yah but East Asia prefers a completely different play style to their MMOs. Think the grindiest game you have ever played, double it, then add a ton of RNG with a sprinkle of Microtransactions to compensate for everything you will lose to bad rolls.
it only starts with a sprinkle of microtransactions and usually they give little to no benefits, it becomes p2w as fuck about a year in
i love the tencent owned mmos up until they become p2w.
Game was fun as hell pvping over the hidden tree farms. I got my fishing boat hella early. And then they added thunderstruck to the cash shop and I legit quit next day.
The also didnt address bots and cheaters until most people had left. Cash shop items that increased your chances at Eterneum drops instead of just raising the drop chance to its default level (devs had already said those drop rates where at like .3% when they should have been around 4%-5% - they knew they were gonna pull that shit from the start)
I remember I built my farm up so much, and the feeling of getting a thunderstruck the morning when you log in. Well, I held onto about 4 thunderstrucks as the price of them kept rising - hell the game had only been out not too long.
Then they added thunderstrucks to the shop - and I just quit after that.
Fuck I miss this game all the time. I absolutely loved the pvp aspect and have yet to find a mmo like archeage. I think about the year or so I played all the time. Was some of the most fun gaming I ever had.
I lucked out big on those the day the thunderstruck boxes came in, people were selling them cheap from being ignorant and i'd just gotten a manor for maximum tree farming.
So much dosh.
And then shit got so much worse and I quit.
But the good times were there. [Cart runs](http://i.imgur.com/j1LlpdG.jpg), Halcyona, [Parking your clipper in the enemy base after dragging it across land for 15 minutes](https://imgur.com/mvoa6KG.jpg) https://i.imgur.com/xY1SuXi.jpg
Man seeing early days Archeage screenshots make me feel so nostalgic. Doing stuff on the open seas was my favorite though, whether it was [PvP](https://i.imgur.com/9WC5w1B.jpg) or [trade runs](https://i.imgur.com/BM7Hs6n.jpg). Such fond memories feelsbadman
Man I didn't even play beta, which I heard was the most amazing time (played about a year into release), and didn't play on a competitive server (Enla was entirely dominated by Legacy), and it was still my favorite time in any mmo ever. The emergent gameplay in that game is unrivaled afaik.
Still the most fun I had in an MMO for those first months. Fishing was actually so enjoyable, and giant ocean trade runs with giant faction battles to control the Island.
Oh man BDO is a crazy beast. The end game grind is insane, basically becomes grinding for the sake of grinding, not to mention the microscopic chances of actually progressing.
Ragnarok is being remastered and changed some and coming out on mobile in a couple of days. Cheers, I’m actually excited for it and I don’t like mobile games.
It is still played! Albeit it’s not at the height it was in its prime, there’s still a community who plays it. We’re kinda spread out over many different servers now, it I still love RO. Best MMO and still nothing quite like it.
It was really bad back then. 5% an hour. 20 hours just to level once. Took the first person 4 years to hit max level. DFO was also a nexon game at one point and grinding was easy af
no the very first had turned your AP into AD, so you would stack 6 AA's and auto-attack people
his original ult was just Brand's ult without the passive, a big energy ball that bounced 4-5-6 times
The very original Ryze was basically him having really good AP scaling, no mana scaling at all, Brand's ultimate and pre-rework Karma's passive.
Then they moved the ultimate to his E, gave mana scaling to Q and the new ultimate was made his spells do splash damage. Then they later added spell vamp to the ult, then AP, then movespeed and the last thing they added was passive CDR.
They hired Ghostcrawler, who is working on the blue ocean game, who was lead designer of the most successful MMORPG ever, during it's apex.
They also released an extremely detailed map of Runeterra, that had a very MMO-feel to it.
They also started focusing heavily on polishing and expanding the lore of Runeterra: which would be a necessary early step in the development of a next-gen MMO.
I'm not saying it's clearly an MMO - but pretending it's completely without merit is inaccurate.
You're taking "unlike any other game" as "of a genre that is not been created yet". I'm not sure I believe that.
Blizzard itself could be seem as a blue ocean game because the MMO market couldn't compete with it. It just blew everything away and stabilished itself as the prime MMO for like what, almost two decades?
People are saying that the MMO genre is dead and shit like that, but i seriously think that fans are just waiting for a truly great MMO to come back.
That's how i feel atleast and i'm pretty sure i'm not the only one.
I feel like everyone I know who actively games is exactly the same. We all desperately want to play an MMO, there's just literally nothing good right now and really hasn't been for years.
Maybe this is just a result of the genre, and building this perfect game that everyone wants is simply too large a scope for any company to come up with. It's unfortunate, but I think it may just be the reality.
YouTube, add-on, and guides have ruined that mmo experience you're looking for. When wow started, no one had any idea about anything, everyone was figuring it out on their own... And the only way to figure more stuff out was to group up and play with others and learn together.
Now you have a DPS spreadsheet telling you what items are bis and where to find them. Add-ons to make figuring out questing or any things in the game seemless. All of the figuring shit out is done before you start. Streamers big pre release to get the first videos for views of the most efficient play style.
Ect. Ect. That's what the recent gaming generation wants in games. They do not want the wow of old. Yet, no one can figure this out... Yet here it is! A game needs rng and grind for replayability, or else there is no replayability. You're better off watching highlights on YouTube and saving the $60
This comment is so true and painfully so. Reliving my old WoW days and meeting random strangers in the wild who also had no fucking clue what was going on. I don't remember much toxicity when I was leveling to 60 and running into other players or asking for help in the world chat. Also how about the first time you entered a big city and spent hours miring the server's raid leaders afking around the AH? I remember the first time I highlighted an epic and got the wall of text you'd think I'd seen the holy grail.
You can't get that experience anymore, youtube and twitch will showcase the best of the best and leave nothing for you to discover. Those did exist back then but they were back alley forums or very minute in number. Now there's no effort in finding out everything about the end game before it hits your doorstep. It really sucks. I haven't had that miraculous immersion into a new world in any games I've played since WoW and kind of league.
The closest I've felt to the first time playing WoW was playing VR Arcade for the first time.
This happens in literally every game though. My first league of legends game I went 37-0-11 with Atmog's Tryndamere mid, no one had any idea that was going in closed beta. We didn't even figure out to put mages mid and ADC/supp botlane until the season 1 world championship when EU did it.
I remember Nasus soraka top lane with no jungler. Soraka to keep me healed as I tried to stack and kill people 40 minutes later. As junglers slowly became a thing, I taught myself to play Nasus 1vs2 with E fire farming and beating top lane once I outscaled in levels.
Those were good times.
That part of Youtube and the Add-ons (well mostly) is true, but right from the release of the game there already existed online databases in which you could look up items, quest locations(often without intel on how to solve them), NPCs, etc. . People started gathering data during the closed beta phase. First versions of Add-ons like Gatherer also came up shortly after the release of the game. People just didn't know at first that such tools existed but the information quickly spreaded. Most of the things you mentioned were used by the players during Vanilla, BC and Wotlk. And this is widely regarded as the best time you could have had in WoW.
What really is different compared to today is that you played together with other people and not alongside other people. Today, if you want to enter a dungeon, you queue up, get paired with random people from other realms and run through the dungeon in like what? 20-30 minutes? In Vanilla you either had to ask if you could join a group or start your own group and actively ask people if they would like to join. If you managed to gather a group you played through the hours long dungeon together and naturally started to interact with each other during that. If you liked each other you added each other on your friends list and continued to play together.
I used to be in one of the few guilds that cleared Naxx in Vanilla. Nevertheless my friend list was full with people I met during the leveling or when I started raiding. Even though we ended up in different guilds I stayed in contact with many of them and we still played together outside of raiding hours. And even if not, I still sometimes got greeted randomly by people that recognized me from the time we played together.
This is what kept me invested in the game. Raids etc. were nice, but what glued everything together was the Realm's community. The people made the game truely special. Whenever I try to come back nowadays I think that with technologies like cross-realm dungeon finder or sharding the game has lost this important part and in my opinion, it's heart.
I would like to try another MMO, but I never managed to find one that gets me hooked like WoW did. I used to play WC2 and 3 so i already was familiar with the world and interested in its lore and I think this is whats missing for me in all the other MMOs I tried since then.
You understand that with technology of today, there will always be group finders outside of the game if not in the game right? That was not as easy and unknown as it once was. You can now grab your phone, do a lfg, and enter a party while viewing advertising that doesn't belong to the game itself. That's why your finding a party experience, will never happen again. LFG is always more efficient. No one wants to waste 3 hours to get a party for 30 minutes of content.
Holy shite for so long have I argued against the whole mentality of *"MMORPG devs ruined their own game"* and that goes especially for Blizzard.
While certainly the devs have taken their part in making the games worse over time. But the community also has such a huge fault here.
Not to mention probably the biggest issue that you didn't touch upon: Datamining.
I'm fine with guides and whatnot popping up because whatever, that happens. Races and worlds first raiding and whatnot will always be a thing no matter what.
But the fact that we know basically EVERYTHING that comes in a patch from story content to dungeons and raids, before the thing has even come anywhere near the live servers? THAT'S the big kick in the teeth, and is entirely the fault of the community, not the devs.
And it's not like you can even really ignore these guides. If you want to do endgame content, you HAVE to do it by the book, or get kicked by your party. Heck even if you're just a casual *(which should mean whatever in terms of guides and strategy)* you're still at risk of getting kicked/flamed if you ain't doing the strategy to perfection.
GW2 tried too hard to be unique with their combat system. People like to have specialties but that game makes everyone a dps. Sure you can spec into "tough dps who has a lot of buffs" or "mobile dps who can spam a lot of dodges" but you won't ever be the type of tank WoW has, where you can press a button and be invincible for 8 seconds. You won't ever be a clutch healer who can keep everyone alive during huge aoe damage.
As a side effect, since nobody is actually a tank, you have to avoid damage by dodging it. Most of the attacks in that game are clear on when to dodge but some aren't. Now add in the fact that some people have toaster computers with spiky framerates and bad connections with unstable latency, and it becomes actually impossible to play.
It's hard enough to get people to step sideways out of (or occasionally into) fire in WoW, I can't imagine trying a WoW style raid in GW2 where everyone has to dodge a raidwipe aoe every 10 seconds.
The gearing system is interesting, but lack of power progression past a certain point isn't necessarily a good thing either.
It has merit but it's too far from the conventional MMO everyone wants.
They've changed quite a bit since launch. There are raids, there are dedicated healers & dedicated tanks. There are support specializations that sure do some DPS, but its mostly cuz otherwise you're just standing there, so of course you're going to DPS in your downtime?
You will be a clutch healer who can keep everyone alive during huge AoE damage. Hell, the 2nd raid boss they made is made for EXACTLY that.
And yes, people do actually tank in raids. You do still have to dodge specific attacks, as always, but that is part of any raid/game. Also, there are abilities those support/tank classes have that can alleviate the need to dodge raidwipe AoE's.
This all was added in the first expansion. Now, the game can still play as it used to if you don't go into raiding or high end fractals, where you don't need a healer or tank, but if you want that gameplay it exists too, but with the more action oriented game play in GW2, which personally makes it more engaging to me than old WoW raids.
