The only thing that is dead is the MMORPG gold rush, and that is something to be thankful for. It only created a huge number of very bad games in the hope of getting rich quick. Surprise, surprise, video game players aren’t total idiots, and bad games don’t really do well. Especially not if you have a business model where you expect your customers to keep paying for a long time, instead of selling them a game they can’t test first and running with the money before the customer finds out the game is bad.
— Tobold
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I wonder which are the very bad games he was thinking of.
Did you mean “I can’t think of any bad game” or “I can think of so many bad games, I’m wondering which one in particular did Tobold have in mind”?
I think there is a lot of them but most MMO players have only heard about a small subset because their time is too precious to waste it on playing games that lack quality and imagination. Most of the bad games became deserted in months (or less) after their launch and probably shut down soon after.
That’s Tobold, so I believe he was thinking of Darkfall and Eve.
There is tremendous irony in giving yourself the moniker “Anti-Stupidity League,” making up stupid beliefs, attributing them to others, then scorning them.
You call it irony, everyone else calls it the internet ;)
Tomorrow’s Quote of the day!
Yeah, I’m like the good advice that you just didn’t take. And rain on your wedding day.
I love Alanis, but those things aren’t even ironic, according to the dictionary definition. Unless that was your point?
That Alanis Morissette song is only ironic in an ironic way.
On the main topic, the MMO gold rush is dead how? We seem to get announcements of new ones weekly, if not daily.
Who would have thought? It figures.
I love this quote. There seemed to be a huge influx of generic MMO’s in the hopes of striking it rich. I am just glad there are still companies out there trying to make something unique, games like Guild Wars 2, SWTOR, TERA and others like that. They seem to be going for something more unique. Glad the gold rush is dead, go back to consoles and more importantly Call of Duty rip offs!
But…one of those games is a sequel, another is Star Wars-flavored World of Warcraft, the third follows the standard MMORPG tropes and only adds in a quasi-real-time combat system. None of your examples are “something unique.”
So you think GW2 will not be unique, simply because its a sequel? Wow.
Agreed on Star Wars, I’m not sure about GW2 and Tera. GW2 don’t look like another typical sequel (lore doesn’t make it identical in any way), and I didn’t spend much time on reaserch on Tera. One thing I know – SWToR is everything I feard it could become (WoW with SW falvoure :( ), and it’s nothing I ewanned it to be (MMO that will give me chance to live in galaxy far far away… and don’t give me Galaxies bullshit – that game wasn’t even half baked).
“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
Let’s be honest, the basic 4 pillars have been around and refined for over 15 years now. UO – one of the first true successful MMOs – had combat, crafting, exploration and progression and each MMO since then has taken that formula and tweaked it. Some put a creative spin on one facet while some put so much lipstick on the pig that you could barely recognize it.
When people remember that when WoW launched, it brought absolutely nothing new to the table other than polish and palyer-driven refinement (a lot of the devs were avid EQ players) and met with crazy success, that’s when we can actually see the criteria for success of a new game.
A custom Mustang is unique in it’s own way, but it’s still a Mustang and it’s still a car.
I would question you on everything being perfected.
Guild Wars 2 shows how some MMO systems aren’t bad, they’re just used in a bad way. A dynamic event stage where you kill 10 guys is better than a kill 10 guys quest because
#1, those guys have a purpose, and they will suceed in that purpose if you don’t beat them, moving the event to a different stage.
#2, you don’t have to accept dialogue to know that you can fight them. If you see them doing bad things, you can stop them and the game gives you credit as if you had accepted the quest.
#3, because after you finish, they are gone from that area. They’re back at their fortress trying to regroup, or their fortress is gone and they’ve fled, to return later to try to rebuild. It feels more alive.
If those three simple things are not in ANY MMOs coming out this year other than GW2, then I’d say we have a long ways to go. And that’s one of the most minor things that GW2 does within the framework of a normal MMO.
I think there’s a lot of innovation and improvement to be made.
You’re still killing 10 guys.
The fact that we still don’t think the repetitive task of killing ten of the same enemy is a bad thing says a lot about MMO culture.
Hell, the name of the blog is “Kill Ten Rats” as a tongue-in-cheek jab at exactly this kind of quest. So now the rats don’t respawn and you don’t have to click through dialogue that nobody would read anyway to get credit for having killed them. It doesn’t really change all that much.
It changes everything. Back to where we started, hence why I would call it improvement, not innovation.
Yes, we are still killing stuff. That’s the one trope you don’t get around. You’re playing a dude with a sword, that’s what swords are used for.
But the system in GW2 gives it context, it gives your actions meaning. In recent MMOs, your opponents where either standing around in a field picking daisies, or they fought a neverending scripted battle against other endlessly respawning NPS.
The difference here is that now you have a progression in the world, not just in your character. It is of course just an illusion, but it is a much more immersive illusion, and it makes the world seem more alive and believable.
Maybe you still remember? That was the promise MMOs gave a decade ago, creating believable, immersive worlds.
More MMOs than ever are being created, and more often than not, the F2P excuse is used for pushing unpolished content into the market. So how is the MMO gold rush dead.
Actually, you could say that the MMO gold rush has morphed into the F2P goldrush.