Next MMORPG aspect to go?

[HardlyWaken]

Hey, all. I've just been noticing a pattern, much of the newer mmos seem to try to escape modern mmo set up so they're not just another wow-clone. For example, Tera and a few others are getting rid of tab targeting, GW2 and Secret World is trying to remove specific combat rolls, WoW and Tera both are moving away from point allocation spec building. So what's the next basic MMO-RPG feature to be changed/removed? Stats? Classes? What do you think?

[unholytestament]

Bag space as items.

I hope this "feature" dies. WoW and other games that use it should revamp their inventory system so you don't use items to increase your capacity you just spend gold.

Kind of a minor feature compared to what you mentioned, but it has always bothered me.

And don't even get me started on that bullshit inventory system that Final Fantasy XI uses.

[HardlyWaken]

I've noticed Tera and SWtor has gotten away from that with just expanding slot spaces. Honestly I think they should do away with it in general. It's more of an annoyance than a money sink, just give us our set amount of room! I guess that's just a peeve of mine though.

[Sorx]

there's plenty of mmo's that did not have talent tree's/ point spec allocation. Particularly asian mmo's so it's not as if it's anything new. So many things WoW does aren't "basic features" and when companies or people try to trumpet the fact of moving from wow, they're often, in reality, just falling back on some older not as successful model. no originality either way.

Anywho, I'd like to see character wide inventory more common. It's a nuisance having to log between chars to find items, mail them etc.

[Deleted]

i think the next big step will be making an mmo with very little kill quests. can't really think of a combat based rpg mmo which isn't jam packed full of quests where you simply kill mobs. it's incredibly boring and no matter how often the scenery changes, it's the same old stuff over and over. the problem is that filling the leveling experience without kill 'X' amount of mobs or activating 'Y' amount of points would be incredibly hard, but it's something that i feel needs to be done to make mmos feel fresh and new rather than the same old thing.

sure, games like SWTOR have a lot of interesting cutscenes and storylines, but underneath all of that it's still the same old kill quests. i absolutely love mmos and it's probably my favorite genre, but the quests are really making it a hard to love.

[bcbully]

Bag space as items.

I hope this "feature" dies. WoW and other games that use it should revamp their inventory system so you don't use items to increase your capacity you just spend gold.

Kind of a minor feature compared to what you mentioned, but it has always bothered me.

And don't even get me started on that bullshit inventory system that Final Fantasy XI uses.

TSW gives you unlimited space

[unholytestament]

TSW gives you unlimited space

The Secret World?

[Pachycrocuta]

i think the next big step will be making an mmo with very little kill quests. can't really think of a combat based rpg mmo which isn't jam packed full of quests where you simply kill mobs. it's incredibly boring and no matter how often the scenery changes, it's the same old stuff over and over. the problem is that filling the leveling experience without kill 'X' amount of mobs or activating 'Y' amount of points would be incredibly hard, but it's something that i feel needs to be done to make mmos feel fresh and new rather than the same old thing.

sure, games like SWTOR have a lot of interesting cutscenes and storylines, but underneath all of that it's still the same old kill quests. i absolutely love mmos and it's probably my favorite genre, but the quests are really making it a hard to love.

And what exactly do you propose as a replacement to the kill quests. I see countless people complain about the quests that tell you to go kill X or go gather Y or go get Z from a creature, yet they don't say what could possibly replace them.

As for me? Not really sure what would be the next thing to go.

[Deathproven]

Fewer barriers to grouping with others like revamping the experience/leveling system and a new outlook on items focusing more on cosmetics than stats

The conventional experience/leveling system will be replaced by systems like Guild Wars where players stats are basically equalized, so high level players and low level players can group with eachother and benefit. We also saw something like this in the level 1-49 bracket in SWTOR, where low level players saw a stat boost. To an extent, WOW had this in Wintergrasp as well. I like the Guild Wars/SWTOR approach since a more group-friendly system goes a long way in a social game

Items will be more cosmetic and for bragging reasons rather than being stat breaking game changers. I think the days of joining a group, PvP or PvE, and being outclassed by opposing items rather than skills and teamwork will fade away. For example it really sucks for a new WOW PvPer to join a battleground only to get blown up and feel useless, and it'll take a new WoW PvPer tens of hours to even stand a chance on the spreadsheet.

