Gaming Star Wars: The Old MMO Problem

http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/pc/2012/08/01/star-wars-the-old-mmo-problem/1

 

This is a really good article and reiterates everything I've been saying for the past ten years about MMOGS. I'm glad you finally caught on.

 

Star Wars Galaxies was the best for me. Sandbox design, player-led cities, do what you like, when you like, how you like. The economy was totally player-driven; there was roleplaying, combat in non-combat areas, raids on cities, political overthrows, the lot.

I miss it.

 

I've heard SWTOR is actually a passable single player game, so I may have a look at it now. What put me off it, and why I never picked it up, wasn't the game itself but the price tag. To get it on Origin it was a hell of a lot for a very long time, with a subscription on top of that, just can't see that happening. Besides when you know the destiny of an MMO is to go F2P, why ever buy it? Saved myself the moolah and hope to enjoy the game.

As to future MMOs, well my hopes lie with Planetside 2. I think the days of the fetch-quest based online crack house are done, the future is (as the past was) masses of players all piled onto the biggest possible server shooting each others faces off.

 

18 months and it dies - they`ll do what they did with earth and beyond

 

world of warcraft has held players in mmos for the best part of 9 years now, Every mmo that comes out is hailed as the next wow killer by the general world gamers and they all return to wow a few months later slating the game that they were playing.

Blizzard created the best mmo in a long time when world of warcraft was released 9 years later theres still very few mmos that have tried something different than what world of warcraft did 9 years ago. Thats the critical problem people want something different to world of warcraft not the same game in space or in a different universe.

Content is king for an mmo and most recent released mmos have lacked it in a big way, whilst blizzard has a 9 years worth of content and a highly active community on most servers.

Guild wars 2 will be the next thing stated as the next greated mmo on the planet ect ect 12 months later it will be down to 200-300k players and people will be readying themselves for the next one.

The never ending cycle great for publishers not so great for us, Personally i wont be buying another mmo game ive done my time in them and they just dont hold my intrest anymore.

 

SWG (and the original EverQuest) were true MMO's but we have never seen games like that again. WoW came along with it's noobtastic approach to everything, got 10+ million players, and so every MMO ever since then has followed their design and completely ignored all the other possibilities.

To me the key to these games is not so much trapping the players, but providing addictive grinds. The grinds are essential because it's cheap and easy copy and past content. You can TRY to minimise the grinding and provide really good hand crafted content, (like SWTOR), but problem with that is that people have a great time and enjoy it but then complete it all in a month or two. In a subscription based game, that's a major problem. To keep people playing for many months or even years, then there needs to be serious grind content, and yet while managing to somehow entertain too. As much as some of us hate various things about WoW, you gotta admit... their design people are godlike geniuses. It has just the right amount of grind that they can keep people playing forever, but it's got just enough carrot in there that people don't get fed up of it. Add that to low system requirements and steady build up of content over years and it's no mystery why it was such a massive success.

The designs of SWTOR (and Rift etc..) is pretty baffling to me. I can only assume that as expensive as they are to make, they must still somehow make a profit. It might seem like a failure but if more than a million people bought it and then paid a subscription cost for several months, then perhaps that is enough to at least recoup the costs and then make some profit. Either that, or these companies must just be deluded morons.

Imo the key to the future of the genre, is for people to pay far more attention to Eve. From what I can gather, it's the ONLY mmo to have ever grown constantly. All the others have either flopped and burned big time, or are WoW, which grew and peaked but has declined a bit in the last year or so. Eve started small and grew and grew and just keeps growing. Their design is brilliant because it's grind based so keeps people playing for years, but it has more social interaction and more depth to it than just providing a million "Kill 10 Wolves" quests. I think future MMORPG's need to be clever and try to mirror that. They need some traditional grind but with some PVP and sandbox elements too. Guild Wars 2 seems like an ok attempt, but I'm not convinced their World vs World was a good enough attempt to really pull it off.

 

It looked good when it came out, but i didn't buy it. Now i can play for freee!!!!

