"The neckbeards aren't gone... they're WAITING."

[Queen of Hamsters]

Asmongold is a dude with an opinion, not some authority.

My opinion is that he and his zealots vastly overestimate the desire for and the meaning of "hardcore MMORPG gameplay".

[Laerrus]

2nd Gen VR (Samsung HMD Odyssey or HTC VIVE Pro, yes the 2nd gen is really that good! No motion sickness and minimal eyestrain) combined with a new AAA title similar to WoW will get people playing again.

Maybe Star Citizen?

[judgementofantonidas]

RPG's that cost $180 a year plus game/expansion buy-in are, I think, gone.

World of Warcraft isn't the standard; it's a one-time freak of nature with respect to the business it's done. For years everyone has held it up as the bar to get over. It isn't and never was.

No, Classic WoW isn't going to revive the genre for any long period of time. No more than releasing Ultima IV-V-VI would revive anything.

When it has continued to thrive for much longer than any other offerings who can it not be considered the current standard?

Agree with Classic. It takes a special mind to want to go backwards.

[anaxie]

Wasn't W* going to revive the "hardcore" (whatever that means) MMO? That one worked well!

Wildstars terrible forgettable story scenary and its awful action reticule combat killed it harder then the. "Hardcore" aspect.

Wildstar was never going to be a contender veing a new IP

Lets be honest WoW villan hero and world backlog is what caused it to surge and survive in the first place.

And if you truely believe lich king. , illidan, or burning legion didnt sell boxes you are a special kind of ignorant.

Sure nowadays most subs are still around by pure addiction and time investment alone. Its a hard link to break. But the rng spiral since WoD caused me to leave.

I only hold an interest for the two decades plus of investment i have in the franchises story and watching it still play out. Azeroth and its characters and villans are top notch.

[ManiaCCC]

When it has continued to thrive for much longer than any other offerings who can it not be considered the current standard?

Because it can't be replicated. Blizzard just hit right nail with right hammer in the exactly right time, not a second earlier or later. How can you have standard if nothing can go even close to it? Standard means something approachable, when you are creating MMORPG, some goal to chase and it was proved again and again, WoW numbers are just not possible to reach anymore.

It is like you have MMORPG market, where you can find your standard and WoW, which is separate entity.

[anaxie]

When it has continued to thrive for much longer than any other offerings who can it not be considered the current standard?

Agree with Classic. It takes a special mind to want to go backwards.

Does it?

Does it take a special mind to prefer the fallout 2? Baldurs gate? Does it take a special mind to enjoy kotor 2 over Swtor?

Does it take a special mind to prefer morrowind?

Classic is such a different game if somwone prefers it its probably because the game is such bland shit now they would rather play something that came out before the turn of pandering to mainstream simple minded demographica

Im surprised Inj you have enough self awareness to know this shit.

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Because it can't be replicated. Blizzard just hit right nail with right hammer in the exactly right time, not a second earlier or later. How can you have standard if nothing can go even close to it? Standard means something approachable, when you are creating MMORPG, some goal to chase and it was proved again and again, WoW numbers are just not possible to reach anymore.

It is like you have MMORPG market, where you can find your standard and WoW, which is separate entity.

And lets be honest. They hit the nail based one of of their huge ips when blizzard was nothing but quality PC ips

They had a huge world and cast to dog into and they are still using that backlog to this day. The backlog is finally emptied out come BFA

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If people would know, what makes awesome MMORPG, someone would already made it. Problem is everyone knows MMORPGs are dying but noone is sure why. Maybe it is problem with players, not games.

Odd are of a mmo thats not final fantasy hitting WoWs level will never happen. Azeroth was established years before WoW. Random MMO there is minimal hype or previous investment for many to care about for the initial surge

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Great.. I'm a neck beard now because you are right. I am dying on the inside because I want a new mmo that's really awesome, yea. pretty much. I hate wow. : /
But I'm stuck here.

If you hate it just quit

Not like there arent more games then you could ever play in a lifetime out there

[Zafire]

RPG's that cost $180 a year plus game/expansion buy-in are, I think, gone.

World of Warcraft isn't the standard; it's a one-time freak of nature with respect to the business it's done. For years everyone has held it up as the bar to get over. It isn't and never was.

No, Classic WoW isn't going to revive the genre for any long period of time. No more than releasing Ultima IV-V-VI would revive anything.

FFXIV is doing paid subs and is probably the #2 highest active MMO out there right now.

[anaxie]

Black Desert isnt hardcore mmo. Wildstar failed beocuse it was boring game no becouse it was hardcore. And it mostly have nothing to do with game being hardcore. It is mostly about mmorpg being mmorpg. Lot of so called MMORPG games like WoW went from MMO to action RPG with multiplayer element.

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They are not supostu appela to hardcore player. They are supostu appeal to MMORPG players. WoW currently appeals solo casuals what had never interested in MMO game in first place.

Thank you someone said it

Wildstars problem was the combat and everything aucked. That killed it out the gate.

Hurrrr action combat and not tab combat! No... just fuckin no

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Sounds like a reciepe for disaster. Let's design games the way we did over 10 years ago.
I don't think so.

Why not? It would be a good start for say... Capcom

Pretty sure rpgs and mmos wouldnt suffer by turning back the clock to the days of morrowind and baldurs gate

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FFXIV is doing paid subs and is probably the #2 highest active MMO out there right now.

