The Stagnation of MMO industry/genre and why

To the OP:

So basically what you are saying is that Guild Wars 2 will be the "Savior" of the MMO industry. Every single reason you give is a feature of GW2 except sharding., which they will be doing. The reason that people see so many MMO's as failures today is not the features they have; it's that they haven't made WoW's money. NO GAME will be as big(in their inflated subs) as WoW is. People said SWToR was a flop because it ONLY had 1.2 million subs at release. I'd call that a raging success.

I'm not saying I don't enjoy it, I think its great, and if it was coinciding with immerse content, this game would surely have more subscribers . I just don't think they needed to pay Lacey Chabert and David Hayter to do the voice acting, they could have paid someone else a fraction of the amount and it would have still been quality.

Unfortunately voice acting isn't enough to make up for a lack of content. It might be enough for some people, but from a financial stand point, no way. I think most people can agree with me that it seems as if Bioware half-assed the content and expected the voice acting to carry it to success.

On the money right there.

Opinion =/= Fact

It ended after 8 years. The first iteration was amazing, sorry SWG veteran here. The combat upgrade was extremely balanced and innovative too bad Lucas arts and Sony wanted to try and copy wow and epically fail.

It was a niche game that was losing subscribers fast even before NGE, as someone posted on one of the earlier pages. I'm not saying niche games can't be awesome but you have to go and look for them from "underground" developers. "Mainstream" dev teams won't cater to a small playerbase because it doesn't make sense financially.

That's how it is. You may say that this is unfortunate and such but what can you do, apart from not buying those mainstream products?

The entire thread boils down to this basically.

People like different stuff...go figure...

In the previous post you were talking about how they could have made a solid Star Wars MMO without voice acting, you didn't say that voice acting could have been done cheaper.

I personally don't really understand this "lack of content" complaint because I have too much to do on a range of characters and it's killing me. There will be more Operations, more Flashpoints, more whatever but no MMO produces one raid every month. And even that would be too slow for the hardcore progression players.

It’s time for this genre to grow up and shed the MMO standards set a decade ago because there broke at delivering a truly massively multi player environment.

Today’s MMO’s are just lobby worlds for small groups.

Allot of people in this thread make some really good points, and I just like to add the root of most of these issues is simply ROADBLOCKS IN DESIGN THAT PREVENT PLAYERS FROM PLAYING TOGETHER.

Here are the top 7 things that should go up on the chalkboard at the start of the next Gen MMO projects…..instead of …”how can we steal a chunk of WoW pie?”

THINGS WE NEED TO FIX IN THE MMO GENRE THAT PREVENT PLAYERS FROM PLAYING TOGETHER.
1> Sharding – (Players get separated by servers)
2> Trinity – (Class Types, separate players needed to balance party effectiveness)
3> Multiple Factions (Players get separated by Faction Type)
4> Levels (Separating Players by Level Range)
5> Zones Levels (Zones separating players by level difficulty)
6> Gear Power (Player separated by the effectiveness of their gear)
7> Instanced Content (separates players from the open world)

I for one am glad to hear that we atleast have a few Game Developers in the MMO market that did just this, and we will soon see how they do once released.

Very nice read. I enjoyed it and can say I fully agree with all of it. I have to say some of your ideas have been used or seem to be coming.

Sharding. Games like Guild Wars and Champions online dealt with this nicely by making each "shard" zone specific with a population cap. The result was almost every zone, town, city was booming with activity because each time you zoned you automatically went to the next shard in line to be filled up or like in CO you zoned to the shard your party is currently in.

Trinity: I am honestly on the fence about the holy trinity. I have seen it modified to more transparency and I have seen it completely done away with. Champions completely dropped the trinity idea and allowed players to build their own classes from ground up. The result? Dull dungeons. Who needs to be strategic and consider whose going to do what when we all can god mode this thing together with extremely high dps/heals/ and buffs. In the end we ran thru all the dungeons like we had a hot date on the other end. Not to mention what it did to pvp. Eww.