 

Well I don't know about other MMOs but the only one I have tried is WoW, and the graphics were horrible. That and the fact that I was 5 minutes in and I already had to kill 10 of something then go kill another 10: extremely boring to me anyway

 

That was quite a wall of text, but a very well written one, and I really quite enjoyed it.

Once-upon-a-time I dabbled in WoW, but when Lazaroth and his wonderful set of Discord mods went, so did I. There were (and probably still are) so many things that the game (and other games) implements, but doesn't utilise and there were a lot of 3rd party add-ons that took advantage of this in greater or lesser extents.

Left without a convenient way to access these behind the scenes goings on (.lua in WoW?) as a non-programmer, I first stopped enjoying and then gave up the game, it just wasn't fun any more. I had gone as far as I could without leaving a guild that I socially enjoyed (we were a fairly mad bunch) to one that required a set number of hours per week and for any serious raids a time-table booked up a month in advance! But the infinite possibilities in customisation and tweaking kept me enthralled, till they to faded and disappeared.

 

Perhaps the problem is the fundamental design flaw with this type of game...

They're boring.

 

World of Warcraft is basically world war one for a generation of nerds. A generation lost, or forever twisted, by something much bigger and more horrible than they could have expected. The game remains without any shadow of a doubt the single most cynical exercise ever attempted in games development. Addictive, frustrating, entirely pointless, endlessly trying to get you to chase that next level, that next quest, that next whatever it is. On and on. Incrementally increasing stats that don't matter in a world full of millions of people who are themselves incrementally increasing their stats that don't matter.

The gamers that WoW claimed are a broken, scarred breed. They don't see it, bless them they really don't, but you only have to talk to a hardcore WoW fan for a short amount of time to see the mess it's made of them. Husks. Angry, compulsive, hopelessly addicted, joyless shells of gamers. I know guys who have 'played' that game for thousands of hours. Like machines. Like the battery pods from the Matrix. It's horrifying, like some sort of Kafka-esque nightmare.

With any luck we will never see WoW's like again.

 

They stated quite clearly before launch that their subscription model would come with a 'twist'. We all agonized over it on the swtor forum as to what that twist would be. 7 months from launch we now see.

EA aren't stupid. They had LotR and Warhammer to go on (at least). They knew subscription based mmos were dieing and that p2p games were flourishing. Look at the number of them and look at the quantity a single company puts out. It works. But they also knew subbers would quit..so what to do?

They have made TOR both a sub and a free game in 1 single move. Perhaps it will work, I don't know. If it does they will have a healthy income from the core players subbing, and then the freeloaders buying stuff in the cash-shop. Only time will tell.

It is too early to write the game off simply because of this announcement. As a subber I am dismayed at this choice, but that does not mean it won't work. It is a gamble, a frikkin expensive gamble, but one that 'could' pay off.

 

Not a WoW fanboy then

 

So basically the high-score table in any game?

 

Well written if a bit dreary. Still Well written. Seems like you're subtly comparing WOW to alcoholism.

 

No. Because a high score table is a public display of skill. Nobody will ever see your stats in WoW and nobody will ever care.

 

Ah man, I remember all of that and even though it is all true, my god I do remember it fondly!

The original Warlock Epic Mount quest was ridiculous, but it was such an achievement I smiled for a week.

 

I think the problem is that the market for that type of MMO is not big enough for multiple big players.
All the people that enjoy the WoW mode with quests and bosses are playing WoW.
All the people that got bored of that type of game left, and its these people that try new MMO's, realize its pretty much the same as WoW, and leave again.
I personally am looking forward to a new MMO called The Repopulation, it seems pretty damn good with nations(super guilds) fighting eachother, and building your own cities. The crafting is better than anything since SWG and the skills and missions/engagements look brilliant.
It is made on the same engine as SWTOR, be it a much improved version, SWTOR was made with an early heavily customised version of the Hero Engine. The Repopulation is being made on one with 3 more years of improvements.

So yeah check that out if you want to get excited about a new MMO that is truely different to anything else coming out in the next year.