And its because its a ff ip primarily

Slap another publisher and name on it. Never would of happened

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Here's another question - what direction has WoW itself taken over the last couple years. They hit rock bottom (for them) going all in on casual pve as impossible to fail string of instances. Since then, they've started taking away things, getting back to their core audience I would think. There's more about being out in the world, making that world content tougher with less qol features, even before you consider the return of classic wow, the retail game is starting to look like it more and more. Sure, its smaller moves right now, but to me, its clear the direction has changed.

Anyways, I suspect the worse the numbers look for each new mmo, the cheaper costs are to make them, the more hardcore mmo's we will see. I think you all are quite wrong about where we are headed.

The mass rng elements started in wod are still there. Im sure they have made more then a few million players leave as a result

[Torrasque]

If I recall "Wildstar" was suppose to be a project specific to this community and it died in obscurity not too soon after its launch. I believe that says a lot about this "community" that you speak of.

[anaxie]

Personally i couldnt keep playing wildstar because i just thought the gameplay and world was horrible, maybe more ppl felt the same, maybe it had nothing to do with the replication of those elements you speak of, or maybe it's a combination of both.

Signed and agreed 110%

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If I recall "Wildstar" was suppose to be a project specific to this community and it died in obscurity not too soon after its launch. I believe that says a lot about this "community" that you speak of.

I playdd it was done the first day in launch week

The combat alone gave me cancer. Im sure it did ro thousands more

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

what exactly was garbage on wildstar? Leveling was fun, I personally found the story more compelling than what wow had for last couple years. Music was nothing short of epic (I still listen to some of the songs occasionally). Combat was fast paced and responsive. I'll admit that the visual style wasn't for everyone, but that's about it. First time i quit was to play wow with irl friends and second time was with the gear and runes revamp they did as the patch gutted my warrior.

The telegraphing system was fine if you were fighting one mob, but as soon as you had 3-4 of them all you could see was overlapping triangles, circles and trapezoids in different shades of red.

[anaxie]

I'm not sure what you mean, but FF14 was an absolute disaster at launch. Like, they couldn't even buy reviews off of IGN or Gamespot bad, even they slammed it. And instead of doing what 99% of failed MMOs do, blame the consumers and then go F2P to try and milk more shekels out of the 5 people that still care about the game, they admitted their game was trash, offered refunds and then went and remade the game almost entirely and now it's pretty successful with it's 3rd? expansion, and they never had to resort to going F2P like every other failed "WoW Killer".

I've never played it personally, but to me that seems like they actually listened to their community instead of going "LALALALA NOT LISTENING IT'S YOUR FAULT THE GAME SUCKS NOT OURS F2P WITH A CASH SHOP LALALALA".

Sooo. Rift, wildstar , swtor?

[Deleted]

Sooo. Rift, wildstar , swtor?

They're dead in comparison

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

The problem is gaming has evolved. The neckbeards might not be gone but there is a far bigger draw in competitive gaming now. Legion embraced this and you see the results. Will classic? If not, I fear for it's survival. He is right, the game will have tons of people for a little while, but if they just took some efforts to make the game more competitive it would have that many people for way longer. I worry the no changes crowd are going to kill their own game.

[anaxie]

even wow was cheating in this department thought - there were hundreds of thousdands if not milions of people who paid their subs for past 3 years via gold.

if it wasnt for this form of paying it would be a muhc much more dead game atm.

gold tokens saved wow from much more rapid deterioration

And allied races microtransactiona.

I mean thats what it really is. Banking that everyone wants to racechange their main to a sweet new race is a nice jingle in blizzards pocket

[Barnabas]

I had the opporunity to sit down with Asmongold yesterday and talk about Classic WoW and MMOs in general (link is in my signature).

He brought up a very interesting point about the MMORPG audience not being dead, but simply waiting in the wings for the next hardcore AAA MMO to release. I wanted to know how you guys feel about that; Do you think the MMORPG market is still alive and well, but dormant? Could we see another resurgence of the genre with Classic WoW?

Pantheon maybe but classic wow? I'm still on the fence with how long the nostalgia will truly last. Plus the I think it was stated recently they aren't updating the graphics so that's not really going to get some people interested just on that front alone. Though everyone and their mom will just inject the new graphics into the classic client anyway from the BfA or Legion files.

[anaxie]

They're dead in comparison

That was the point

[owbu]

Seeing how PoE and Dark Souls and so on have solid fan bases, even though they have all been declared dead genres at some point, I wouldnt be suprised if someone finds a way to bring back oldschool MMOs in some form and that there is actually a bunch of old and young fans, who could get into that.

Its just not going to happen through the AAA route, where a publisher greenlights a 10 year/200 million $ project based on the hope, that hardcore fans will actually care about this one and not declare it dead on arrival.

But if some niche company figures out a way to get around that problem and finds a technology to create new content fast enough and cheap enough to avoid the "reach max level, find content drought, complain on forums how shit your game is" syndrom, I can see MMOs becoming a hit again.

[Deleted]

Sooo. Rift, wildstar , swtor?

Yep. All 3 of those games blamed the consumer, because it's obviously the players' fault that their flawless masterpiece of a game with literally 0 faults absolute perfection hasn't sold 90 gorillion copies and buried WoW, so they went F2P.

Whereas FF14 saw all the negative feedback and realized that, "our game is shit" and actually fixed it. Never played it and probably never will, but massive props to them all the same.

[Pickynerd]

Doesn't Asmongold surround himself with kids?

How would he know?