come the more cash stuff people have gotten.... You have games like FF and 2 other games i guess that decent im not saying its not 1 decent mmo i never said all mmo new style games suck..

i personally think it becomes 100 % greed and they just want more and more and more that's how all things works to me it wasn't nothing wrong with old mmo's i remember games were shutting down even tho it was soo many players involve some players have left because of the greedy updates had changed everything

FF is decent but that like 1 decent game and EQ is okay but as i play the other ones its kinda like pointless...

FF has only a few million based players active but if you think about it.. its not much considering the era that everyone familiar with mmorpg even kids ... i remember when i was younger not every household didnt even have PCs or internet or didnt care too much about mmorpg

WOW isn't the only mmo that was decent it just had more of a machine behind the game to make it much more popular then the others games i played plenty of mmo that were decent i may have forgotten the names because i played alittle bit everything but for the most part the new style is more of a pay to win in a lot of cases....

but at the end of the day the older mmo were just more better to play in my opinion not saying the games are better then FF but im saying as a whole

i betcha that if they would of just made it old style with a few changes things would be okay but what happens is greed gets to them and they start making changes that people do not like and they leave the game then start losing money.. that's what happen to most of the old games i played

Don't really care about mmo's but i do like games similar to PSO/GW1. They're so rare and when there's one, its most certainly trash.

It takes much longer than a week.. And the community you are talking about are with guilds.. The game is what you make of it..

I have a hard time trying to decide what I prefer. I played WoW from 2006-now, although the last five years have been on/off (mostly off). I loved WoW during vanilla and the first two expansions. The amount of work put in was enjoyable. Guild progression was genuinely enjoyable. However, as my game time has dropped, I found fun in the newer WoW and other MMO's. I don't have to be on regularly to feel like I am still making progress/involved. Its a tough balance for developers to make. They understand that their is the hardcore community that loves that classic grind. Then they also have to offer something for the newer MMO players that may be jumping between multiple games during any given week/have less time to work with. WoW kind of sidesteps that by just offering a wide variety of things to do (Mythic dungeons, raids, pvp, arena, pet battles, achievement grinders, etc.). Not one area provides the same feeling classic WoW/MMO's did, but the whole experience is still fun.

although games were grindy i never had a hard time switch game from game because although grindy there were other ways to do things also you do not have to spend so much time grinding if you know exactly what your doing i didnt understand mmo's as a kid really so i would grind but once i got the understanding i notice you can grind and do other things as well to get items and trade.

Yes some games are fun but developers made this direction to feel like "balance" is difficult MMO's were doing fine developers just decided to make a change to get even more money. yes some games had failed not everything was perfect but even now that goes on

Wow isn't the same game as it was before but im not just comparing Wow to the newer games