Vanilla Was Created in The Golden Age of Creativity

[Polygons]

We weren't overstimulated from social media, cell phones, and the internet back then so the majority of people actually had patience, which could be a big factor.

[Kaleredar]

I don't focus on specific titles. Just the average consensus of the overall market. how long did it take to visualize a tree or a statue in a ruin in the first polygon era compared to a tree or statue with state of the art graphics? To design all elements with this high level of detail costs a lot more resources which must be cutted down on another side.

2004 was not the "first polygon era."

Moreover, the people that work on the story of a game are by and far NOT the modelers or texture artists. Nor are they the programmers, the marketing team, the visual development team, HR, or any of those guys.

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We weren't overstimulated from social media, cell phones, and the internet back then so the majority of people actually had patience, which could be a big factor.

People definitely had the internet and cell phones in 2004...


Jeesum crow, people are trying to go WELL BACK IN MY DAY... for something that happened a little over a decade ago.

[shimerra]

Not everything is about constant improvements/new content. Sometime you have to just find the perfect balance/spot and vanilla is just that
If you take a big dick chef dish and constantly try to improve on that you will find out that you are just making it worse
and good luck trying to improve artwork such as Mona Lisa/The Starry Night

Vanilla was not that. Class balance issues alone should tell you that. You may not have liked the changes after but your nostalgia goggles aren't reality.


What was it 16 buffs for a 40 person raid? Yeah so fun playing a warlock and not being able to dot reducing your dps spells by half!

[Thimagryn]

I think it has everything to do with WoW being a growing world while WoW today is completely defined.

We've moved on an age where the classes were being tuned in raids as if they were simple RPG characters in a D&D module. It's hard to go back to the sandbox when the game we have now is a theme park.

[Wondercrab]

You agree back then was the Golden Age for creativity? Or am i being a old fart.

In mainstream media? Yes. Across creative mediums as a whole? Not at all.

Mainstream gaming, movies, music etc. have become increasingly safe and middle-of-the-road over time as more money gets involved, budgets expand, and the demand for guaranteed returns and huge profits skyrockets. That's only a small part of the media landscape as a whole, however, despite it being the most visible.

I have to admit it perplexes me a little when I hear people lamenting the state of modern gaming, because right now we genuinely are in a golden age of creativity and innovation in the medium thanks to the opportunities indie development and crowdfunding have opened up. There are so many amazing games out there right now, you just have to take an active interest and dig a little to find them. More genres are being catered to than ever before, more people are exploring the artistic side of gaming alongside the commercial, and there's a huge, healthy, diverse variety of experiences out there from blockbuster AAA releases to small indie gems.

My experience with independent production in other mediums is more limited, but I know for a fact that patreon, youtube, KDP etc. are enabling more artists than ever to get their work out there. I'm sure that the creative landscape as a whole is undergoing a similar golden age of awesome content beyond just the gaming space.

There's really never been a better time to be a consumer or producer of media. The landscape is just a little blurrier now, and you have to go looking to find what you want.

[Dhrizzle]

Are you arguing that mainstream blockbusters movies, triple A games and modern pop music are a patch artistically on their past equivalents? They're all just based on cut and paste formulas these days. Too big to fail so stick with the tried and trusted sequal.

Niche scenes will always spring up again and create innovation and the cycle will repeat when they get popular enough for big business to want a slice of the pie.

I'm arguing that generic crappy pop music, movies and video games have existed long before the "golden age" of the 90s and 00s.

[wholol]

FFXIV (more so this and still does tbh) and Blade and Soul gave me some of those "Wowza" moments I got from WoW back in early 2005. Even TERA has a few zones that are pretty damn epic in size and scope, my favorite being able to see the haunted tower from a couple zones away as well as some other huge landmarks and cities.

Of all the mmos that came after wow,the ones that I really enjoyed were Tera and BDO, although their end game content was extremely lacking borderline non existent, their gameplay ,graphics and overall feel of play was extremely enjoyable.

Wish they'd make a game with wow endgame + advanced graphics, action-RPG playstyle. I'd play the heck out of such a game.

[GUZ]

No your an idiot confused with nostalgic ideas

[Dhrizzle]

Everything in moderation, even world of warcraft was no joke. but somewhere along the line what was moderate changed, and now you have people chained to their PC's. nobody is using the real world as inspiration like Tolkien did in his epic, or like Miyamoto did, running through the forest coming up with the ideas for Zelda.