Then there was DCUO who took the trinity and beefed it up with more dps. This was a great Idea and made pvp/pve a lot of fun simply because any role considered worked well with others. My nature/archer could cut through mobs and players with the best of them and toss heals for last minute come backs when needed which made for some really exciting fighting. (And dont get me started on the amazing combo system)

Finally we have GW2 which so far promises a unique take on the trinity. No trinity. All classes are essentially dps with a stock of buffs, debuffs, and CC. That added with the "downed" system so players can pick up a team mate before they die, ,makes for a very interesting feel of combat. No more clueless dpsers skating thru high end content while tanks and healers have to gear up and know their role.

But yes I agree with you fully I just wanted to point out that there is hope and Devs seem to slowly be catching on to such ideas.

Good post.

im an older gamer and one thing i think that mmo developers are not doing is simple. It's the evolution. As a business owner who inherited a business years ago , my dad told me that every 8 to 10 years you have to change.

when WoW came out it captured alot of people and grew. The gaming world was taken by storm with mmo's, swg, eq, wow, etc..

Over the next 3-5 years the wave is at it's peak , people want to ride this wave, including bioware/ea. Building swtor like swg would not have made much of a difference, as there is a total lack of innovation on developers. This is why games like league of legends , and puzzle games etc are gaining more popularity. You now see more moba's coming out. THe mmo genre though hasn't seen any innovation in almost 10 years. What is happening is that people are doing the same thing expecting different results.

Bioware succeeded in making a storyline mmo, but they actually took steps backwards in the development evolution. Games that came out 5+ years ago had much better implementation to them than swtor. When you design something that you want people to subscribe to you want to make that longevity valuable.

I think bioware, made this game with the initial journey as too much of the focus. THe real journey is what keeps you going. This is where mmo's are ultimately failing these days. It is not just swtor. I am talking about a multitude of mmo's, every forum you go to the same topics are there. Nothing to do at max level.

Performance, sharding, cross que, open world. No matter what bioware does, this game will never "feel" like an mmo. The server clusters are too small. The servers cannot handle a very low cap of people. In fleet anything above 150 people causes screens to jitter and lag. As a tech person my first issue would have been to give everyone a smooth open world with the least amount of performance issues. Sharding and small cap servers, really ruined alot of the mmo feeling.

PvP. Neglecting this cost you more subscribers than you were ready for bioware. The reason is that pvp is end game, it's always different, it's always challenging, and it brings out the competitive nature of gamers. 99% of all gamers are competitive and thus , why the majority of gamers worldwide play mostly pvp oriented games. Tying back into the performance technology issue. Ilum was a disaster that could have been avoided , had some initial thought been put into the engine and how it will handle 40+ people on the same screen. Maybe you should have cut back on the multitude of rendering of textures and made some more simnple models of certain things, i don't know.

Raiding, dailies, crafting - I played wow in 2004 on release. I loved it to 60, i raided a bit, and i remember distinctively when i lost interest. TBC comes out, level again, new experience. I get to end game and there is one issue i am having. This dungeon, grinding. It gets old and nothing changes with it, ever. WoW succeeded in keeping up with the pvp crowd. So i moved over to pvp. Wrath comes out and its the same thing. Despite what people tell you, wow subs fall off pretty hard about 5 months after an expansion. This is due to the mindless grind.

WoW has a very strong social aspect that keeps it thriving. People can socialize much more freely. THe userinterface, performance, gameplay is very fluid and smooth. PvP is strong and a huge chunk of wow players are in it for the pvp. Dungeons, raids, grinds are being made with more variety and more options to make them more enjoyable.

WoW grew within itself, it was the originator of the mmo scene in terms of appealing to the masses. Games that come out now take a huge step back trying to emulate only a portion of what wow does and this is what is getting stale. If people want a "wow" they can play "wow".

Again, the buying point of mmo's is what keeps the person playing. Right now, i just don't see any interest in keeping playing something i've done 30 times before. Star wars fans in general, want an open, immersive feeling, with a star wars community. This game took a great idea, made an immersive story, and just simply stopped at how to keep people playing.