Is a true "MMORPG renaissance" possible?

[adrix89]

I also think grind will always be part of these games because players are always looking for ways to get ahead.

Progression isn't a bad thing but it has to be aligned with gameplay always. Some may be more or less tolerant but to me they have no place in the game.
Games need challenge, whether its racing games, management games, combat games they all need challenge. Gameplay can exist in many forms but not all things bring gameplay.
This the crux of the matter, sandbox games needs a form of actual fucking gameplay. Sandbox games tendency to make activities a job instead of a game.

My problem with crafting systems is its about everything else. Its about the resources you get from exploration, combat or territory conquest, its about marketing and selling to the players, its about creating a complex web of relationships.
But when you are actually creating the damn things you can't do much with them. Even if they contain mini-games they get annoying and bothersome really fast. There is not much depth there.

Sandbox MMOs will succeed when they will be much more careful with the day to day enjoyable gameplay rather then the fancy tales you hear about.

 

[anvi]

A renaissance or a revolution? A renaissance is easy, and is already happening with Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen. There are several others too ( The Saga Of Lucimia / Shroud Of The Avatar / etc).

A renaissance is kind of sad though. The whole thing that makes MMOs special is the scope of how big they can be. It is more or less limitless, far bigger than any RPG, you really have to open your imaginations to see the future of MMOs. Games where people grow to become the leaders of virtual companies that are worth a lot of REAL money, famous players doing heroic things and infamous scumbags trying to ruin everything. Entire cities run by real people and defended by real players, etc. AI enemies that are so clever, even a current day PVP griefer complains about getting owned by them. The early games understood this but only had the budgets and technology to make small steps towards something special. EQ, UO, DAOC, all very good but still, they are 20 year old designs based on small budgets and tech. They did some things very right, even after almost 20 years I can remember infamous enemies like Lord D'vinn and legendary items like the FBSS, great players and shitty ones who took an item from someone in a raid and then secretly sold it for real money to pay their rent etc.. It was a good start, the whole first generation of MMOs was as good as it has been imo, but it was still only a first step.

The problem with the MMO genre is that WoW came along as the first "second generation MMO" and basically re-engineered EQ into a far more casual and kid friendly experience. They took the addictiveness of EQ, how each hour you progressed slightly further, so when it was time to go to bed, you had to tear yourself away while thinking, "Just 10 more minutes I can level up / get that sword / do whatever!" And the addictiveness of competing with other players, either directly in PVP or indirectly - "keeping up with the joneses". But instead of being ball busting, WoW made it so that anyone can play, everyone wins, all the time, dying means nothing, and it can run on mommy's netbook. It was so big and so popular, every MMO since that point has copied WoW. The original dreams of the first generation games have been completely forgotten now, by the public and by the devs. Occasionally something pops with a bit more scope like Darkfall or something, but nothing serious has ever shown up. I think the only exception is EVE which is really the only MMO to have ANY innovation since about 2001. Yes WoW added arena based PVP, various games added large scale PVP, Shadowbane had some gimpy sieges, etc... But these are only really things other games had already done just shoved into a MMORPG as an almost side serving minigame. No game has done enough to really deserve my respect, in terms of innovation at least. Except EVE.

But EVE is pretty niche and also isn't a fantasy RPG (MMO), which limits its appeal.

Anyway, my point is that a renaissance isn't really any value to me and I don't think anyone else. What is needed is an MMO revolution, and that is bound to happen eventually. Revolutions happen in gaming all the time, and the great thing about it, is that it is the small "nothing to lose" devs that always do it. Just look at Minecraft, one fat programmer with a vision and it ends up being worth more than 2 billion dollars to Microsoft. There are lots of smaller MMOs like Wurm and Darkfall who work a similar way, and it is only a matter of time until someone comes up with something that catches on. All the big budget games are pumping out the same shit year after year. Whether's in FFXIVLMNOP, SWTOR, Black Desert, ArcheAge, or whatever else... they are all the same game with a different skin. Quest hubs for noobs to click all the characters with big glowing icons, get a bunch of "kill 20 bats" quests, and mindless grind through the levels. They do it in a sort-of interesting enough way that it captures the attention of millions of people, but if you can step back and look at it objectively, they are all shit. They are also all fleeting experiences, waves of players go from game to game, waiting for the next big MMO.

The revolution in MMOs will change all that. Some small team will create something that works in a different way to all of these other games, and millions of people will end up playing it, year after year. Yet the whole thing will be made with voxels or blocks or pixel art or Unity, and there will be no voice overs, and no million lines of dialogue etc. It will have 0.1% the budget of all the mainstream MMOs, yet the gameplay will be better than all of them and the players will flock to it to try it out. That's how gaming revolutions are made and the MMO genre is ripe for it. Admittedly, it is happening a lot slower than I expected. I expected a great new generation game some time around 2004 or 2005, but games like Dark & Light and Horizons and stuff had false starts and then fizzled out. 10 years later there still hasn't been anything. But it will happen.

p.s. If you want to know my opinion on what I think will be in a revolutionary MMORPG, it will be one or more of these types of things.

