Stale MMO's

[lassiie]

So, I have been playing FFXIV: ARR as of late, and it is a very well crafted game, especially considering the original release. My issue is this. I have played Aion, Tera, Guild Wars 2, Rift, SWTOR and Eve. Eve is the only one that is truly different. The others are all basically interchangeable.

Don't get me wrong, I realize they all have slightly different mechanics, and different focuses on what is important, but at the end of the day, they are all basically the same.

I find myself growing tired of MMOs quicker and quicker, as the newer ones try to cater more to the casual gamer. Not that I consider myself a hardcore MMO player by any means, just that I tend to reach endgame and find myself complete almost everything pretty quickly. Aion took me somewhere between 3-6 months to hit max level, honestly do not remember, but I do remember playing Aion for around 2 years before I quit, mostly do to patches ruining the game IMO.

Rift was next and only took me a month or so to get to max level, but there was enough endgame content to keep me interested, not to mention the pvp was extremely fun in that game. Ended up quitting when they nerfed all healing in PvP by 50%.

Then I played Tera and SWTOR, neither which I hit max level, and found myself bored of both games very quickly. SWTOR might've been good but I will never be able to forgive it for taking away KOTOR3 from me.

Was just wondering if anyone else was having similar experiences with MMOs as myself.

 

[Lictor Face]

MMOs, are, by design, meant to capture your attention for as long as possible until you eventually get sick of it.

EVERYONE who has ever played an MMO for a fair amount of time can tell you that, whether it is a handful or months or several years, it all depends how long you can stand it.

 

[sanquin]

Well, technically Aion, Tera, GW2 and on in the other group SWTOR and Rift are two different mmorpg genres. Action and hotkey/point and click as people seem to like to call them.

But yea, I agree. Mmorpg's seem to want to cater to the casual crowd more and more. Your hand has to be held most of the time, questing is the same in all of them, fantasy worlds all start to look alike once you've played a few fantasy mmo's, combat is mostly the same apart from maybe having to actually aim attacks or having to click for every 'auto attack'. So...I dunno. Let's hope that in the future a company will decide on something at least mostly 'new' that will actually work. (New is relative, since anything and everything that can be thought of has probably already been done in some way or form.)

 

[default]

I gave Guild Wars 2 a really good crack after my gaming buddies all got into it and convinced me to buy it. Now they've moved on for the meantime and in the last few months I've only ever logged on to briefly explore, it just doesn't catch me as a game as much as a way to run around doing silly things with friends with less risk of being arrested. I still had lots of fun with it though, and remember those hours fondly. Perhaps we'll go back to it someday.

Personally I'd like to see an MMO that breaks all the tropes of the genre. It would be a much needed breath of fresh air. Something that tears out the heart of what an MMO is about (being in a huge online world with a bunch of other players) and weave its own unique style of gameplay around it, rather than being an RPG with a skillbar as most are these days.

 

[StriderShinryu]

In MMOs I find that it really takes something more than just the gameplay to keep me interested. I have to enjoy the core gameplay, of course, but that can only last for so long given how many hours you typically put into an MMO. Whether it be community, ongoing RP, a really interesting and evolving world/story, little bits of continuous character building, or something else entirely. There has to be a hook that keeps me around after my initial "Ooh new game" thrill has long worn off.

Right now I'm playing The Secret World and am really digging it on almost every level. I can't say that will last forever but I'm definitely enjoying it now, and it does look like it has the possibility of keeping me interested over the long haul. The story and world are just so well crafted, and the community is pretty good as well.

 

[sc1arr1]

I still love Guildwars 2, but I burned myself out on it the first few months after release, so I just kind of hop back on once in awhile to check things out. It is by no means boring though, I just went through it too quick x.x

 

[Auron225]

I've only ever played Runescape so I can't speak from experience but I can understand where you're coming from. I stopped it not quite so much as I was getting bored of it, but cause I'd hit the point where it was taking far too long to level up... alright then so I was getting bored

It's been years since then though - I've been thinking of diving back into an MMO at some stage. What would you recommend OP? I was considering FF 14. Stale as it may be, is it good if one hasn't played many MMOs'?

 

[Foolery]

I quit playing Final Fantasy XIV a few months back. It's a boring grind once you hit level 40 or so. Too much time required to get anywhere in that game. Feels like a chore to play.

 

[J.McMillen]

The only MMO I ever played was the late City of Heroes. Even though there really wasn't any real end game content till the last year or two, the fact that you could create so many different characters (88 at launch) meant if you got bored you could just create another character. Not only did each archetype require different strategies, different powersets withing an archetype would require tactics. So if I ever got bored with my current character, I'd just switch to someone different.

 

[Lawnmooer]

MMO's are hard to do.

Since, they're really expensive (Since, even base release there's a HUGE often 20GB+ game to design, write, produce, balance etc then there's servers to be set up and lots of people working on the game and PR people and support people etc) making companies try and target a large demographic in order to make up the money sunk into the game - This then makes a lot of them seem quite samey, due to innovation being a risky move when trying to amass a large playerbase.

