Future MMO's: Lessons learned from Wildstar and ESO

[Khorm]

Hey guys. Just creating this thread so we can have a discussion on lessons learnt from the two most recent AAA MMO's and what future MMO's need to do to add to the good things they've done and what they need to avoid. I'll post mine later so as to not drive the thread in any one way.

[MetroStratics]

Frankly?
Lesson learned: Don't bother trying to be WoW.
Every MMO out there tries way too hard to do what WoW does.

Archage is the only one that seems like a fresh take on the genre to me.
You will NEVER do raiding and pve content better then wow.
Stop trying companies! Just focus on something else.

[Summer]

Wildstar was like taking all the bad things in wow, just a grind of "kill 20 of this". Nothing there to take on except maybe the housing, to my surprise was very entertained by putting up purple mushrooms and the like in my cute little house.

ESO I felt wasn't bad at all. Sure there's no endgame really, just speedruns but the actual leveling was fun, I liked the dungeons and so on. Some of the good things here are:
* the megaserver, feels never dead
* freedom in choosing talents and abilities from various trees (must be a menace to balance though and for more serious endgame probs converges into a few viable choices)
* the immersion; because of the pov and the better graphics it feels a lot more real
* world events and rares, like them a lot - but this is becoming staple now anyways

The things I didn't care for so much in ESO were how hard some profs were to level and of course, trials being speedruns just doesn't sit well with what I want from the endgame raiding.

[Fencers]

Lesson learned: Sub fees, stop already.


Personally speaking: I am just not that interested in Action Combat in the context of long term MMOs. I find it exhausting and un-fulfilling long term design.

Action Combat is fine in action orientated games (God of War, Revengence, etc) or in games that are meant to be played lightly (Neverwinter, Vindictus). But I don't want to bounce and roll around the battlefield dodging and lining up headshots for every rabbit I encounter in the game. Nor do I want to play a mathematically shallow game for years on end.

[PizzaSHARK]

There's kind of already a thread on this. It's on the front page and has like 27 pages. Did we really need another thread on the same subject?

[Graeham]

Lesson learned: Sub fees, stop already.

There's plenty of MMO players out there unwilling to pay a monthly subscription. There are, however, plenty of players willing to pay a monthly subscription. FFXIV has embraced a subscription model as is doing very well for itself with frequent and consistent content updates. Personally I'm very wary of the B2P and F2P model simply because it usually comes with a lot of baggage that I'm not very fond of such as awesome items being temporarily available for real life money and then never seen again. Or those awful boxes that have a chance to reward a sought after item but usually just offer junk instead.

[Maconi]

FFXIV is doing fine and going strong. It's honestly just another traditional hotkey MMORPG. I think what these other games lack (for the most part) is character. WildStar tried to be so over the top that it ended up feeling like the entire game was one big joke and was hard to take seriously. ESO just felt disjointed and as if it wanted to rest on its previous laurels (see SWTOR).

My only hope for the future of MMORPGs is EQ: Next. Although the videos that came out for it this year didn't look very promising. Black Desert looks nice but I have a feeling it's going to just end up as another average Korean grinder (see Tera/Vindictus).

[Graeham]

I gave Wildstar and ESO a thorough chance. In Wildstar's case I absolutely loved exploring the game world and uncovering the mystery behind the Eldan. Yet the artificial gate blocking access to raiding and the lack of much to do during the elder game just made me lose interest. I do think the game's housing system is absolutely brilliant though.

As for ESO? I was really looking forward to being able to explore Tamriel yet the existence of factions for the sake of PvP just really killed my enthusiasm. I was really hoping that we'd get to see the Aldmeri Dominion be a formidable and pragmatic force similar to the blood elves of WoW. Instead the faction was led by an airy-fairy human-with-long-ears and all the intriguing Altmer that actually acted like Altmer were painted as villains and killed off.

My avatar might have given it away already but I'm a huge fan of gritty and pragmatic elves. It's a shame that ESO failed to deliver in that regard.

[Veluren]

Wildstar wanted to be Vanilla WoW in the worst way possible

There's a reason BC onward had no attunements, they weren't fun, they weren't skill based, there was just wasted time and luck that your raid group would consider you worthy enough to run you through said attunement content.