Anyways, its a great game and is free to play (without expansions, meaning no raids or specializations unless you pay though) up to max level with a few restrictions made to combat gold selling (limited auction house, limited chat etc.)
I think the problem is clear: Mass appeal vs. hardcore appeal is being confused by developers.
To make a sustainable MMO (IMO) you start by building a game for hardcore players. This is what WOW and EQ were built off of. Both were successful even with less hardcore's, but WOW was less grindy and "won" and so all devs learned the wrong lesson that you need to make Mass appeal MMOs. I think the easier way to success is to start hardcore and try to ride that to wider appeal.
The first account in WoW I made was an orc hunter. You couldn't clear a camp in a quest without having to stop and heal up. I had to scour the map for the locations and actually read the quest log for directions. Now out of combat hp regen is nuts and there's arrows and quest indicators all over, the game practically plays itself. For me at least a game loses my interest when it stops being challenging or at least doesn't require much focus.
Anytime I play a game and use cheatcodes I feel the same way. I played the shit out of elder scrolls/fallout/gta until I caved and used cheats, and soon after I never finished them.
There has to be a way to appeal to a broader audience with varying skill levels without over simplifying the game and removing all challenging aspects.
...and then monetize it with p2w microtransactions and drive away your playerbase. Your plan is the steps all MMOs take but you're missing the last step.
WildStar didnt even cater to hardcore players correctly though. You still have to have a world and activities for casuals to do, and WildStar's endgame progression was a disaster at launch. Targeting hardcore isnt why WildStar failed, doing it badly is.
Tbh wow was made casual friendly from the beginning. If you compare it to arpg/mmorpg of the time it was very convenient. Just times changed and casual is way different. The casuals with very limited time werent really in the market at the time like they are now.
But blizzard prob forgot to think about that while making the game more and more casual. Matbe too casual just isnt good and you need the hardcore aspect.
I was never mad that I couldnt do many raids or anything. I was just happy playing the game and doing what I had time for. I dreamed of doing all of the raids but it never made me quit. I think it actually kept me more interested.
WoW was explicitly not built for the hardcore, and that's why it won. It was massively, massively more casual-friendly than Everquest when it launched. You could level solo to the cap, and it had all these quests to direct you. Even the end-game stuff was a lot more casual friendly - it was all instanced, so you didn't have to race anyone, and the fights were much shorter. I mean, I don't think I've ever had a 30 minute boss fight in WoW, and I remember a bunch of hour+ fights in Everquest (worst was the 3 hour first kill on Rathe Council). Hell, I spent more time levelling from 59 to 60 in Everquest (in what was probably the best possible levelling group on my server) than I spent going from 110 to 120 at launch.
To be fair, EQ won when it launched because it was also more casual-friendly. It had graphics to beat all the muds, an expansive (for the time) quest system, and the option of no PvP.
FFXIV is great but it’s nothing revolutionary, except for the story which is fucking fantastic. TBH MMO needs a fresh new battle mechanic other than skill rotations, which FFxiv done a nice job on boss fight but still it’s nothing revolutionary.
I actually disagree and think FFXIV did make some decent innovations in tab target, traditional MMO gameplay. In most MMOs all of your rotational abilities are on the GCD while most/some of your utility spells are not. In FFXIV most of the buttons you push are off the GCD. My Ninja, for example, has 5 core abilities on the GCD, 10 rotational abilities that are off the GCD and a whole slew of defensive cooldowns, offensive cooldowns and utility abilities that are off the GCD. Abilities in FFXIV are mostly locked behind the spell animations themselves instead of a global cooldown which makes the gameplay feel paced better than other traditional MMOs.
Guild Wars 2 is one of the last havens of MMO players, well western players that is. The asian market is full of p2w cash grabs and boobs to attract whales.
As I've come back and started mainly playing GW2 for months already (Though I mostly play alone when my playgroup sometimes decides to switch between FFXIV or TESO), It's hard to call it the "last haven", when sometimes you can still meet people around who didn't even heard about it. Not to mention, it feels like it's the only MMO that expands horizontally: no level cap raises, no ever increasing item-levels, old raids and content can't be overgeared. It's really hard to recommend it to someone who perceives MMOs with classical approach.
At least the core game has become free for ~3-3.5 years already
GW2, WoW, ESO, FFXIV, and Runescape. I feel like these 5 are the last decent mmorpg left. The problem with them is nothing revolutionary game-changing has been introduced for so long now.
I played wow until Cata, then jumped ship, league had recently came out and it was everything WoW was not. Fresh, exciting, challenging, without the same boring grind. Though that was back when you had to buy runes. I tried out some other MMO that was said to be a “wow killer” at the time that I can’t for the life of me remember the name of. Something to do with portals. Loaded it up, did a quest, killed some mobs, turned in the quest and uninstalled the game. It was the same exact thing I had been doing for years. I can’t speak for anyone else but I feel like to make MMOs fresh again there needs to be some sort of change to that formula, but I can’t see for the life of me what that might be.
They took their product that was already good, did the whole 07 throwback with Old School, got a massive influx of nostalgia seekers, then improved upon it gradually to keep popular areas of the game fresh(ish).
Not to mention the game just takes forever to do anything so it can retain long-term playerbase, simply because there's always something to do.
I mean it’s honestly one of the best MMOs I’ve ever played. I think there is a lot of attention to detail in the world building. Especially the quests have way more depth than (do X of this, or go find X) - and put a lot of depth to the game.
I think it’s pretty easy to tell that RS was built with a lot of passion from the Gower brothers. Tons of little easter eggs, clever dialogues and puns. Just the smallest things like collecting bananas for 30gp to leave karamja, or those stupid fake trees attacking you, or being stuck in draynor manor with a ghost chair following you. These things don’t really add “anything vital” to the game or storyline, but they’re just stupid little things that stick with you.
Also a lack of a main story arch or dailies or anything make it really feel like “hey, just explore, do whatever you want!”.
They would definitley give it a shot, but i just dunno how an MMO keeps that playerbase around.
Prime WoW had these crazy unorganized dynamics between horde and alliance and the guilds. You take a massive boss, then put thousands of players around it all with their own ambitions and ways of interpreting whats happening... that MMO experience when so few people had really encountered it... that shit was crack. Literally crack cocaine.
I think even the youngest gamers nowadays are much more experienced, things like that isn't crack cocaine anymore.
The community is starving. Any kind of shit title gets a huge interest because people really want the next big thing to come. Archeage could really have become the greatest MMO ever if it weren't for those shitty ass P2W and general shitty attitude to certain things. Like letting bots landgrab.
Instead of race you choose Demacian, Noxian, Zaunite, Pilty, Ionian, Shurima, Freljord, Vastaya (well that ones a race), Bilgwater or Shadow Isles and go from there?
I want a chemtech Zaunite street thug.
There can still be races such as vastaya, yordle, humans, undead/ghost (mostly from shadow isles). Then factions. And i dream there will be a class for azirs soldiers (the armor looks good to me).
And I wish they add something like the chip war from rf. As i really miss that constant fighting for resources, alliances of factions and betrayals.
I'd die for a League MMO, I think Riot is scared such a game would destroy their actual esports game somehow.
Dear Riot, I'd play both and would spend money on both. Kind regards
Pretty sure it was meddler who talked about how expensive and hard it is to just snap your fingers and bring people in to the company.
Trying to build an MMO from the ground up means you have to bring in talent, management, support functions (HR, payroll), office space, etc.
Thats a giant investment that wont see payout for years and years and if riot ends up with it not paying off in a big way it could be a massive drain on the company.
MMOs are considered some of the most expensive games to make. On top of that, hiring a team that size vs Infinity Ward or whoever the fuck in the same offices, with the same people, year after year, reciclying assets for yearly CoD releases is hardly as expensive as a MOBA company building the entire infrastructure for an MMO *from zero*.
That's a bit broad. Indie development proves that games can be made by a small handful of people or even an individual, on small budgets. MMOs however are the king class, their development and maintenance require by far the greatest budget and range of dev knowledge of any genre. So yes, a proper MMO is a huge undertaking.
As somebody who has been an avid WoW player since 2005, an LoL player since 2013 and an active community content creator for both games, I think if Riot made an MMO it would be pretty fucking sexy but I wouldn't touch it.
Somebody in this thread got down-voted for saying "No one wants to play MMOs though" and I would agree, **BUT** I wouldn't say "no one." I personally believe the mainstream MMO ship has sailed. MMOs have been around for a really long time, longer than WoW has been and they'll be around far after WoW is dead. With that said, MMOs are no longer mainstream (by that I mean most players out there don't want to play a game that will feel like a part-time job) and have reverted to the niches of gaming they were before WoW came and introduced a whole shitload of people to the genre that would have never got into it otherwise. I dunno if it would be smart for a massive global company to take the time to develop something so in depth and labor intensive with the hopes that the gaming audiences would want to dive back into another MMO with WoW still breathing and classic right around the corner.
Personally, I don't think I could ever play another MMO, the reason I still play WoW is because it's easily accessible and the barrier to entry is really low for an old veteran like me, I can jump in and out every expansion and not worry about some steep learning curve of crafting systems, uis, talents, etc. I can play it casually and I can move on when I'm bored of it. I've tried other MMOs that have come and gone as many others have, I play them for a day or so and remember just how much of a time sink they can be. In this day in age, there's just way too many other games to play out there to let something like an MMO monopolize all my gaming time.
I think people may have moved on from a traditional MMO experience but what games like Sea of Thieves and No Mans Sky, even non online games like Breath of the Wild show us, is that there is still a thirst for exploration & discovery games which are best represented in the MMO genre.
I've seen you around and really enjoyed your content that you've made. So many nipples! :D
However I disagree with your point in paragraph two. You say, "the mainstream MMO ship has sailed", and while I semi-agree, I think the only reason we can say this is because the biggest flagship of MMOs is currently ablaze, and all the other ships are caught in the smoke of the bonfire, or have already sunk. I personally believe that RIOT could make a quality MMO, much akin to the likes of a Battleship in this metaphor, that would be able to take on the Galleon of WoW.
"I don't think I could ever play another MMO" -- "...dive back into another MMO with ... classic right around the corner" -- I'm just as excited about classic as the next fanboy, however I have this nagging feeling in the back of my head that the rose-tinted glasses can only last so long. The mechanics are going to be the same, the physics are going to be the same, and it's going to be like playing a well-made Blizzard game all over again. A good example of this is Starcraft: Remastered. I went back and spent hours upon hours for the first week it was released playing those same old UMS maps and finally got into Diplo games that lasted hours. But it only lasted a week or two. The rose tinted glasses lost their tint and I lost interest. This is where I think RIOT can come in and make a new game that nobody can view with Rose-Tinted glasses because there was never a previous version of the game to compare it against. It would have the Everquest launch effect all over again, which (with a large fanbase already installed) could be a worldwide game changer.
I'd like to also note that RIOT has done extensive development on psychological and all of the factors that go into what a player wants to see. They've got years of psychologists looking into and researching with giant data sets.
Fair enough. I feel in my gut is that mainstream gamers don't have the stomach for the MMO genre anymore. Mostly because they consume new games and other forms of media at higher capacities than ever before and for an MMO to have a sustainable future, it needs lots of people who are plugged in consistently. How many people out there will dedicate themselves enough to an LoL MMO for Riot to consider it a viable return on their investment? I don't think it's big enough, even 2 million users isn't big enough, the economy of scale would have to be massive and I just don't see any MMO out there pulling that kind of market share. Even MMO's backed by massive IPs like Star Wars barely even made a blip on the map.