<snip>

everything is a derivative, of a derivative, of a derivative. but the thing is, where did this trend start? maybe people have literally been doing this since the greeks, just stealing and adapting.

As you mentioned Tolkien you should probably know that a lot of his work was greatly inspired by Germanic myths, particularly Norse and Finnish, with the Elder Edda and Nibelungenlied inspired Lord of the Rings and many scenes were stolen (yes stolen!) from other works.

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Gaming in the 90s- mid 00s is literally - "Hey just look at this nerd and his video games, what a loser"

Gaming nowadays - gamer girls, Esport broadcasts on tv, People literally are making careers and becomes famous by playing games, hell even my 50 years old father plays wow now and his co-workers plays tanks. + HUGE mobile gaming market.

in the past games target audience were kids and nerds now it's the most "normie" thing that you can do.

In the early 90s gaming was mostly a kid's thing but by '95 the PSX and Saturn were aiming for an older demographic and by the time the PS2 rolled around in 2000 gaming had gone full-blown mainstream.

[Molvonos]

Everybody says this in every generation.

Everyone remembers the good old days. In 20 years time your kids will be saying "Remember back in the good old days in the 2010s? It was truly a golden age."

This.
/10chars

[Usagi Senshi]

Of all the mmos that came after wow,the ones that I really enjoyed were Tera and BDO, although their end game content was extremely lacking borderline non existent, their gameplay ,graphics and overall feel of play was extremely enjoyable.

Wish they'd make a game with wow endgame + advanced graphics, action-RPG playstyle. I'd play the heck out of such a game.

I know man, I can't do these draining, grind for 4-6 hours, or nickle and dime you Korean fests anymore. The combat and interesting world keeps me visiting though, and yes, I would love that as well.

FFXIV is a straight up WoW clone (with FF overlay and some mechanics) with great questing, story, gear, etc, that I'll be playing until it ends.

[Polygons]

2004 was not the "first polygon era."

Moreover, the people that work on the story of a game are by and far NOT the modelers or texture artists. Nor are they the programmers, the marketing team, the visual development team, HR, or any of those guys.

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People definitely had the internet and cell phones in 2004...


Jeesum crow, people are trying to go WELL BACK IN MY DAY... for something that happened a little over a decade ago.

Yeah back when everyone was constantly check their phones for myspace updates, am I right?

[Kaleredar]

Yeah back when everyone was constantly check their phones for myspace updates, am I right?

Message boards and IMing people was still definitely thing.

[rasako]

Gaming went more "mainstream" somewhere around 1996/1997 when Sony made it more cool to be a gamer and PSX sales went hard well into the early 2000s. One could even argue (and extremely well at that) that Sega started this trend with the Genesis/MegaDrive in 1991-1993 with many action/sports games to play.

Personally when I started playing Everquest around 2000, I found its gameplay to be extremely shitty/clunky compared to a proper western/eastern rpg/action rpg. Dark Age of Camelot was more fun but still shitty with the combat, presentation, etc. FFXI was better with its better story and world to explore, but still had that clunky menu-based combat.

WoW is what changed things for the better but it was already much easier and stream-lined compared to what I had already been playing for nearly 5 years. Why people keep shitting on retail WoW and acting like vanilla was some bastion of supreme MMO gameplay is beyond me because I couldn't wait until they improved and streamlined even more of the shoddy MMO mechanics at the time of what I was playing in WoW at the time. I wanted improved character models and gear customization before TBC ever launched and having to wait 7+ years for both was extremely asinine IMO.

Blizzard was already talking about automated PVE content (said that it would take a few more years to get right) as far back as fall 2006 (after the launch of cross-server BGs) because in a couple interviews they stated that making expensive raid content for sub-5% of the subscriber base wasn't going to be feasible in the long-term.

The people that hate more accessible content and gear are really just straight up cunts tbh and don't understand what it takes to keep a game of this size running and keeping a lot of players paying and happy. They probably also forget on how much of a fucking headache it was to gear some new scrubs out in Van/TBC and get them attuned (I did the Ony attune twice on Horde and once for Alliance and the Kara/SSC/Eye shit on 4 characters at the time, major PITA, I wanted account-wide shit after the first time done) for shit the rest of us already wasted so much time on. The notion that Vanilla is harder than retail makes me laugh as well considering every raid from 2004-2008 is much easier than our current heroic raid (and a all of mythic/+ 5-mans stuff as well) content is.

