A REALLY good article that SO sums up my feelings about the state of MMOs in particular.

http://kotaku.com/5908402/its-time-to-take-these-old-mmo-games-out-back-and-shoot-them

(YIKES! I had linked the wrong article. lol. Ok THIS is the REAL one. Gomen. Thanks TwoThreeFour.^^)

"Veteran designer Warren Spector, whose credits include Deus Ex and System Shock, puts it best when he said in this 2007 interview "I'm one of those people who doesn't find anything interesting at all in leveling up, finding a +3 sword or paper-dolling a character with a purple cloak. That doesn't appeal to me in any way as a human being. Put that all together and the play experience of MMOs is on par with roleplaying back in ‘87."  (OMG YES A 1000 TIMES YES!)

From cooldowns to instances to collecting ten of anything, most MMOs were, and still are, chores dressed up in the livery of a fictional universe. Aside from the basics of exploration and the lure of collecting loot and levelling up, there's been only one thing keeping people playing them, and stopping them from realising there's little difference between the banality of their daily grind to that of, say, a Farmville player."

Go and read the rest in the link. ^^

mawkishly digestible neoteny

Have to agree with the writer, it is nice that we have plenty of MMOs to choose from but do they all need to have pretty much the same mechanics in different graphical style and setting? Not counting the few innovative ones that take their own path, like EVE or GW2. This is of course a topic that has been discussed to death but it is still, sadly, relevant.

Good read, bit to focused strictly on TOR, but it gets the point across.

good article about star wars i must say :)

I think you may have linked to wrong article.

Think http://kotaku.com/5908402/its-time-to-take-these-old-mmo-games-out-back-and-shoot-them is what you wanted to link to, I hope? And not http://kotaku.com/5810509/the-more-they-keep-telling-me-star-wars-the-old-republic-isnt-like-world-of-warcraft-the-less-i-want-to-play.

Originally posted by TwoThreeFour

I think you may have linked to wrong article.

 

Think http://kotaku.com/5908402/its-time-to-take-these-old-mmo-games-out-back-and-shoot-them is what you wanted to link to, I hope? And not http://kotaku.com/5810509/the-more-they-keep-telling-me-star-wars-the-old-republic-isnt-like-world-of-warcraft-the-less-i-want-to-play.

Oopsy daisy! You are right. Thanks, I corrected the link.

Playing MMOs has made me miss PnP games.

Article kinda lost all credibility when it stated that TERA offers a radical departure from WoW's tired old formula.

I kinda agree with that article, its the same thing I been saying, people are just getting tired of the same boring wow formula being used in all games and want some innovation, but no dev really wants to step up to the plate.

Originally posted by SuperXero89

Article kinda lost all credibility when it stated that TERA offers a radical departure from WoW's tired old formula.

I do agree with the general point of the article but yeah the writer lost his credibility with that especially when the gripes he mentioed about mmo's where grinding quests and instances for better gear and levels. 

Kind of 50-50 on that article.  But this quote from it sums up a bit of my feelings of the staleness of MMORPG gaming for years now.

"This insistence on using established MMO tropes rather than attempting genuine innovation in the genre has long amazed me. It's as though publishers and developers looked at World of Warcraft's subscriber base and thought, wow, that game had 10-15 million players, we should get in on that action."

This was exactly the point of concern some forward looking MMORPG players had back in 2004, when it was becoming apparent how WoW was going to dominate the genre.  The fear that other developers will be shocked and amazed at the WoW Juggernaught, and will slavishly mimic its traits to no end in an effort to get a piece of that WoW Pie.  Back then though, we mocked them as being paranoid naysayers.  Well, as it turns out and looking at how MMORPGs are now, they were completely right.

Also, the use of Warren Spector for his quote on MMORPG in general needs to be taken with a grain of salt.  He has a list of great accomplishments as a game designer, and PC gamers from the 1990s will likely remember him from those days.  But he has his roots in RPGs, not necessarily MMORPGs, which are quite a bit different in execution.  But, he does have a point in how progression has been done with the genre.

Originally posted by dubyahite
"To be clear: I've always hated MMO games. "

This disclaimer is in every damn Kotaku article about MMOs that I read. They are openly hostile to MMOs in general and their writers don't play them.