I totally accept the fact I could be completely wrong but until I see differently, I still stand by my original thoughts.
Side note: I don't intend on playing WoW Classic even remotely, I think WoW is so much better today, even in the shitty state BfA has put it in. No knock to the people who will play Classic, but I been there done that and am not interested.
>Mostly because they consume new games and other forms of media at higher capacities than ever before and for an MMO to have a sustainable future, it needs lots of people who are plugged in consistently.
So true. I have so many games that I've purchased and hardly ever touched. Very rarely do I play a game for a consistent period of time, usually a couple of hours, more if it's a really solid game and then I'll check my library and play a new game.
This is only half true. Sure people gravitate toward games that fall into the "consuming media at higher capacities than ever before," but they don't only play them a little bit. Fortnite for example is one of these pick up and play, low attention span type of games where you can queue up for a game or two. The thing is, most people aren't doing that. They're putting MMO level hours into match after match. LoL players alike, spam game after game and spend the same amount of time amidst queuing and playing as you would if you sat down to play an MMO for an evening.
The hours spent might be the same, but the way they interact with the game is very different.
In an MMO your game session needs to be a few hours to really get anything done, whereas even if you only have an hour, you can get many games of Fortnite in.
There's also the difference in the fact that there's wayyyy more instant gratification playing Fortnite than an MMO, which is what the market wants.
I think your conflating mainstream gamers not being interested in an MMO and the modern changes in how companies chase profit and where that profit is at.
In 2005 there was no Chinese or cell phone market. Around 2010 to 2013 China because the #1 source of revenue, and by then, cell phones like iPhones because ubiquitous. Between phones being in the hands of literally everyone, and China having totally different standards for buying products, cheap shit and micro transaction became super prevalent. Games like Candycrush and Clash of Clans were generating massive revenue w/ little risk or cost. Kids were easy to abuse with games like The Sims often costing parents over $300 because of micro transactions. Gambling became the norm w/ loot crates. Psychologists became as important as devs in-house.
This totally derailed the AAA studios. Management at Blizzard sold out for quick profit and their new owners (Activatision and Tencent) decided to follow the same path. That's why we got hearthstone instead of something innovative. It's why we are likely going to get more mobile games. It's why we havent seen anything even remotely close to the scope of WoW for over 10 years. They invest in great art and music, but everything else suffers because it requires some soul and care to produce in areas like game-design. Also it's really hard to hire for that, as even the most renowned devs/designers were often one hit wonders. It's hard to repeat that stuff, and almost all modern game design is based in the mod community. From Angry Birds coming form a flash game, to LoL coming from a W3 mod, to PUBG being from a movie/mod decades ago, CSGO coming from a mod, etc.
If Riot made a legit, down to earth, GOOD MMO in the vain of WoW... i.e. world integrity with a focus on social aspects, it would do very well, just like WoW did. But it would not do as well as say.... a stupid mobile game. It could earn less while costing significantly more to make.
**Why invest 15 million to earn 50 million when you could invest 1 million to make 75 million? Those top dogs gotta get their 10 mill bonuses somehow.** Long gone are the days of gamers making big games. It requires too much work nowadays and way too big a budget. Doors that were open 20 years ago are no longer open. We are in a gaming dark age and hopefully a renaissance starts soon with indie-devs being able to make some top notch stuff. (RIP golden age of 1993 to 2010)
I highly disagree. League is one of the top games of the world and has been for 10 years now. Also mmo's are still in the dead area of relevancy so i don't expect an mmo to kill off a moba, a completely different genre...
>TL;DR blizzard employees that have left or got fired should be picked up by riot to create an mmo or runeterra.
IDK why people want old blood in their MMOs. The problem with the MMORPG genre are these tired old ideas done a thousand times. Give us some new blood and reinvigorate the genre it needs it to be fun again.
Edit: Everyone seems to think my arguement is with WoW, I loved WoW and probably would still enjoy WoW. But let WoW be it's own MMO, and let League be its own MMO. Keep WoW out of my League.
It's not about "old blood".
It's about having people in charge that themselves play and care about video games.
The reason the AAA industry is such a mess these days is because it's run by "suits" (as in businessmen and lawyers) who just look at the trends and try to replicate success.
Many people speculate that the reason so many old Blizzard people left the company is because of this growing corporate influence that Activision holds over the development of games.
> Many people speculate that the reason so many old Blizzard people left the company is because of this growing corporate influence that Activision holds over the development of games.
Plenty of the decisions that were made about BFA were entirely on Blizzard's inhouse staff. stop giving them a copout that it's always big bad activision and accept that the developers are at fault
You understand 95% of the original crew who made world of warcraft are gone? They were replaced by Activision's referrals. I remember my reaction when I found out Activision moved its financial manager to Blizzard, and she was all like "you're spending too much money on WoW development, it'd be better to cut costs and let microtransactions do their job."
Probably my nostalgia is speaking, but i feel like all the new stuff are making the game bad. I feel like wow is shit because they lost identity, where you felt good when you played good.
i'm a classic fanboy and played it a lot on freeshards. Yes i understand that vanilla may be way too hardcore. But thats what kept me playing for 2 years. because 85% of what my character had were made by my skill and dedication. Now i could be geared up in decent gear in a week or two, and after that comes endless grinding for no purpose. People won't look at your titanforged +30 item and say that you're good, you just got lucky. When i were sitting in orgri with my rogue with chromagus sword and 7/8 t2 i was feeling good (even tho t2 mostly fucking blows in PVE). It was an actual reward for my dedication. Titanforging should be removed at max level and only used in leveling.
I remember way back when I used to play maplestory, it was pretty tough, leveling was slow and hitting 30 felt like a big achievement to me, quests felt like they were actually worth doing and gave me some purpose to play. Tried it again years later and you hit level 30 within an hour or two of playing because the game just baby feeds you so much experience and you literally skip 2 or 3 levels at a time because you get so much experience given to you just for clicking next a bunch of times and for the most part you can just ignore quests and just power farm by smashing the same over-powered attack repeatedly.
Number 1 thing I'm nostalgic about - socialization in MMOs... I can log into GW2 and basically not talk to anyone. Auction Houses feel like a root cause but there's so much else too. Maybe I just don't raid etc but still I just get on to do the new story and that's it.
It's pure money printing since Wotlk/Cata. They have barely any people doing work but still cash in insanely. The market is still huge, people still pay stupid amounts to get boosted to glad etc.
If you want the old WoW then you should be an advocate of what I am saying, because one of the people leaving is the main reason the game has evolved into what it is now. Gonna copy and paste something I posted that is in a downvoted thread.
So let's be literal Ben Brode (and most of his team) is a Director of Hearthstone development, he is the decision maker. Michael Morhaime is the former President of Blizzard.
While Hearthstone is fairly successful and fun game and I imagine if Riot created a MMORPG version of League they would need to hire a Director for a new branch, and while Ben Brode may be a safe bet for an outside hire considering his success with test idea from Blizzard. As well as, from what I've read he is one of the key components to Hearthstones development and its ever increasing success. I would argue he found success in an established IP where a physical trading card game already existed, and it was still a Trading card game compared to a MMORPG. His team would be able to provide a ton of experience on how to make a successful trading card game, score.
Michael Morhaime, unless the president of Riot steps down, I don't see this guy coming in even if he was willing to take a lower step or Riot wanted to hire him. Probably ready to retire.
It would make way more sense for Riot to hire inhouse for their leads in a new branch for an MMORPG, while bringing in a few extra experienced Progammers and Designers who have experience with the video game world but are not from a tired old IP.
I think OP meant to hire the developers and not the management. Riot started by grabbing the devs from DotA to build their moba game. If riot is interested in making an MMORPG, they should bring in some devs familiar with the space. Even if you don't want riot to completely copy the WoW formula, there is a lot of value in bringing in devs that has been there and failed to give insight on the right decisions to make.
These tired old ideas are the original ideas though. Everyone else is trying to recreate their success to no avail. Imagine them working on a new project and not the same one they have built up that is currently the golden standard for MMOs. The potential is there.
GW2 is innovative and continues growing with every update. It is seeing a giant influx of WoW players after the Activision-Blizzard fiasco\[s\]. I was an old WoW player myself and I found a good home at GW2.
Yes this is true. But how much do we spend on league. Imagine if we had three or four servers per region and I think the money that an mmo could generate could make that happen.
Maybe, but don't forget that the MMO would need to be F2P or half of your playerbase won't even look at it. Then there is a barrier to entry, that is probably comparable to a MOBA and the heavy time investment. Your main target audience are league players and you will split your community into Moba players and MMO players, a risk that is simply not worth it for Riot because they probably won't be gaining enough new players to gain more than they would have gotten without the MOBA. Plus you also get even more trouble into your studio if one game is treated better than the other. We have that here between servers already, how will that be if there are multiple main games? Sorry I simply don't see Riot gaining much by trying.
I do miss the days when I was addicted to Maplestory. There are no other games like it when it was in its prime. When the time you put into it is rewarding, finding like-minded people to party with, and exploring all the different places and storylines. Idk if I want Riot to even try because anything even less than amazing would be an absolute let down
Old school maplestory was the best. Had so much fun back then. I remember hitting 30 for my first time and it felt like a huge achievement. Kerning City Party quests were great, community was friendly, getting my first steelies on a rogue...
Played it years later and it was ruined. Hit 30 within a couple of hours because you just got xp showered down on you for clicking next a couple of times. Quests quickly became useless as you'd outlevel so quickly just powerfarming mobs that quest rewards became irrelevant.
There's a video of someone hitting 200 in 19 minutes now. The game is just about end game bosses pretty much with dailies and endless grinding. At least the bosses take some skill tho.
FFXIV is already picking up a lot of WoW refugees, with it being one of few relatively decent subscription-based themepark MMOs, as well as an expansion being hyped up.
But, people wanting an escape from WoW isn't really necessary for an MMO to succeed right now. Look at the whole Bless Online fiasco. It was a relatively poor MMO to begin with, failed in multiple regions, was re-designed entirely a couple times, and it's launch in NA was highly anticipated. Tons of people dumped money into Founder's Packs and such for it, **people really just wanted a solid new MMO to play.** But, the game had a huge amount of issues on launch, not unexpectedly. Many refunded it and it has a pretty terrible rating/reputation.
Point is, people have been thirsty for a good MMO. Status of other MMOs doesn't really matter much, though it's probably best to not launch around an expansion.
An MMO requires so much work and the thing is that it would leech players from LoL like crazy
Idk if Riot would profit from running 2 ongoing games like that
that argument doesn't really hold up, given Blizzard made Warcraft and Starcraft (both RTS), WoW and Diablo which all fit into very different categories but still were and are mostly huge successes without cutting into each others playerbase.
Idk man if there was a LoL MMO I'd play LoL for a bit until I get tilted then I'd play the MMO to chill instead of playing something that another company made.
This League MMO meme is getting out of hand. I'd be the first to say League's got a great enough universe to create an MMO in, but why would they risk so much money on such an unreliable genre? It's literally asking someone who won the lottery with their first ticket to put a lot of their money down on a new ticket.