More on items, I think transmorgification will become standard. That way all items can still be used at the end game, having more cosmetic options for characters is good.

[willowe]

Bag space as items.

I hope this "feature" dies. WoW and other games that use it should revamp their inventory system so you don't use items to increase your capacity you just spend gold.

Kind of a minor feature compared to what you mentioned, but it has always bothered me.

And don't even get me started on that bullshit inventory system that Final Fantasy XI uses.

*coughs*Aion did that *coughs*

You spend Kinah to expand your inventory. No bag slots.

[unholytestament]

*coughs*Aion did that *coughs*

You spend Kinah to expand your inventory. No bag slots.

Too bad Aion was grindy as fuck, consisted of nothing but tunnel zones, had a ridiculous loot system, and character animations were annoying as all hell.

Also of note, MANY Asian MMOs have the feature where you expand your inventory with gold.

[Deleted]

there's plenty of mmo's that did not have talent tree's/ point spec allocation. Particularly asian mmo's so it's not as if it's anything new. So many things WoW does aren't "basic features" and when companies or people try to trumpet the fact of moving from wow, they're often, in reality, just falling back on some older not as successful model. no originality either way.

Anywho, I'd like to see character wide inventory more common. It's a nuisance having to log between chars to find items, mail them etc.

In GW2 the bank is account wide.

[Deleted]

In GW2 the bank is account wide.

Same i've heard it is in Tera

[Deleted]

Same i've heard it is in Tera

Having played, I can confirm that it's at least server-wide with 4 big bank tabs. However, I don't know if it is account-wide. I think it's not, because you would be able to transfer items from one server to another which may lead to economic imbalances. GW2's is account wide beacuse your characters are restricted to a single server, so in the end it's like being server-wide. A neat feature that I found in TERA is the ability to store money in the bank and then withdraw it with any character you feel like.

[Deleted]

The changes to skill systems is an attempt to simplify them and make them easier to balance. With point allocation Blizzard had to be careful to restrict creativity because it would become unbalanced.

Remember demonology/destruction hybrid warlocks with sacrifice in karazhan? What about 2h fury warriors?

All that stuff was hard to balance, which costs blizzard money and effort. So they just 'forced' point allocation into cookie-cutter builds to restrict those unorthodox builds and now they're completely dismantling the system. Boring stuff.

[Pull My Finger]

Is it actually that desirable to get rid of as much classic gameplay elements as possible? Might as well invent a new genre. There's always all this talk, trinity system blah blah, class stacking yadda yadda, modern mmo, burp. I don't know. Sometimes, the whole discussion kind of reaches a point where one could think typical genre aspects are a bad thing.

It's like, let's do a heavy metal record and use guitars as little as possible. Let's record a hiphop album and use no rappers. What's the point.

[Gentlepenguin]

TERA has glyphs in place of talent point type allocation. just adds to your abilities really though, doesn't actually change how you play.

[willowe]

Too bad Aion was grindy as fuck, consisted of nothing but tunnel zones, had a ridiculous loot system, and character animations were annoying as all hell.

Also of note, MANY Asian MMOs have the feature where you expand your inventory with gold.

Yeah so you never got to 20 in Aion right? Cause the zones past that are anything but 'tunnels.'
And you haven't played in the past year and a half, right? Cause droprates have been upped and grinding is about as bad as WoW's.

But yeah, totally, let's bash the game we only played the free trial for, even though I only stated a fact that Aion had what you were looking for, so it's already been done 'in Asia.'

You should try it now, it's f2p. Yeah 1-16 is kinda tunnely, but i can do that in ~4 hours, so I could care less....

[Fencers]

Leveling & level disparity.

There are strong trends in recent MMOs that either devalue leveling or make the disparity somewhat trivial. In a sense the genre has been moving this way for years. The pace of leveling in EQ ->classic WOW was pretty shocking, and the trend is just reaching it's natural point these last few years.