Then, due to how wide a demographic they get, they need to constantly be bringing out new content at a rate that means that the hardcore crowd don't get burnt out and leave, but doesn't make the more casual player feel as though they're never going to get through it all... This is very hard to do, since it can take a lot of time and man-power in order to put in more content and due to the nature of MMO's (With subscriptions and such) people are more likely to leave when things start getting stale due to constantly spending money on it.

All this stuff needs to happen WHILST there's other big name MMO's out there with already established playerbases (Eve, WoW, GW2 etc) making it harder to actually attract the MMO players in the first place (Without some sort of innovation, which is still risky)

I myself, have played many MMO's. The main cause of me leaving a game is because new content takes way longer than I can wait... The other cause is because of balance issues...

WoW - I've played on and off for 8 years. I typically burn out during the last patch of an expansion when nothing new is coming and it's just grind the same dungeons/raids once a week for several months.

Rift - I got burnt out on when I'd got every class up to max level and had done all the dungeons multiple times on each character on each difficulty and had done all the Raid Rifts multiple times and there was no new content (Even after I left, it still took several months before new content was put in... But by then I'd given up, since I'd probably tear through it and get bored again)

GW2 - I got bored with the lack of interesting end-game (There's Fractals... Or WvWvW... With the PvP being pretty much just server based whether or not you win on many server groupings). Also, having classes nerfed because bads are bad got really frustrating. Luckily, with no subscription fee, it is possible to easily log in now and then to check things out.

Warhammer Online - The lack of balance in PvP was a nightmare... It heavily favoured Glass Cannons (Bright Wizards, Sorcerer, Choppa, Slayer) pumping out way more AoE damage than every other class supported by healers completely negating their downside (BW/Sorc's self damage, Choppa/Slayer's armour reduction) and the complete lack of PvE after a certain level, making leveling up a matter of PvPing with a lot of better geared people (Even with the buff up, the higher level ranges had more people with really good sets of gear)

This weekend, I've been playing The Elder Scrolls Online beta... It looks like it could be promising for a while - Combat is decent, skill customization is pretty good, there's a lot of lore about the place (Like other TES games, NPC's can be asked questions about things and there's books and letters dotted about the place to read). But ultimately, my feelings is that it will get stale pretty easily unless it has some good PvP (Haven't tried it yet) and some decent end game content. If it drops the Subscription, I'd likely pick it up and play it for a long time, but if it keeps the sub, then I don't think it'd be worth it (Currently paying for WoW... Which I'm reluctant to leave even though I'm bored of it because I still talk to friends on it)

 

[Lucyfer86]

I've yet to feel anything like that with WoW, and i've played it all the way from vanilla times.
During that time i had few breaks sure, i tried different MMO's, but they quite couldn't match up and i ended up quitting them soon.

Couple have sticked with me tho, and i play them ocasionally. Games like The Secret World and Guild Wars (both of em).

 

[InfinityX]

The problem I find in most MMOs (with FF:ARR being the latest one) is that they don't really focus on a "endgame" and instead work on a "Theme Park MMO". while endgame can be different for everyone, most MMOs just go the route of:
Max Level Dungeon -> Low Tier Raid -> High Tier Raid
and that's what we get for an endgame. Thats what you level for. Sure there was Primal battles (which were cool at first) but then you realize they had the exact same attack pattern (and you also had to fight some of them 20+ times to get your gear)

As mentioned before, Developers want to cater to the most people, so they make all content accessible and able to be complete by anyone. While Im against locking content out, I still think it should be challenging. using GW2 as an example, all dungeons can be done without the best gear, but to make up for that, there's little to no challenge.

However, with some upcoming MMOs, we're seeing a bit of a change, like with what GW2 did, and that's the living world and exploration concept. I don't know if Wildstar is working on it(I think they are), but ESO's Player-driven World battle, or Everquest Next's changing world. This was something FF:ARR was missing, an actual world; it was all tiny instances.

Hopefully with the new MMos coming out, we can finally see something that will break the mold AND be successful at the same time, changing the way MMOs are made from a theme park to a sandbox.

IMO, sandbox MMOs work much better.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Well, technically Aion, Tera, GW2 and on in the other group SWTOR and Rift are two different mmorpg genres. Action and hotkey/point and click as people seem to like to call them.

One of those things is not like the others...

Tera is an action MMO. GW2 is a hybrid action/tab-target. Aion is as old school a point/click/hotbar MMO as they come.

Was just wondering if anyone else was having similar experiences with MMOs as myself.

Sounds like you're getting a bit worn out on theme park level/loot MMOs. That you name check EVE as the outlier is telling, as it's more of a sandbox.

You'll probably just want to take a break from theme parks for a bit until they feel less stale. There's not much in the way of new sandbox games on the horizon. MAYBE EQ Next, but we still don't know much about that one.