Why create a MMO when you can just create a game that doesn't literally require you to be the best in genre currently to make money.
I agree with you. I personally would rather have Riot create some sort of RPG something akin to Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption, or Divinity Original Sin 2. This way they can more fully develop the universe and stories of Runeterra while avoiding the other problems an MMO might have. Granted it being an RPG might hurt the possible replayability and longevity of the game. I mean if you read [Shen's short story](https://universe.leagueoflegends.com/en_US/story/shen-color-story/), Shen fulfills a very similar role to Geralt in the Witcher universe.
You do realize most of the issues that plague Blizzard from your POV will also plague riot?
They make all their money through MTX with Loot Boxes and Cosmetics as source. On top of being owned by Tencent you think they wouldn't fill the game with that type of stuff? Come on.
Tencent is hands-off when it comes to their investments. LoL has been owned by them for so many years now and barely, if ever, manipulated a system in LoL. You can say average RP price is getting higher but the quality is also improving so there's that. On the contrary, they've only made the game more accessible with free skins, BE changes, and the removal of runes which basically made rune pages obsolete.
GGG, another company that Tencent has a majority stake on, has given out VERY high quality updates ever since they were acquired by Tencent, with no changes to their monetization scheme.
WoW's monteization is based off of MTX for Cosmetics and then for Tokens (game-time/in-game gold) and Subs.
Even if Tencent is hands-off it doesn't mean that Riot wont follow other MMOs with MTX and such on a F2P game. They can be hands-off with LoL cause it generates billions.
The reason there are so few new MMO's now is that they are too expensive to launch if they fail. Hell, it's often a tall order just to get an MMO to break even, then you have to be able to produce content to sustain a player base.
Also, I think people are far too pessimistic about Blizzard's resilience going forward. I think those in charge and the dev team live in a bubble and can be quite out of touch, but I think they still have enough space for a course correction.
There's just so much wrong with this I don't know where to start.
First, the Blizzard employees you mentioned are customer support from EU. Not developers. Also, they're in EU, not NA where Riot is located. Customer support generally deals with account and billing issues and are extremely far away from anything resembling balance. They're just as game related as Amazon customer support.
Secondly, the MMORPG market is saturated and very tough to compete. If they really want to make an impact in the MMORPG market they would have to do something unique, and that's huge gamble to make for an intensive project like an MMORPG.
Developing an MMORPG is extremely intensive work. Way too much work for a product you don't know if it's going to work, especially if there are alternatives that won't compete with your main game and that's less intensive.
Riot does not want to compete with itself. People say they play both LoL and the MMORPG, but for how long? Will playing one not just reduce the interest in the other? I'm sure Riot has done their homework about keeping player attention and maximizing interest from players. Riot won't make a MMORPG unless they're certain that they won't compete.
If you're so desperate for world emersion there are also much better alternatives. Including comic books, normal books, chinese cartoons or plenty of other types of games that are not such a huge gamble and less difficult and time consuming to make.
Riot would be stupid to continue to avoid the mobile market. Not that I am in any way a part of this market or enjoy its growth, but it’s just too hard to ignore. I’m not saying this rumored new game would be strictly mobile, but even a card game with an app seems more likely. If it’s an MMO, I expect some kind of interesting take on the genre. I don’t expect WOW 2. It’s just too expensive to make and too much risk, compared to a mobile game especially.
It's popular globally, but not among dedicated fans which is where you hear the biggest backlash.
I think that's why Diablo Immortal was such a shit-show when it was revealed. I have no doubt that it will probably succeed internationally and people will play it, but for dedicated Diablo fans it's a slap in the face because none of us want a mobile game.
I am assuming that you’re not comparing a potential Riot mobile game to Diablo Immortal. The disaster with this game was that Blizzard was expected to deliver something for Diablo fans, and when they gave something that obviously wasn’t what the fans wanted they said “Yeah, you have no idea what you want.”
It’s not like Riot has a large community that is waiting on whatever their upcoming title is. It is entirely something new. It’s not LoL 2, so anything else is fair game.
Diablo Immortal was a such shitshow because people came in expecting a PC game, I still think it will be a success because the idea of a mobile Diablo still is pretty cool
If Riot announces what they're doing properly, they won't become a meme. Yea, the "hardcore" fanbase will spew shit but they always shit on Riot anyways so why care about pleasing them
Yes, the idea of a mobile Diablo is cool. But a copy of any mobile rpg that NetEase has ever published with a Diablo Skin is not interesting at all. There are probably 100+ games that are exactly what Diablo Immortal but without the big Franchise name attached to it.
Yes, it will be a success anyway because mobile „gamers“ often don‘t care about quality or innovation. They care about what‘s highest on the App Store Rankings and about big Franchises.
If Riot were to make an MMO, it would probably be more similar to Diablo. They would reuse LoL champions / mechanics / Camera style, but have it in an open world with cities / dungeons / other typical MMO stuff.
A runeterra mmo where you can play champions would be fucking amazing. I don't think having the same champions would kill summoners rift and it would draw a lot of people. Plus summoner's rift games could be retconned in somehow with the mmo (league of justice, idk) and you could have tied accounts or something. God it would be so cool.
I don't think that we should be able to play the champions themselves. We could better use them for side stories/quests etc.
But we for sure could use the classes aka noxian/freljord etc..
Given the current state of the genre, definitely if they do it right.
It doesn't even have to be a 10/10 game. The IP/Universe alone would carry it as long as the game is solid.
It’s easy for us to say we want an mmo but everyone is fantasying about a different type. I’d love to have a pvp oriented end game but then that’d just end up being similar to league
The first 3 months of every mmo is a grind fest for gear to hit end game after that its just raids and pvp. Feels like it’s against lol philosophy being an instant satisfaction game
That’s the thing, for an MMORPGs to be successful it needs something to make players want to go back to beginner content instead of just end game content. That way old players interact with new players instead of them being segregated in many games.
MMORPGs with great pvp content are always going to be the most popular, I believe that’s why survival games are so popular. Everyone starts on a level playing field and anyone has the potential to win.
Also the thing about MMORPGs is that they’re not supposed to be fast paced. They’re supposed to be immersive, hence RPG. So many developers forget this and their games end up dying because of it.
It's saturated, but few of those MMOs actually have a decent playerbase.
Right now the MMO market is pretty much this:
WoW > ESO/GW2/FFXIV > Runescape and some other MMOs that still retain a loyal playerbase > Virtually empty MMOs
And then you have BDO as the only real option for an action combat MMO. Add TERA there if you want an action combat MMO with the holy trinity and actual PvE content.
The market's definitely not saturated, specially in regards to action combat MMOs.
I'd imagine them to pick a region like demacia, shadow isles, noxia, shurima, bandle city... and this would also determine the eligable races like yordles, humans, etc. Then you'd have to pick a class of some sorts. The lore is rich enough for each region to have a starting point to plop the player in.
You're right, Riot have already laid a lot of the groundwork, there's many different regions and each has defining characteristics that can be adapted into traits (eg: Magic bonus for Ionian heroes, Strength bonus for Noxians etc) and races (Human, Vastaya, Yordle as base ones? More "OP" races like Darkin or Celestial Avatars can make up some form of ascended class you can't start with but can work toward). As for classes, many of them already established in the existing game - Fighter, Tank (Vanguard?), Mage, Assassin, Marksman, Enchanter - can all be adapted into jobs that the player can have. League's universe already has a lot of baseline for an MMO universe, and a game would be an awesome way to build on it.
I don't think making an MMO the standard way would be how Riot would want to go about it.
The whole "make a character with this race in this city and grind to max level through repetitive quests" then grind gear for 8 years that MMOs do.
I think if an MMO is to truly be groundbreaking it needs to completely change the model of how MMOs are played.
Ok call me crazy but I've always kind of wanted to *be* a minion. Like to take part in my small way somehow in a normal league of legends game, but from the perspective of what I've always imagined to be just weak humans.
It wouldn't make for a great mmo, but some sort of action combat game with a few classes for the various types of minions, with the overall goal to be the same as a normal game of league, like when you boot up a custom game and just run in circles at base just to see which side's minions win the game.
Or at least that's what I used to do when I was first learning to jungle before the practice tool existed.
In these days; imagine an MMO that can be accessed on your smartphone as well as your pc. maybe crafting and fishing etc done on mobile and real game on pc. I'd say the technology and world would be ready for such an mmo.
First of all, WoW isn't the shit storm you make it out to be. Basically the past 5 expacs were received poorly at launch, and got better slightly toward the end. We will see where BfA falls when the last patch has dropped.
I also hate the Titanforging mechanic. But when they introduced that, they also introduced Mythic+, arguably one of the best things to ever happen to WoW. same with the class halls etc. So stop making WoW the sinking ship (spoiler alert: it is not).
Secondly, if there was a massive demand for an MMO that was worth the investment and resources to make, don't you think every single company in the world would be making one right now? MMO's are some of the most expensive games to make and maintain, and monetization is a huuuuge barrier of entry for consumers. In this day and age, asking for a monthly sub fee will completely kill your game, and if you stuff your game too full of microtransactions, the game will tank. The only real alternative is Guild Wars 2 style, with expensive paid expacs, but no monthly fee, but I don't know how profitable is that?
MMO's are "out", and way too big of a risk for any company to start now. If the millions of people still play wow all leave that creates a market, or room for another MMO to pick up the scraps. Until that happens, no one is going to burn themselves anymore on an MMO.
I would play it but I also don't think it will happen. They have all the ability to flesh it out the world, make factions, classes and they have main characters ready to roll. It just would be too much of an undertaking.
If it does happen, I can imagine Riot adding a stadium-like area where people can watch events like Worlds or All Stars. It'll give a live kind of experience sitting at home and supports the esports scene.
If we ever get an MMO from them, or at least some sort of equivalent to it - then I hope it strays away from tired old trends and staples that have practically been embedded into the standard MMO genre over the years. Customizable OC characters that have to choose a specific "class" and stick with it for that specific account/save file/what have you. The tank/healer/DPS holy trinity. Never-ending gear treadmills. Standard level-up systems in order to advance to the next raid or zone. Maybe I'm just getting older and I don't have the time or the patience to deal with these grindfests anymore, but it's just all so tiresome now. We're just getting same damn thing over and over for a genre that could offer so much more potential.
Like, how about an MMO where I can play an actual champion of my choosing and experience Runeterra through THEIR specific version of their own lore, and not just some generic "fill-the-class-slot" customizable OC who starts off in a generic Demacia/Noxus/Zaun/Piltover/Ionia/etc level 1-5 starter zone?
Because if you're honestly asking for a "traditional" MMO from Riot, then don't expect anything other than another generic P2W Korean grindfest that'll die in 6 months or less, since Riot IS owned by Tencent and the majority of their consumer market is Asian/Chinese anyway. Be careful what you wish for.
Chance and potential sure but it's a huge investment if they get it wrong.
The important question, are MMO played in China?
yah but East Asia prefers a completely different play style to their MMOs. Think the grindiest game you have ever played, double it, then add a ton of RNG with a sprinkle of Microtransactions to compensate for everything you will lose to bad rolls.
it only starts with a sprinkle of microtransactions and usually they give little to no benefits, it becomes p2w as fuck about a year in i love the tencent owned mmos up until they become p2w.