This article also states that the mmo genre is dying and that soon noone will make MMOs any more.


I find it hard to take them seriously on any topic related to MMOs. They simply have no credibility on the subject am frequently don't know what the f they are talking about.

Some will say that their outside perspective on the genre is valuable, but I disagree. They dont know what they are talking about and they are very clearly biased.

The difference is, he hates MMOs for a reason, and he is very clear about his reasons! You can still disagree with that, but just brushing it off as mindless hate is just absurd.

A genre can just as well die and still have many customers, because it is dying as a game idea, as an art, as creativity. Look, no single entertainment genre has been SO conservative and stuck in an old paradigm as the MMO genre! Where all other types of games advanced, MMOs still stick to age old concept. And the basic concepts of MMOs are indeed very, VERY primitive. See the wonderful Warren Spector quote in my sig.

Ultima Online and SWG had laid great foundations what MMOs COULD have been. But today, all MMos are about fast levelling through pseudo-stories which do not matter at all, and endgame rubbish like dailies, arena pvp and hardmode dungeons. It is WAY too much revolving about some loot or rewards! I said it many times, one of the best times I had in a MMO was City of Heroes, because it had NO loot at all! These are all McDonalds type of MMOs.

Author of the article misunderstands the principles of the genre. There were always single player games, massive multiplayer ,and multiplayer games somewhere in between. Sure you can say that MMORPG must be more single player or more multiplayer, but this will just make make a new genre, and it doesn't mean there's a need  to remove existing one. It's like saying "I've been playing Tetris for 20 years (was made in 20th century!!!!) and it's time for changes ! I want social interaction ! I want shooting !", fine, move to different genre and have all those thing, but tetris should stay tetris.

It's not like, MMORPG doesn't need to improve. Sure, there's always room for improvements, but massive multiplayer online is a very wide spectrum of games, heck, even Zynga games can be called MMO, and that's fine, there's room for many different games. If one game is done bad, it doesn't mean that genre is doomed!!11 and must change !!11 it simple mean that the game is done bad, and usually mixing two different principles are to blame.

this guy sounds like a fruitcake. Tera is as generic of an asian grinder as generic can be. just has prettier graphics than most. "radical departures" lmfao. this idiot has no idea wtf hes on about. anyone who takes what he whines about serious, is a fool too.

Compared to other genres mmorpgs are still in their infancy.

To expect a radical depature of core mechanics because you played a mmo like a addict is imo idiotic.

The basic structure of mmos will never change.

Look at games like Guild wars 2 or Tera what makes them so different from Everquest and WoW?

Because Guild wars 2 has a dodge button? Am I not still clicking on a mob with my mouse and activating skills off an action bar? Whats so different in TERA manual aiming? What is manual aiming? Putting my mouse cursor over an enemy and clicking abilities that are on my action bar... the same shit i've been doing for 15 years.

Both tera and gw2 offer action bar combat, questing, character progression and some type of repetitive endgame  mechanic to keep the player base interested. 

Originally posted by Elikal

The difference is, he hates MMOs for a reason, and he is very clear about his reasons! You can still disagree with that, but just brushing it off as mindless hate is just absurd.

Is well-reasoned hate really any better?  Let's try that out as a hate crime defense, your honor.

Originally posted by Z3R01

Compared to other genres mmorpgs are still in their infancy.

To expect a radical depature of core mechanics because you played a mmo like a addict is imo idiotic.

The basic structure of mmos will never change.

Look at games like Guild wars 2 or Tera what makes them so different from Everquest and WoW?

Because Guild wars 2 has a dodge button? Am I not still clicking on a mob with my mouse and activating skills off an action bar? Whats so different in TERA manual aiming? What is manual aiming? Putting my mouse cursor over an enemy and clicking abilities that are on my action bar... the same shit i've been doing for 15 years.

Both tera and gw2 offer action bar combat, questing, character progression and some type of repetitive endgame  mechanic to keep the player base interested. 

I have to disagree on the bit about GW2. It does not really offer any sort of endgame in traditional sense, the whole concept of endgame does not exist in GW2, also character progression plays far smaller role than in more traditional games. While mechanics are still your MMO standards, the concepts behind the game have been rethought to offer less progression based experience. I hope this works out for them as the whole gear/levelling thing became stale 8 years ago.