So no, I always found old MMO designs to be fucking garbage but the addictive nature of them kept me playing and entertained still on some nights. WoW was an improvement but still a carebear fest that a lot of people still fail to realize to this day. It was always going to keep on being a casual/easy MMO for years to come. /shrug

MMOs definitely need to move forward, but I see no problem with giving people back vanilla since ~98% of the playerbase never even downed a raid boss. meaning ~98% of players never reached meaningful endgame content. I would love to see the MMO space move forward but the only innovations have been looter shooters like destiny or warframe which moves further from the "massive open world" and social gaming communities to a more personalized loot grind experience.

I've always mused about a dark souls like MMO that really refines and expands on that combat system to add in classes and such, while also having a player run main hub like Destiny's tower but all the shops are run by players and uses the guild wars sharding system so that you can have many instances of the same city so 20 people aren't running the whole town and making billions of gold.

Maybe anthem will finally find a great balance between shooter and RPG? I feel like borderlands and destiny both didn't take it far enough. Mass Effect felt close and bioware is making anthem so maybe it will be great, despite EA's bullshit.

[Otimus]

I personally think of the golden age of game creativity as around 1996-2004. So, WoW came out right at the tail end of it all. But that period when we just got real 3D gaming, and the efforts to build it up in the late 90's/early 2000's was something absolutely special. (I personally mark the launch of the XBOX 360 as the beginning of the end of real mainstream game creativity.)

16-bit gen of gaming was really close, but I think the efforts are wildly more creative from the period I said.

That being said, I've never considered WoW a product of it's time. Take that to mean something good or bad if you will, as I sort of mean it to be both.

[Xe4ro]

Yes back then the overall creativity might have been a bit better but it's also the consumer who throws money at lazy EA crap that promoted this landscape. : )

[Millyraynge]

2004 was not the "first polygon era."

Moreover, the people that work on the story of a game are by and far NOT the modelers or texture artists. Nor are they the programmers, the marketing team, the visual development team, HR, or any of those guys.

I didn't said something about 2004 nor did I said something about WoW. I said something about the overall consensus, this means the overall industry. We have several steps in the gaming industry. In times at which graphics didn't play that huge role or rather didn't required that much time/resources, the industry had to do something else to attract the people and they had also the resources left to invent an idea.

We still have frequently good titles, but way less than 15-20 years ago. Most of the games released today have a main story with less than 10 hours playtime.

[Kaleredar]

I didn't said something about 2004 nor did I said something about WoW. I said something about the overall consensus, this means the overall industry. We have several steps in the gaming industry. In times at which graphics didn't play that huge role or rather didn't required that much time/resources, the industry had to do something else to attract the people and they had also the resources left to invent an idea.

We still have frequently good titles, but way less than 15-20 years ago. Most of the games released today have a main story with less than 10 hours playtime.

Can you name a quick succession of releases of "amazing" titles that took days and days and days to beat and had an equally engrossing story to back up your claim?


Because, strangely enough, there were probably more "good games" released over a span on 20 years than there have been over the course of four or five.

[kamuimac]

I know man, I can't do these draining, grind for 4-6 hours, or nickle and dime you Korean fests anymore. The combat and interesting world keeps me visiting though, and yes, I would love that as well.

FFXIV is a straight up WoW clone (with FF overlay and some mechanics) with great questing, story, gear, etc, that I'll be playing until it ends.

i love how people claim FF to be wow clone when FF XI (mmorpg) was out in may of 2002 which make wow a clone of FF

ignorance is a bliss eh ?

[Usagi Senshi]

i love how people claim FF to be wow clone when FF XI (mmorpg) was out in may of 2002 which make wow a clone of FF

ignorance is a bliss eh ?

FFXIV is a WoW clone, I said nothing of FFXI which I agree with you on. FFXIV before its revamped played more like FFXI/XII (battle system only) did, but plays a lot more like WoW does with a similar UI and everything else.

Also, calling it a WoW clone is not me demeaning the game at all as I find it does a few things better than WoW still. It just plays a lot more like WoW does compared to other MMOs.

I've been subbed to the damn game for 4+ years now, I should know.

I also played FFXI a year before WoW and played it off and on until 2012.