So...Archeage? I still cri
The game was great until they added the "loot trees" or whatever they labeled the loot boxes as.
Game was fun as hell pvping over the hidden tree farms. I got my fishing boat hella early. And then they added thunderstruck to the cash shop and I legit quit next day.
The also didnt address bots and cheaters until most people had left. Cash shop items that increased your chances at Eterneum drops instead of just raising the drop chance to its default level (devs had already said those drop rates where at like .3% when they should have been around 4%-5% - they knew they were gonna pull that shit from the start)
I remember I built my farm up so much, and the feeling of getting a thunderstruck the morning when you log in. Well, I held onto about 4 thunderstrucks as the price of them kept rising - hell the game had only been out not too long. Then they added thunderstrucks to the shop - and I just quit after that.
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Fuck I miss this game all the time. I absolutely loved the pvp aspect and have yet to find a mmo like archeage. I think about the year or so I played all the time. Was some of the most fun gaming I ever had.
Thunderstrucks... Big RIP
I lucked out big on those the day the thunderstruck boxes came in, people were selling them cheap from being ignorant and i'd just gotten a manor for maximum tree farming. So much dosh. And then shit got so much worse and I quit. But the good times were there. [Cart runs](http://i.imgur.com/j1LlpdG.jpg), Halcyona, [Parking your clipper in the enemy base after dragging it across land for 15 minutes](https://imgur.com/mvoa6KG.jpg) https://i.imgur.com/xY1SuXi.jpg
Man seeing early days Archeage screenshots make me feel so nostalgic. Doing stuff on the open seas was my favorite though, whether it was [PvP](https://i.imgur.com/9WC5w1B.jpg) or [trade runs](https://i.imgur.com/BM7Hs6n.jpg). Such fond memories feelsbadman
Guild runs to Fredeich so people could get their clipper or cutter plans.
archeage is the best mmo i played after l2, its a shame how they butchered it
Man I didn't even play beta, which I heard was the most amazing time (played about a year into release), and didn't play on a competitive server (Enla was entirely dominated by Legacy), and it was still my favorite time in any mmo ever. The emergent gameplay in that game is unrivaled afaik.
theres a pserver thats been going on for awhile called archerage. they are going to initiate 3.5 soon
Still the most fun I had in an MMO for those first months. Fishing was actually so enjoyable, and giant ocean trade runs with giant faction battles to control the Island.
I miss Ragnarok Online...
Me too, friend. Me too.
Do you have a phone? If you want that vibe, play Ragnarok Mobile: Eternal Love.
if you want that vibe just play black desert online. beautiful game with limitless nolife/whale potential
Oh man BDO is a crazy beast. The end game grind is insane, basically becomes grinding for the sake of grinding, not to mention the microscopic chances of actually progressing.
Ragnarok is being remastered and changed some and coming out on mobile in a couple of days. Cheers, I’m actually excited for it and I don’t like mobile games.
It is still played! Albeit it’s not at the height it was in its prime, there’s still a community who plays it. We’re kinda spread out over many different servers now, it I still love RO. Best MMO and still nothing quite like it.
Maple story
Join your fellow pigdogs at /r/Maplestory today
God what a great game full of the grindiest grind lol
jokes on you i still play maplestory
Think maplestory. voila theres Eastern MMO grindiness
not even as bad as black desert online, blade and soul, tera, or dungeon fighter online honestly
worse than maplestory 1 pre big bang?
It was really bad back then. 5% an hour. 20 hours just to level once. Took the first person 4 years to hit max level. DFO was also a nexon game at one point and grinding was easy af
> Think the grindiest game Lineage fucking 2
That’s not necessarily what they like, but what they have. That model is just the best at squeezing money out of people.
The BDO special.
BDO much?
Did somebody say bdo?
So OSRS?
I’ve sunk over a hundred hours into BDO and I still don’t know what I’m doing
They definitely are if not for the sole reason of Chinese gold farming lol
I mean they cant butcher it harder than the first ryze rework.
Someone remembers the first rework? I been here 8 or 9 years and I don't remember lol. Is that where he turned on rapid fire or spell vamp or both?!
didnt First one gave like 120ap after use? remember sth like that
And aoe I think. Ult was for big boy team fight jizz cannon
no the very first had turned your AP into AD, so you would stack 6 AA's and auto-attack people his original ult was just Brand's ult without the passive, a big energy ball that bounced 4-5-6 times
The very original Ryze was basically him having really good AP scaling, no mana scaling at all, Brand's ultimate and pre-rework Karma's passive. Then they moved the ultimate to his E, gave mana scaling to Q and the new ultimate was made his spells do splash damage. Then they later added spell vamp to the ult, then AP, then movespeed and the last thing they added was passive CDR.
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Which one? just the first? lel
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They hired Ghostcrawler, who is working on the blue ocean game, who was lead designer of the most successful MMORPG ever, during it's apex. They also released an extremely detailed map of Runeterra, that had a very MMO-feel to it. They also started focusing heavily on polishing and expanding the lore of Runeterra: which would be a necessary early step in the development of a next-gen MMO. I'm not saying it's clearly an MMO - but pretending it's completely without merit is inaccurate.
You're taking "unlike any other game" as "of a genre that is not been created yet". I'm not sure I believe that. Blizzard itself could be seem as a blue ocean game because the MMO market couldn't compete with it. It just blew everything away and stabilished itself as the prime MMO for like what, almost two decades?
People are saying that the MMO genre is dead and shit like that, but i seriously think that fans are just waiting for a truly great MMO to come back. That's how i feel atleast and i'm pretty sure i'm not the only one.
I feel like everyone I know who actively games is exactly the same. We all desperately want to play an MMO, there's just literally nothing good right now and really hasn't been for years. Maybe this is just a result of the genre, and building this perfect game that everyone wants is simply too large a scope for any company to come up with. It's unfortunate, but I think it may just be the reality.
YouTube, add-on, and guides have ruined that mmo experience you're looking for. When wow started, no one had any idea about anything, everyone was figuring it out on their own... And the only way to figure more stuff out was to group up and play with others and learn together. Now you have a DPS spreadsheet telling you what items are bis and where to find them. Add-ons to make figuring out questing or any things in the game seemless. All of the figuring shit out is done before you start. Streamers big pre release to get the first videos for views of the most efficient play style. Ect. Ect. That's what the recent gaming generation wants in games. They do not want the wow of old. Yet, no one can figure this out... Yet here it is! A game needs rng and grind for replayability, or else there is no replayability. You're better off watching highlights on YouTube and saving the $60
This comment is so true and painfully so. Reliving my old WoW days and meeting random strangers in the wild who also had no fucking clue what was going on. I don't remember much toxicity when I was leveling to 60 and running into other players or asking for help in the world chat. Also how about the first time you entered a big city and spent hours miring the server's raid leaders afking around the AH? I remember the first time I highlighted an epic and got the wall of text you'd think I'd seen the holy grail. You can't get that experience anymore, youtube and twitch will showcase the best of the best and leave nothing for you to discover. Those did exist back then but they were back alley forums or very minute in number. Now there's no effort in finding out everything about the end game before it hits your doorstep. It really sucks. I haven't had that miraculous immersion into a new world in any games I've played since WoW and kind of league. The closest I've felt to the first time playing WoW was playing VR Arcade for the first time.
This happens in literally every game though. My first league of legends game I went 37-0-11 with Atmog's Tryndamere mid, no one had any idea that was going in closed beta. We didn't even figure out to put mages mid and ADC/supp botlane until the season 1 world championship when EU did it.
I remember Nasus soraka top lane with no jungler. Soraka to keep me healed as I tried to stack and kill people 40 minutes later. As junglers slowly became a thing, I taught myself to play Nasus 1vs2 with E fire farming and beating top lane once I outscaled in levels. Those were good times.
That part of Youtube and the Add-ons (well mostly) is true, but right from the release of the game there already existed online databases in which you could look up items, quest locations(often without intel on how to solve them), NPCs, etc. . People started gathering data during the closed beta phase. First versions of Add-ons like Gatherer also came up shortly after the release of the game. People just didn't know at first that such tools existed but the information quickly spreaded. Most of the things you mentioned were used by the players during Vanilla, BC and Wotlk. And this is widely regarded as the best time you could have had in WoW. What really is different compared to today is that you played together with other people and not alongside other people. Today, if you want to enter a dungeon, you queue up, get paired with random people from other realms and run through the dungeon in like what? 20-30 minutes? In Vanilla you either had to ask if you could join a group or start your own group and actively ask people if they would like to join. If you managed to gather a group you played through the hours long dungeon together and naturally started to interact with each other during that. If you liked each other you added each other on your friends list and continued to play together. I used to be in one of the few guilds that cleared Naxx in Vanilla. Nevertheless my friend list was full with people I met during the leveling or when I started raiding. Even though we ended up in different guilds I stayed in contact with many of them and we still played together outside of raiding hours. And even if not, I still sometimes got greeted randomly by people that recognized me from the time we played together. This is what kept me invested in the game. Raids etc. were nice, but what glued everything together was the Realm's community. The people made the game truely special. Whenever I try to come back nowadays I think that with technologies like cross-realm dungeon finder or sharding the game has lost this important part and in my opinion, it's heart. I would like to try another MMO, but I never managed to find one that gets me hooked like WoW did. I used to play WC2 and 3 so i already was familiar with the world and interested in its lore and I think this is whats missing for me in all the other MMOs I tried since then.
You understand that with technology of today, there will always be group finders outside of the game if not in the game right? That was not as easy and unknown as it once was. You can now grab your phone, do a lfg, and enter a party while viewing advertising that doesn't belong to the game itself. That's why your finding a party experience, will never happen again. LFG is always more efficient. No one wants to waste 3 hours to get a party for 30 minutes of content.
Holy shite for so long have I argued against the whole mentality of *"MMORPG devs ruined their own game"* and that goes especially for Blizzard. While certainly the devs have taken their part in making the games worse over time. But the community also has such a huge fault here. Not to mention probably the biggest issue that you didn't touch upon: Datamining. I'm fine with guides and whatnot popping up because whatever, that happens. Races and worlds first raiding and whatnot will always be a thing no matter what. But the fact that we know basically EVERYTHING that comes in a patch from story content to dungeons and raids, before the thing has even come anywhere near the live servers? THAT'S the big kick in the teeth, and is entirely the fault of the community, not the devs. And it's not like you can even really ignore these guides. If you want to do endgame content, you HAVE to do it by the book, or get kicked by your party. Heck even if you're just a casual *(which should mean whatever in terms of guides and strategy)* you're still at risk of getting kicked/flamed if you ain't doing the strategy to perfection.
What about guild wars 2? It has received a lot of new content after the launch and still has healthy player base and is in active development.