Confusing "Hardcore" with "Tedious" is the same issue that Vanilla had, and it's the main thing I say to silence people who are longing for the days of Vanilla wow, and too many MMOs continue to make that exact same mistake.

[Graeham]

Lessons learned:

Make super-casual games with huge moneygrubbing item-shops. Don't try to innovate because all the casual gamers will complain it's not like WoW.

The majority of people interested in MMO's don't care for their experience to be a tedious affair. A lot of people already have to deal with a lot of pressure in the real world and don't necessarily want to have to break through a number of artificial gates simply to get the chance to explore the content that they want to see first hand.

[Torais]

I think the big one for Wildstar would be "those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it".

There is a reason why 40 man raids failed. There is a reason why long-winded attunement quests failed. There is a reason why giving the giant middle finger to the PvP population failed. The beta test for WS was one of the worst I have been a part of, with vanilla WoW developers zealously sticking to vanilla WoW dogmas, trying to pretend the last ten years of MMO development and progress has never happened.

WS did have its own charm but that only appeals for so long. Once you get to the core, you see its a tight ball of stubborn ideals that were proven to be unpopular nearly a decade ago with the attempt to force them down your throat. The beta process was rife with this with no discussion whatsoever being brokered on raid/Warplot game sizes.

I am still glad I got a chance to be a part of the beta. WS has some nice ideas but the developers are their own worst enemy. Seeing where the game was going, I cancelled my pre-order and never looked back. Considering the launch and following months go pretty much like I expected, I am rather glad I did.

[Khorm]

Lessons learned:

Make super-casual games with huge moneygrubbing item-shops. Don't try to innovate because all the casual gamers will complain it's not like WoW.

Can you expand on these innovations?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Stop trying to be the "WoW killer," "the greatest thing since WoW," or "the next evolution in MMORPGs."

The age, of classical MMORPGs of the likes of WAR, WoW, EQ, UO, and FFXI is over. Stop trying to act like you are making some grand revitalization of the genre that everyone is going to love because it's nostalgic and that you should be too because it incoo-rorates mehanics from a bunch of old games you were too ignorant to care about. WoW was, and still is, the last of it's kind. WoW has been running for an establised 25 years, and is firmly entrenched into a position wherw no other wannabe MMO king will ever have. It's attained 12 million simultaneous players; at one point had over 100 million different, unique people at one time or another subscribe to the game; it's identified itself as the supreme MMORPG benchmark to be compared to (and always will); and it will still be running off of $15 subscriptions 10, 15 years from now when all it's would-be clones ha long since died and been forgotten.

WoW may still be running, and people may certainly pay $15 a month to enjoy it, but that doesn't change the facts: the classical age of MMORPGs, is over. Deal with it.

Rather than just taking a big franchise or company name, making a sterotypical MMORPG with said name plastered all over, paying review sites like IGN to give you biased reviews and really nice lines to take out of context and plaster all over yojur mass media advertising campaign ("The real WoW killer in the making! A true master piece to echo through the ages!") and demanding a $15 a month subscription fee because supposedly your game is so amazingly high quality it needs it; only for it to get a ton of uneducated kids to buy, burn through your weak and thin content and leave it all behind while you figure out who your going to lay off next: how about making something actually different for a change? Don't pretend to be a manifestation of everything that supposedly made vanilla WoW great like attunments and such, change a few things here and there and herald yourslef as the new WoW. Why? Because the truth of the matter is, however shocking it may be; your not. Don't try to pretend your a single player action RPG marketed to the masses turned. multiplayer action RPG marketed to the same audience with all the same mechanics. Why? Becaue your not.

Stop listening to all this "the next big thing for MMORPGs" crap, and start looking ahead at real evolutions, like the Repopulation, Gloria Victis, and others.

[Edge-]

Make super-casual games with huge moneygrubbing item-shops. Don't try to innovate because all the casual gamers will complain it's not like WoW.

Considering neither game did any significant innovation, especially WildStar...yeah, not sure what you're trying to say.