 

[DanielBrown]

Yeah, I grew tired of the casual gameplay of WoW, which got worse and worse with each expansion, and moved on to LOTRO. It was an amazing difference. LOTRO didn't hold your hand, you didn't have stats through the roof and even normal enemies could prove challenging as fuck. Four years later and now it's so fucking casual it hurts.

Still hoping to find a MMO that's old school in it's game play, but new ones suck and the old ones has gotten bad.
The action type game play, and moving in combat, doesn't suit me. I want tons of skills, lots of instances that require teamwork and tactics and gear griding.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Pretty much all the MMOs I've played I found incredibly stale. The one that held my interest the longest was Star Trek Online and that's mostly because it actually has some sort of semi-coherent story thread going on and the story missions could be done completely solo. Even if that did get fractured by the fact that the story missions could be replayed anytime you wanted and, like all MMOs, this was completely undermined by the niggling knowledge that these missions were completed by thousands of other players before me and would be completed by thousands of other players after me and that my completing them had 0 impact on the game world. Also it didn't help that they were very poorly written, like seriously.

 

[Silvanus]

I still enjoy GW2, but I'm really running out of things to do. The Living Story can't occupy players forever. They need to release an expansion, or at least clarify whether there will be one (one dev implied there may not be, before another attempted to retract that sentiment).

 

[mitchell271]

The only MMO I ever really got into was Guild Wars 2, but even then it wasn't exceptionally long. For a while, I'd play 3 hours a day just to get all my dailys, but with the elemental class, there's only so many attack. I prefer the WoW style, where your attacks are all essentially the same but they feel instantly more powerful, the ones in GW2 eventually just feel a little stale, especially since I've found the best gear style for my playing style, so my moves never switch up all that much. When I play DPS with a scepter/dagger combo, there's only about 15 moves that are really useful, plus a handful of skills.

Getting back into it though, this time with an engineer.

 

[Sight Unseen]

Elder Scrolls Online will hopefully address that. From what I've seen of it it seems a lot more "like skyrim with other people running around" than "WoW with Dark Elves and Khajiit" and the PVP looks truly different and awesome. The graphics are also AMAZING and almost on par with Skyrim itself. you can play the game fully in first person with real-time combat and the exploration aspects of the classic TES games are alive and well here.

I know that everyone and their dog is already ruling out ESO as a cash-in game that will spark and then quickly die, but I think people should really give it a harder look before they immediately dismiss it. It seems like it's going to be A LOT of fun for anyone who liked TES.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Elder Scrolls Online will hopefully address that. From what I've seen of it it seems a lot more "like skyrim with other people running around" than "WoW with Dark Elves and Khajiit" and the PVP looks truly different and awesome. The graphics are also AMAZING and almost on par with Skyrim itself. you can play the game fully in first person with real-time combat and the exploration aspects of the classic TES games are alive and well here.

I know that everyone and their dog is already ruling out ESO as a cash-in game that will spark and then quickly die, but I think people should really give it a harder look before they immediately dismiss it. It seems like it's going to be A LOT of fun for anyone who liked TES.

If I'd been in beta, I'd imagine I'd say something like "I played it for a few hours and the combat system was the worst I've ever encountered in 30 years of gaming". Weightless, zero sense of impact, spammy. I'd probably say that this made me very sad, because I imagine I'd have thought the game did a reasonable job evoking the Elder Scrolls games, if in a kind of slightly off-brand way.

 

[Sight Unseen]

Elder Scrolls Online will hopefully address that. From what I've seen of it it seems a lot more "like skyrim with other people running around" than "WoW with Dark Elves and Khajiit" and the PVP looks truly different and awesome. The graphics are also AMAZING and almost on par with Skyrim itself. you can play the game fully in first person with real-time combat and the exploration aspects of the classic TES games are alive and well here.

I know that everyone and their dog is already ruling out ESO as a cash-in game that will spark and then quickly die, but I think people should really give it a harder look before they immediately dismiss it. It seems like it's going to be A LOT of fun for anyone who liked TES.

If I'd been in beta, I'd imagine I'd say something like "I played it for a few hours and the combat system was the worst I've ever encountered in 30 years of gaming". Weightless, zero sense of impact, spammy. I'd probably say that this made me very sad, because I imagine I'd have thought the game did a reasonable job evoking the Elder Scrolls games, if in a kind of slightly off-brand way.

So what you're saying is that the combat perfectly captures the essence of what all TES combat systems have been in all of their games.

If you had played the beta.

To me it looks like the combat system is similar to Skyrim except that you have MMO-like skills that you can use that consume your magicka/stamina instead of just regulat attacks/spells. And that's fine by me. I never had that big of a problem with TES's combat systems since IMO the game is more about exploring and discovery than the minute to minute combat.

Also, don't you think that the combat might get improved once you got to the higher level areas and started co-operating with other classes to take advantage of synergies and the monsters actually got to be reasonably challenging? If you had played the beta?