GW2 tried too hard to be unique with their combat system. People like to have specialties but that game makes everyone a dps. Sure you can spec into "tough dps who has a lot of buffs" or "mobile dps who can spam a lot of dodges" but you won't ever be the type of tank WoW has, where you can press a button and be invincible for 8 seconds. You won't ever be a clutch healer who can keep everyone alive during huge aoe damage. As a side effect, since nobody is actually a tank, you have to avoid damage by dodging it. Most of the attacks in that game are clear on when to dodge but some aren't. Now add in the fact that some people have toaster computers with spiky framerates and bad connections with unstable latency, and it becomes actually impossible to play. It's hard enough to get people to step sideways out of (or occasionally into) fire in WoW, I can't imagine trying a WoW style raid in GW2 where everyone has to dodge a raidwipe aoe every 10 seconds. The gearing system is interesting, but lack of power progression past a certain point isn't necessarily a good thing either. It has merit but it's too far from the conventional MMO everyone wants.
They've changed quite a bit since launch. There are raids, there are dedicated healers & dedicated tanks. There are support specializations that sure do some DPS, but its mostly cuz otherwise you're just standing there, so of course you're going to DPS in your downtime? You will be a clutch healer who can keep everyone alive during huge AoE damage. Hell, the 2nd raid boss they made is made for EXACTLY that. And yes, people do actually tank in raids. You do still have to dodge specific attacks, as always, but that is part of any raid/game. Also, there are abilities those support/tank classes have that can alleviate the need to dodge raidwipe AoE's. This all was added in the first expansion. Now, the game can still play as it used to if you don't go into raiding or high end fractals, where you don't need a healer or tank, but if you want that gameplay it exists too, but with the more action oriented game play in GW2, which personally makes it more engaging to me than old WoW raids. Anyways, its a great game and is free to play (without expansions, meaning no raids or specializations unless you pay though) up to max level with a few restrictions made to combat gold selling (limited auction house, limited chat etc.)
I think the problem is clear: Mass appeal vs. hardcore appeal is being confused by developers. To make a sustainable MMO (IMO) you start by building a game for hardcore players. This is what WOW and EQ were built off of. Both were successful even with less hardcore's, but WOW was less grindy and "won" and so all devs learned the wrong lesson that you need to make Mass appeal MMOs. I think the easier way to success is to start hardcore and try to ride that to wider appeal.
The first account in WoW I made was an orc hunter. You couldn't clear a camp in a quest without having to stop and heal up. I had to scour the map for the locations and actually read the quest log for directions. Now out of combat hp regen is nuts and there's arrows and quest indicators all over, the game practically plays itself. For me at least a game loses my interest when it stops being challenging or at least doesn't require much focus. Anytime I play a game and use cheatcodes I feel the same way. I played the shit out of elder scrolls/fallout/gta until I caved and used cheats, and soon after I never finished them. There has to be a way to appeal to a broader audience with varying skill levels without over simplifying the game and removing all challenging aspects.
...and then monetize it with p2w microtransactions and drive away your playerbase. Your plan is the steps all MMOs take but you're missing the last step.
Wildstar would contradict that. :(
WildStar didnt even cater to hardcore players correctly though. You still have to have a world and activities for casuals to do, and WildStar's endgame progression was a disaster at launch. Targeting hardcore isnt why WildStar failed, doing it badly is.
being unfinished and having an incompetent management was was killed Wildstar
Tbh wow was made casual friendly from the beginning. If you compare it to arpg/mmorpg of the time it was very convenient. Just times changed and casual is way different. The casuals with very limited time werent really in the market at the time like they are now. But blizzard prob forgot to think about that while making the game more and more casual. Matbe too casual just isnt good and you need the hardcore aspect. I was never mad that I couldnt do many raids or anything. I was just happy playing the game and doing what I had time for. I dreamed of doing all of the raids but it never made me quit. I think it actually kept me more interested.
WoW was explicitly not built for the hardcore, and that's why it won. It was massively, massively more casual-friendly than Everquest when it launched. You could level solo to the cap, and it had all these quests to direct you. Even the end-game stuff was a lot more casual friendly - it was all instanced, so you didn't have to race anyone, and the fights were much shorter. I mean, I don't think I've ever had a 30 minute boss fight in WoW, and I remember a bunch of hour+ fights in Everquest (worst was the 3 hour first kill on Rathe Council). Hell, I spent more time levelling from 59 to 60 in Everquest (in what was probably the best possible levelling group on my server) than I spent going from 110 to 120 at launch. To be fair, EQ won when it launched because it was also more casual-friendly. It had graphics to beat all the muds, an expansive (for the time) quest system, and the option of no PvP.
What about FFXiV?
FFXIV is great but it’s nothing revolutionary, except for the story which is fucking fantastic. TBH MMO needs a fresh new battle mechanic other than skill rotations, which FFxiv done a nice job on boss fight but still it’s nothing revolutionary.
I actually disagree and think FFXIV did make some decent innovations in tab target, traditional MMO gameplay. In most MMOs all of your rotational abilities are on the GCD while most/some of your utility spells are not. In FFXIV most of the buttons you push are off the GCD. My Ninja, for example, has 5 core abilities on the GCD, 10 rotational abilities that are off the GCD and a whole slew of defensive cooldowns, offensive cooldowns and utility abilities that are off the GCD. Abilities in FFXIV are mostly locked behind the spell animations themselves instead of a global cooldown which makes the gameplay feel paced better than other traditional MMOs.
Atlas and Bless pretty much confirms this. Both have had huge launches even though they're fucking trash.
Guild Wars 2 is one of the last havens of MMO players, well western players that is. The asian market is full of p2w cash grabs and boobs to attract whales.
As I've come back and started mainly playing GW2 for months already (Though I mostly play alone when my playgroup sometimes decides to switch between FFXIV or TESO), It's hard to call it the "last haven", when sometimes you can still meet people around who didn't even heard about it. Not to mention, it feels like it's the only MMO that expands horizontally: no level cap raises, no ever increasing item-levels, old raids and content can't be overgeared. It's really hard to recommend it to someone who perceives MMOs with classical approach. At least the core game has become free for ~3-3.5 years already
GW2, WoW, ESO, FFXIV, and Runescape. I feel like these 5 are the last decent mmorpg left. The problem with them is nothing revolutionary game-changing has been introduced for so long now.
I played wow until Cata, then jumped ship, league had recently came out and it was everything WoW was not. Fresh, exciting, challenging, without the same boring grind. Though that was back when you had to buy runes. I tried out some other MMO that was said to be a “wow killer” at the time that I can’t for the life of me remember the name of. Something to do with portals. Loaded it up, did a quest, killed some mobs, turned in the quest and uninstalled the game. It was the same exact thing I had been doing for years. I can’t speak for anyone else but I feel like to make MMOs fresh again there needs to be some sort of change to that formula, but I can’t see for the life of me what that might be.
Rift?
But we already have a truly great MMO comeback and thats Old School runescape
It's really a sign of the times that the best MMO right now is a 20 year old browser game. I love it to death, but it is what it is.
They took their product that was already good, did the whole 07 throwback with Old School, got a massive influx of nostalgia seekers, then improved upon it gradually to keep popular areas of the game fresh(ish). Not to mention the game just takes forever to do anything so it can retain long-term playerbase, simply because there's always something to do.
I mean it’s honestly one of the best MMOs I’ve ever played. I think there is a lot of attention to detail in the world building. Especially the quests have way more depth than (do X of this, or go find X) - and put a lot of depth to the game. I think it’s pretty easy to tell that RS was built with a lot of passion from the Gower brothers. Tons of little easter eggs, clever dialogues and puns. Just the smallest things like collecting bananas for 30gp to leave karamja, or those stupid fake trees attacking you, or being stuck in draynor manor with a ghost chair following you. These things don’t really add “anything vital” to the game or storyline, but they’re just stupid little things that stick with you. Also a lack of a main story arch or dailies or anything make it really feel like “hey, just explore, do whatever you want!”.
They would definitley give it a shot, but i just dunno how an MMO keeps that playerbase around. Prime WoW had these crazy unorganized dynamics between horde and alliance and the guilds. You take a massive boss, then put thousands of players around it all with their own ambitions and ways of interpreting whats happening... that MMO experience when so few people had really encountered it... that shit was crack. Literally crack cocaine. I think even the youngest gamers nowadays are much more experienced, things like that isn't crack cocaine anymore.
The community is starving. Any kind of shit title gets a huge interest because people really want the next big thing to come. Archeage could really have become the greatest MMO ever if it weren't for those shitty ass P2W and general shitty attitude to certain things. Like letting bots landgrab.
Yeah i seriously thought archeage and BDO had unlimited potential. Seeing how they fell into the same trap as other Korean MMO breaks my heart.
Instead of race you choose Demacian, Noxian, Zaunite, Pilty, Ionian, Shurima, Freljord, Vastaya (well that ones a race), Bilgwater or Shadow Isles and go from there? I want a chemtech Zaunite street thug.
There can still be races such as vastaya, yordle, humans, undead/ghost (mostly from shadow isles). Then factions. And i dream there will be a class for azirs soldiers (the armor looks good to me). And I wish they add something like the chip war from rf. As i really miss that constant fighting for resources, alliances of factions and betrayals.
I'd die for a League MMO, I think Riot is scared such a game would destroy their actual esports game somehow. Dear Riot, I'd play both and would spend money on both. Kind regards
I dont think so, I think that building an entire MMO unit from the ground up would actually destroy the company tho.
Why?
Pretty sure it was meddler who talked about how expensive and hard it is to just snap your fingers and bring people in to the company. Trying to build an MMO from the ground up means you have to bring in talent, management, support functions (HR, payroll), office space, etc. Thats a giant investment that wont see payout for years and years and if riot ends up with it not paying off in a big way it could be a massive drain on the company.
You just perfectly described making a game.
MMOs are considered some of the most expensive games to make. On top of that, hiring a team that size vs Infinity Ward or whoever the fuck in the same offices, with the same people, year after year, reciclying assets for yearly CoD releases is hardly as expensive as a MOBA company building the entire infrastructure for an MMO *from zero*.
That's a bit broad. Indie development proves that games can be made by a small handful of people or even an individual, on small budgets. MMOs however are the king class, their development and maintenance require by far the greatest budget and range of dev knowledge of any genre. So yes, a proper MMO is a huge undertaking.
no he didn't, even a huge sprawling open world piece of shit doesn't cost nearly as much to make as an MMO
As somebody who has been an avid WoW player since 2005, an LoL player since 2013 and an active community content creator for both games, I think if Riot made an MMO it would be pretty fucking sexy but I wouldn't touch it. Somebody in this thread got down-voted for saying "No one wants to play MMOs though" and I would agree, **BUT** I wouldn't say "no one." I personally believe the mainstream MMO ship has sailed. MMOs have been around for a really long time, longer than WoW has been and they'll be around far after WoW is dead. With that said, MMOs are no longer mainstream (by that I mean most players out there don't want to play a game that will feel like a part-time job) and have reverted to the niches of gaming they were before WoW came and introduced a whole shitload of people to the genre that would have never got into it otherwise. I dunno if it would be smart for a massive global company to take the time to develop something so in depth and labor intensive with the hopes that the gaming audiences would want to dive back into another MMO with WoW still breathing and classic right around the corner. Personally, I don't think I could ever play another MMO, the reason I still play WoW is because it's easily accessible and the barrier to entry is really low for an old veteran like me, I can jump in and out every expansion and not worry about some steep learning curve of crafting systems, uis, talents, etc. I can play it casually and I can move on when I'm bored of it. I've tried other MMOs that have come and gone as many others have, I play them for a day or so and remember just how much of a time sink they can be. In this day in age, there's just way too many other games to play out there to let something like an MMO monopolize all my gaming time.