Yes, congratulations. So now you're going to get 'Call of Duty'-style MMOs with yearly expansions and basically more of the same shallow solo content as last year with minor improvements to the game.

I can't think of any MMO's outside of maybe EQ1/2 that release yearly paid expansions. Hell, most F2P MMO's release free expansions anyways (Rift, Tera, Aion, STO etc.) or forego the expansion route altogether (DCUO, TSW, GW2 so far).

As for putting in a bunch of solo content...if that's what people are playing, why not give them more? You can put all the raid content in the world in a MMO, but if nobody wants to raid they're going to complain about a lack of content and leave.

That's kinda the whole thing with businesses providing a service, you're supposed to cater to the desires of your customers.

We can wave innovation, immersion and sandbox gameplay goodbye in the MMO genre.

Except we have a game like ArcheAge with heavy sandbox elements right on the horizon, and games that are more sandbox oriented like EQ Landmark, EQN, Bless, Black Desert, and others in development now.

Sandboxes have been a niche since the advent of theme park MMO's, I don't see why that's inherently "bad", though more diversity in MMO"s is always a good thing.

As for innovation...MMO's haven't bothered trying to innovate much in the past decade regardless. So it's still nothing changing on that front.

I guess the movie Idiocracy was a much more relevant social critique than people thought.

Yup, moving to extremes helps your argument : 3

[PizzaSHARK]

FFXIV is doing fine and going strong. It's honestly just another traditional hotkey MMORPG. I think what these other games lack (for the most part) is character. WildStar tried to be so over the top that it ended up feeling like the entire game was one big joke and was hard to take seriously. ESO just felt disjointed and as if it wanted to rest on its previous laurels (see SWTOR).

My only hope for the future of MMORPGs is EQ: Next. Although the videos that came out for it this year didn't look very promising. Black Desert looks nice but I have a feeling it's going to just end up as another average Korean grinder (see Tera/Vindictus).

I think the next "big thing" in MMORPGs is going to be something along the lines of the way Neverwinter Nights persistent-world servers functioned. I've been playing Divinity Original Sin, and the one thought that's almost constantly going through my head is "man, wouldn't it be fucking awesome if this was a persistent world game and none of my party members were robots?"

If you could implement some Minecraft-like elements into that... well, you're gonna have a cash cow on your hands.

[mistahwilshire]

Stop making clunky games that feel bad to play.

[Graeham]

Yes, congratulations. So now you're going to get 'Call of Duty'-style MMOs with yearly expansions and basically more of the same shallow solo content as last year with minor improvements to the game. That is what the market is heading towards. We can wave innovation, immersion and sandbox gameplay goodbye in the MMO genre. I guess the movie Idiocracy was a much more relevant social critique than people thought.

I'd appreciate more depth in MMO's. In my case I just enjoy exploring a detailed and immersive game world with interesting lore and playable races that appeal to me. I'm more likely to stick around if there's a strong community of role-players and I'm not afraid to indulge in the PvE/PvP aspects of an MMO either provided the mechanics are enjoyable and polished.

[Edge-]

The average MMO gamer of today plays in sessions of 15 to 30 minutes a day, solo.

In Wildstar. You can't really take that number and use it for other games, especially given the fact that WildStars population is still very much in flux which leads to erratic results in terms of average playtime. MMO's with more solidified communities no doubt have much higher average play sessions.

[taliey]

Admit it, Blizzard spoiled us with World of Warcraft.

No other game can out World of Warcraft, World of Warcraft.

All games that try to emulate or surpass World of Warcraft will be forever subjected to the dilemma of the successor (or as I like to say, Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs).

In this day and age of MMOs, any game that will come up will always be in the shadow of World of Warcraft. Don't expect the trajectory to change any time soon (barring Blizzard royally screws up BIG TIME).

[PizzaSHARK]

Stop making clunky games that feel bad to play.

"Having to mash 1 on cooldown doesn't feel very skillful or different from WoW."

"SHUT UP CASUAL ITS VERY SKILLFUL DID YOU SEE THE TELEGRAPHS IF YOU DONT LIKE IT FUCKING LEAVE CASUAL"

So I did! And so did most other people, apparently.