Spoiler

1) MOBs currently have a detection range of about 20 feet. They have no hearing and no eye sight, it is just a proximity detection, so when you walk into range, they will turn and attack you. I see this completely changing in the future. For a start, animal mobs should be able to smell you from far away, that's how they hunt in the wild, and that's how players should be hunted in the wild world of an MMO. But the distance should also change. When you scale a large hill or mountain and look down on an enemy encampment far below, there should be some enemy that spots you. You may be half a mile away, but he will get a few friends and they will come after you. Currently no MMO works anything like this, but it happens in PVP games in big online games like Arma, etc. It is time for MOBs to have better AI and this is part of that.

2) Not only that, but they need to work in better ways. Currently ape mobs will stand around waiting to be engaged by the player, or they may walk along a few waypoints around their camp. In the wild they would be in the trees and they would be watching, and if you strayed into their territory, they would ambush you. Groups of them would flank you and some would run all the way around to come up behind you. They are intelligent, but again, nothing like this happens in an MMO, and that will change too.

3) Questing is currently shit, and this is something that affects single player RPGs too. These games have names like "Saga of Heroes" or whatever, but there is nothing heroic about "Please collect 20 lizard scales so I can make some armor" or "I lost my amulet in the orc compound outside the city, please recover it for me." All that needs to completely change. Not only is this kind of questing super shit, but it is also more expensive than it needs to be. Current thinking is that it is good value because a few devs make a quest that takes the player an hour to complete, and it is on to the next one. In total it keeps the players doing stuff for month after month when really it is all cut and paste. Last time you killed 20 wolves for their paws, and now you are killing 20 skeletons for their rusty swords. Yet this all requires dev time and writers are coming up with the (albeit shit) dialogue for it too. But some of my favorite games had no quests at all. Eye of the Beholder 2 is something I really love and there were no quests. It just had a short intro at the start of the game which says the respected Dran has tasked a party of adventurers with investigating the Temple of Darkmoon. Mysterious things had been happening and he sent a scout to investigate but she never returned. Take your party there and find out whats up and also keep an eye out for the scout. I played that game for months and this was the only backstory I needed. Soemtimes less is more, and if the gameplay is good, you don't need constant dialogue. The MMO revolution will understand this.

4) The world needs to be dynamic. Dynamic is one of those lame buzz words that no longer means anything because it has been abused so much. Most MMOs have had nothing dynamic in their worlds at all, so later ones tried to shoe horn a few shitty variables into the game. In WoW there are a few towers that get captured and lost and captured and lost all day every day forever. In Rift they even have big rifts appear out the sky in random locations and mobs appear and attack anything nearby. But they are all fake, dynamic by numbers, etc. GW2 hyped so much this dynamic world and I remember in beta doing some quest where what you do to help an NPC will change what he does after that. A popup appeared asking if I liked the quest and was it "dynamic." And while I was typing Lol no... some other players were showing up to do the exact same quest I had just done in the exact same way and I was watching the "world changing" thing basically reset and get redone only 2 minutes after I had just done it. This is clearly idiotic. Anyway, there may be a big NPC city but out in the wilderness and it should be untouched. Players should be creating an outpost because it is near a dungeon or something useful, and it serves as a stopping off point when travelling back to the main town. But this should be able to grow over time. If they build it up it becomes a village and eventually a new town. NPCs should show up and try to trade, and trade routes should start, both NPCs but the players too, like it would in real life. And it should be at risk of being taken over by enemy factions or rampaging skeleton armies or whatever. Again, the only game that does anything like this is EVE which has empires rising and falling. But EVE does it all in a horrible spreadsheet kind of way, and people have still never seen this happen before their eyes in a real fantasy world, with city walls crumbling etc. A few games have sort of touched on it (Shadowbane etc), but it still hasn't been done well and properly. Any self respecting dev knows how to make this work, but no game has gone there yet.

5) The class system needs overhauling. I don't like classless systems because they are just so hard to make and balance, and balance does matter because without it, you end up with a game that is too easy or too hard through no fault of your own. But strict classes are a pain because you are tied to it, and strict roles are no fun either because if there is a group looking for a healer and you are a Wizard then they have to wait for someone else to show up and you have to wait for some other group. It is ridiculous. But it doesn't need to be like that. Rift had some great ideas letting every class satisfy any archetype role. So a mage could be a tank, healer, or dps, and change their build on the go. I love that... But GW2 takes it a step further and makes it so that there are no archetype roles anymore. There are no tanks, healers, or dps, everyone is basically just a self sufficient ass kicker. I didn't like how it worked out because everyone was just diving around and it was too headless chicken-ish. Games should be more tactical than that. But I think a mixture of both will work in the future.

6) Getting tired. I might think of more sometime.