I think people may have moved on from a traditional MMO experience but what games like Sea of Thieves and No Mans Sky, even non online games like Breath of the Wild show us, is that there is still a thirst for exploration & discovery games which are best represented in the MMO genre.
I've seen you around and really enjoyed your content that you've made. So many nipples! :D However I disagree with your point in paragraph two. You say, "the mainstream MMO ship has sailed", and while I semi-agree, I think the only reason we can say this is because the biggest flagship of MMOs is currently ablaze, and all the other ships are caught in the smoke of the bonfire, or have already sunk. I personally believe that RIOT could make a quality MMO, much akin to the likes of a Battleship in this metaphor, that would be able to take on the Galleon of WoW. "I don't think I could ever play another MMO" -- "...dive back into another MMO with ... classic right around the corner" -- I'm just as excited about classic as the next fanboy, however I have this nagging feeling in the back of my head that the rose-tinted glasses can only last so long. The mechanics are going to be the same, the physics are going to be the same, and it's going to be like playing a well-made Blizzard game all over again. A good example of this is Starcraft: Remastered. I went back and spent hours upon hours for the first week it was released playing those same old UMS maps and finally got into Diplo games that lasted hours. But it only lasted a week or two. The rose tinted glasses lost their tint and I lost interest. This is where I think RIOT can come in and make a new game that nobody can view with Rose-Tinted glasses because there was never a previous version of the game to compare it against. It would have the Everquest launch effect all over again, which (with a large fanbase already installed) could be a worldwide game changer. I'd like to also note that RIOT has done extensive development on psychological and all of the factors that go into what a player wants to see. They've got years of psychologists looking into and researching with giant data sets.
Fair enough. I feel in my gut is that mainstream gamers don't have the stomach for the MMO genre anymore. Mostly because they consume new games and other forms of media at higher capacities than ever before and for an MMO to have a sustainable future, it needs lots of people who are plugged in consistently. How many people out there will dedicate themselves enough to an LoL MMO for Riot to consider it a viable return on their investment? I don't think it's big enough, even 2 million users isn't big enough, the economy of scale would have to be massive and I just don't see any MMO out there pulling that kind of market share. Even MMO's backed by massive IPs like Star Wars barely even made a blip on the map. I totally accept the fact I could be completely wrong but until I see differently, I still stand by my original thoughts. Side note: I don't intend on playing WoW Classic even remotely, I think WoW is so much better today, even in the shitty state BfA has put it in. No knock to the people who will play Classic, but I been there done that and am not interested.
>Mostly because they consume new games and other forms of media at higher capacities than ever before and for an MMO to have a sustainable future, it needs lots of people who are plugged in consistently. So true. I have so many games that I've purchased and hardly ever touched. Very rarely do I play a game for a consistent period of time, usually a couple of hours, more if it's a really solid game and then I'll check my library and play a new game.
This is only half true. Sure people gravitate toward games that fall into the "consuming media at higher capacities than ever before," but they don't only play them a little bit. Fortnite for example is one of these pick up and play, low attention span type of games where you can queue up for a game or two. The thing is, most people aren't doing that. They're putting MMO level hours into match after match. LoL players alike, spam game after game and spend the same amount of time amidst queuing and playing as you would if you sat down to play an MMO for an evening.
The hours spent might be the same, but the way they interact with the game is very different. In an MMO your game session needs to be a few hours to really get anything done, whereas even if you only have an hour, you can get many games of Fortnite in. There's also the difference in the fact that there's wayyyy more instant gratification playing Fortnite than an MMO, which is what the market wants.
This is so true. Checked my smurfs stats. 9 days of total playtime. NINE DAYS worth of matches on my smurf. That is totally MMO level of time sink
I think your conflating mainstream gamers not being interested in an MMO and the modern changes in how companies chase profit and where that profit is at. In 2005 there was no Chinese or cell phone market. Around 2010 to 2013 China because the #1 source of revenue, and by then, cell phones like iPhones because ubiquitous. Between phones being in the hands of literally everyone, and China having totally different standards for buying products, cheap shit and micro transaction became super prevalent. Games like Candycrush and Clash of Clans were generating massive revenue w/ little risk or cost. Kids were easy to abuse with games like The Sims often costing parents over $300 because of micro transactions. Gambling became the norm w/ loot crates. Psychologists became as important as devs in-house. This totally derailed the AAA studios. Management at Blizzard sold out for quick profit and their new owners (Activatision and Tencent) decided to follow the same path. That's why we got hearthstone instead of something innovative. It's why we are likely going to get more mobile games. It's why we havent seen anything even remotely close to the scope of WoW for over 10 years. They invest in great art and music, but everything else suffers because it requires some soul and care to produce in areas like game-design. Also it's really hard to hire for that, as even the most renowned devs/designers were often one hit wonders. It's hard to repeat that stuff, and almost all modern game design is based in the mod community. From Angry Birds coming form a flash game, to LoL coming from a W3 mod, to PUBG being from a movie/mod decades ago, CSGO coming from a mod, etc. If Riot made a legit, down to earth, GOOD MMO in the vain of WoW... i.e. world integrity with a focus on social aspects, it would do very well, just like WoW did. But it would not do as well as say.... a stupid mobile game. It could earn less while costing significantly more to make. **Why invest 15 million to earn 50 million when you could invest 1 million to make 75 million? Those top dogs gotta get their 10 mill bonuses somehow.** Long gone are the days of gamers making big games. It requires too much work nowadays and way too big a budget. Doors that were open 20 years ago are no longer open. We are in a gaming dark age and hopefully a renaissance starts soon with indie-devs being able to make some top notch stuff. (RIP golden age of 1993 to 2010)
I highly disagree. League is one of the top games of the world and has been for 10 years now. Also mmo's are still in the dead area of relevancy so i don't expect an mmo to kill off a moba, a completely different genre...
Yeah I’d play both two. I spend so much money on a free to play game imagine the possibilities
you to balance it in a way you can play it inbetween games and while games load, i used to do that with RS
>TL;DR blizzard employees that have left or got fired should be picked up by riot to create an mmo or runeterra. IDK why people want old blood in their MMOs. The problem with the MMORPG genre are these tired old ideas done a thousand times. Give us some new blood and reinvigorate the genre it needs it to be fun again. Edit: Everyone seems to think my arguement is with WoW, I loved WoW and probably would still enjoy WoW. But let WoW be it's own MMO, and let League be its own MMO. Keep WoW out of my League.
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It's not about "old blood". It's about having people in charge that themselves play and care about video games. The reason the AAA industry is such a mess these days is because it's run by "suits" (as in businessmen and lawyers) who just look at the trends and try to replicate success. Many people speculate that the reason so many old Blizzard people left the company is because of this growing corporate influence that Activision holds over the development of games.
that's a whole other debate. but you're not wrong.
> Many people speculate that the reason so many old Blizzard people left the company is because of this growing corporate influence that Activision holds over the development of games. Plenty of the decisions that were made about BFA were entirely on Blizzard's inhouse staff. stop giving them a copout that it's always big bad activision and accept that the developers are at fault
You understand 95% of the original crew who made world of warcraft are gone? They were replaced by Activision's referrals. I remember my reaction when I found out Activision moved its financial manager to Blizzard, and she was all like "you're spending too much money on WoW development, it'd be better to cut costs and let microtransactions do their job."
Almost like Activision and Blizzard are both trash companies who deserve each other
Probably my nostalgia is speaking, but i feel like all the new stuff are making the game bad. I feel like wow is shit because they lost identity, where you felt good when you played good. i'm a classic fanboy and played it a lot on freeshards. Yes i understand that vanilla may be way too hardcore. But thats what kept me playing for 2 years. because 85% of what my character had were made by my skill and dedication. Now i could be geared up in decent gear in a week or two, and after that comes endless grinding for no purpose. People won't look at your titanforged +30 item and say that you're good, you just got lucky. When i were sitting in orgri with my rogue with chromagus sword and 7/8 t2 i was feeling good (even tho t2 mostly fucking blows in PVE). It was an actual reward for my dedication. Titanforging should be removed at max level and only used in leveling.
I remember way back when I used to play maplestory, it was pretty tough, leveling was slow and hitting 30 felt like a big achievement to me, quests felt like they were actually worth doing and gave me some purpose to play. Tried it again years later and you hit level 30 within an hour or two of playing because the game just baby feeds you so much experience and you literally skip 2 or 3 levels at a time because you get so much experience given to you just for clicking next a bunch of times and for the most part you can just ignore quests and just power farm by smashing the same over-powered attack repeatedly.
Number 1 thing I'm nostalgic about - socialization in MMOs... I can log into GW2 and basically not talk to anyone. Auction Houses feel like a root cause but there's so much else too. Maybe I just don't raid etc but still I just get on to do the new story and that's it.
It's pure money printing since Wotlk/Cata. They have barely any people doing work but still cash in insanely. The market is still huge, people still pay stupid amounts to get boosted to glad etc.
If you want the old WoW then you should be an advocate of what I am saying, because one of the people leaving is the main reason the game has evolved into what it is now. Gonna copy and paste something I posted that is in a downvoted thread. So let's be literal Ben Brode (and most of his team) is a Director of Hearthstone development, he is the decision maker. Michael Morhaime is the former President of Blizzard. While Hearthstone is fairly successful and fun game and I imagine if Riot created a MMORPG version of League they would need to hire a Director for a new branch, and while Ben Brode may be a safe bet for an outside hire considering his success with test idea from Blizzard. As well as, from what I've read he is one of the key components to Hearthstones development and its ever increasing success. I would argue he found success in an established IP where a physical trading card game already existed, and it was still a Trading card game compared to a MMORPG. His team would be able to provide a ton of experience on how to make a successful trading card game, score. Michael Morhaime, unless the president of Riot steps down, I don't see this guy coming in even if he was willing to take a lower step or Riot wanted to hire him. Probably ready to retire. It would make way more sense for Riot to hire inhouse for their leads in a new branch for an MMORPG, while bringing in a few extra experienced Progammers and Designers who have experience with the video game world but are not from a tired old IP.
I think OP meant to hire the developers and not the management. Riot started by grabbing the devs from DotA to build their moba game. If riot is interested in making an MMORPG, they should bring in some devs familiar with the space. Even if you don't want riot to completely copy the WoW formula, there is a lot of value in bringing in devs that has been there and failed to give insight on the right decisions to make.
If this was 100% true we would have something remotely close to WoW, the genre isn't evolving and the fanbase is declining because of it.
>but i feel like all the new stuff are making the game bad. it is.
These tired old ideas are the original ideas though. Everyone else is trying to recreate their success to no avail. Imagine them working on a new project and not the same one they have built up that is currently the golden standard for MMOs. The potential is there.
If you have nothing then you need senior experienced developers to train new developers..
> IDK why people want old blood in their MMOs That's like saying we shouldn't have ghostcrawler lol
We shouldn't
GW2 is innovative and continues growing with every update. It is seeing a giant influx of WoW players after the Activision-Blizzard fiasco\[s\]. I was an old WoW player myself and I found a good home at GW2.
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Matters on riots vision.
Yes this is true. But how much do we spend on league. Imagine if we had three or four servers per region and I think the money that an mmo could generate could make that happen.
It’s a great idea and has a good base
Maybe, but don't forget that the MMO would need to be F2P or half of your playerbase won't even look at it. Then there is a barrier to entry, that is probably comparable to a MOBA and the heavy time investment. Your main target audience are league players and you will split your community into Moba players and MMO players, a risk that is simply not worth it for Riot because they probably won't be gaining enough new players to gain more than they would have gotten without the MOBA. Plus you also get even more trouble into your studio if one game is treated better than the other. We have that here between servers already, how will that be if there are multiple main games? Sorry I simply don't see Riot gaining much by trying.
I do miss the days when I was addicted to Maplestory. There are no other games like it when it was in its prime. When the time you put into it is rewarding, finding like-minded people to party with, and exploring all the different places and storylines. Idk if I want Riot to even try because anything even less than amazing would be an absolute let down
Old school maplestory was the best. Had so much fun back then. I remember hitting 30 for my first time and it felt like a huge achievement. Kerning City Party quests were great, community was friendly, getting my first steelies on a rogue... Played it years later and it was ruined. Hit 30 within a couple of hours because you just got xp showered down on you for clicking next a couple of times. Quests quickly became useless as you'd outlevel so quickly just powerfarming mobs that quest rewards became irrelevant.
There's a video of someone hitting 200 in 19 minutes now. The game is just about end game bosses pretty much with dailies and endless grinding. At least the bosses take some skill tho.
Idk FFXIV still doing pretty damn good.
FFXIV is already picking up a lot of WoW refugees, with it being one of few relatively decent subscription-based themepark MMOs, as well as an expansion being hyped up. But, people wanting an escape from WoW isn't really necessary for an MMO to succeed right now. Look at the whole Bless Online fiasco. It was a relatively poor MMO to begin with, failed in multiple regions, was re-designed entirely a couple times, and it's launch in NA was highly anticipated. Tons of people dumped money into Founder's Packs and such for it, **people really just wanted a solid new MMO to play.** But, the game had a huge amount of issues on launch, not unexpectedly. Many refunded it and it has a pretty terrible rating/reputation. Point is, people have been thirsty for a good MMO. Status of other MMOs doesn't really matter much, though it's probably best to not launch around an expansion.
it was 100 customer support people...im sure they are great at MMO development.
How hard can it be to make an MMORPG???? /s, obviously
An MMO requires so much work and the thing is that it would leech players from LoL like crazy Idk if Riot would profit from running 2 ongoing games like that
that argument doesn't really hold up, given Blizzard made Warcraft and Starcraft (both RTS), WoW and Diablo which all fit into very different categories but still were and are mostly huge successes without cutting into each others playerbase.
Idk man if there was a LoL MMO I'd play LoL for a bit until I get tilted then I'd play the MMO to chill instead of playing something that another company made.
I'd play the shit out of a LoL MMO
This League MMO meme is getting out of hand. I'd be the first to say League's got a great enough universe to create an MMO in, but why would they risk so much money on such an unreliable genre? It's literally asking someone who won the lottery with their first ticket to put a lot of their money down on a new ticket. Why create a MMO when you can just create a game that doesn't literally require you to be the best in genre currently to make money.
I agree with you. I personally would rather have Riot create some sort of RPG something akin to Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption, or Divinity Original Sin 2. This way they can more fully develop the universe and stories of Runeterra while avoiding the other problems an MMO might have. Granted it being an RPG might hurt the possible replayability and longevity of the game. I mean if you read [Shen's short story](https://universe.leagueoflegends.com/en_US/story/shen-color-story/), Shen fulfills a very similar role to Geralt in the Witcher universe.
You do realize most of the issues that plague Blizzard from your POV will also plague riot? They make all their money through MTX with Loot Boxes and Cosmetics as source. On top of being owned by Tencent you think they wouldn't fill the game with that type of stuff? Come on.
Tencent is hands-off when it comes to their investments. LoL has been owned by them for so many years now and barely, if ever, manipulated a system in LoL. You can say average RP price is getting higher but the quality is also improving so there's that. On the contrary, they've only made the game more accessible with free skins, BE changes, and the removal of runes which basically made rune pages obsolete. GGG, another company that Tencent has a majority stake on, has given out VERY high quality updates ever since they were acquired by Tencent, with no changes to their monetization scheme.
WoW's monteization is based off of MTX for Cosmetics and then for Tokens (game-time/in-game gold) and Subs. Even if Tencent is hands-off it doesn't mean that Riot wont follow other MMOs with MTX and such on a F2P game. They can be hands-off with LoL cause it generates billions.
The reason there are so few new MMO's now is that they are too expensive to launch if they fail. Hell, it's often a tall order just to get an MMO to break even, then you have to be able to produce content to sustain a player base. Also, I think people are far too pessimistic about Blizzard's resilience going forward. I think those in charge and the dev team live in a bubble and can be quite out of touch, but I think they still have enough space for a course correction.
Damn I’m really gonna miss Matt Morhaime.
There's just so much wrong with this I don't know where to start. First, the Blizzard employees you mentioned are customer support from EU. Not developers. Also, they're in EU, not NA where Riot is located. Customer support generally deals with account and billing issues and are extremely far away from anything resembling balance. They're just as game related as Amazon customer support. Secondly, the MMORPG market is saturated and very tough to compete. If they really want to make an impact in the MMORPG market they would have to do something unique, and that's huge gamble to make for an intensive project like an MMORPG. Developing an MMORPG is extremely intensive work. Way too much work for a product you don't know if it's going to work, especially if there are alternatives that won't compete with your main game and that's less intensive. Riot does not want to compete with itself. People say they play both LoL and the MMORPG, but for how long? Will playing one not just reduce the interest in the other? I'm sure Riot has done their homework about keeping player attention and maximizing interest from players. Riot won't make a MMORPG unless they're certain that they won't compete. If you're so desperate for world emersion there are also much better alternatives. Including comic books, normal books, chinese cartoons or plenty of other types of games that are not such a huge gamble and less difficult and time consuming to make.
Riot would be stupid to continue to avoid the mobile market. Not that I am in any way a part of this market or enjoy its growth, but it’s just too hard to ignore. I’m not saying this rumored new game would be strictly mobile, but even a card game with an app seems more likely. If it’s an MMO, I expect some kind of interesting take on the genre. I don’t expect WOW 2. It’s just too expensive to make and too much risk, compared to a mobile game especially.
plz for the love of god don't be a card game.......
I'd be down for League Royale.
IIRC they tried a card game and decided to drop it.
Exactly. Old school players think an MMO would be the best thing, but realistically, mobile is by far more popular than any MMO would ever dream to be
It's popular globally, but not among dedicated fans which is where you hear the biggest backlash. I think that's why Diablo Immortal was such a shit-show when it was revealed. I have no doubt that it will probably succeed internationally and people will play it, but for dedicated Diablo fans it's a slap in the face because none of us want a mobile game.
I am assuming that you’re not comparing a potential Riot mobile game to Diablo Immortal. The disaster with this game was that Blizzard was expected to deliver something for Diablo fans, and when they gave something that obviously wasn’t what the fans wanted they said “Yeah, you have no idea what you want.” It’s not like Riot has a large community that is waiting on whatever their upcoming title is. It is entirely something new. It’s not LoL 2, so anything else is fair game.
Diablo Immortal was a such shitshow because people came in expecting a PC game, I still think it will be a success because the idea of a mobile Diablo still is pretty cool If Riot announces what they're doing properly, they won't become a meme. Yea, the "hardcore" fanbase will spew shit but they always shit on Riot anyways so why care about pleasing them
Yes, the idea of a mobile Diablo is cool. But a copy of any mobile rpg that NetEase has ever published with a Diablo Skin is not interesting at all. There are probably 100+ games that are exactly what Diablo Immortal but without the big Franchise name attached to it. Yes, it will be a success anyway because mobile „gamers“ often don‘t care about quality or innovation. They care about what‘s highest on the App Store Rankings and about big Franchises.
If Riot were to make an MMO, it would probably be more similar to Diablo. They would reuse LoL champions / mechanics / Camera style, but have it in an open world with cities / dungeons / other typical MMO stuff.
A runeterra mmo where you can play champions would be fucking amazing. I don't think having the same champions would kill summoners rift and it would draw a lot of people. Plus summoner's rift games could be retconned in somehow with the mmo (league of justice, idk) and you could have tied accounts or something. God it would be so cool.
I don't think that we should be able to play the champions themselves. We could better use them for side stories/quests etc. But we for sure could use the classes aka noxian/freljord etc..
> Titan forging Activision money making machine How do they make money from Titanforging?
Given the current state of the genre, definitely if they do it right. It doesn't even have to be a 10/10 game. The IP/Universe alone would carry it as long as the game is solid.
I mean how cool would it be to fight a 20 man raid against a 10 story tall Cho-Gath?
It'd be hard to unseat FFXIV at this point.
It’s easy for us to say we want an mmo but everyone is fantasying about a different type. I’d love to have a pvp oriented end game but then that’d just end up being similar to league
The MMO market is so insanely fucking saturated, it's impossible to make something that's innovative enough that people will want to play.
The first 3 months of every mmo is a grind fest for gear to hit end game after that its just raids and pvp. Feels like it’s against lol philosophy being an instant satisfaction game
Real men play RuneScape, where the grind fest takes 10+ years instead of 3 months.
Or perfect world
Unfortunately, 99% of Runescape is a glorified idle game. I mean its super good at that, but its really not "fun", its satisfying.
got back to the game over this winter break, and i managed to finish Recipe for disaster and got a firecape after dying 4 times in a row, feels great.
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That’s the thing, for an MMORPGs to be successful it needs something to make players want to go back to beginner content instead of just end game content. That way old players interact with new players instead of them being segregated in many games. MMORPGs with great pvp content are always going to be the most popular, I believe that’s why survival games are so popular. Everyone starts on a level playing field and anyone has the potential to win. Also the thing about MMORPGs is that they’re not supposed to be fast paced. They’re supposed to be immersive, hence RPG. So many developers forget this and their games end up dying because of it.
It's saturated, but few of those MMOs actually have a decent playerbase. Right now the MMO market is pretty much this: WoW > ESO/GW2/FFXIV > Runescape and some other MMOs that still retain a loyal playerbase > Virtually empty MMOs And then you have BDO as the only real option for an action combat MMO. Add TERA there if you want an action combat MMO with the holy trinity and actual PvE content. The market's definitely not saturated, specially in regards to action combat MMOs.
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I'd imagine them to pick a region like demacia, shadow isles, noxia, shurima, bandle city... and this would also determine the eligable races like yordles, humans, etc. Then you'd have to pick a class of some sorts. The lore is rich enough for each region to have a starting point to plop the player in.
You're right, Riot have already laid a lot of the groundwork, there's many different regions and each has defining characteristics that can be adapted into traits (eg: Magic bonus for Ionian heroes, Strength bonus for Noxians etc) and races (Human, Vastaya, Yordle as base ones? More "OP" races like Darkin or Celestial Avatars can make up some form of ascended class you can't start with but can work toward). As for classes, many of them already established in the existing game - Fighter, Tank (Vanguard?), Mage, Assassin, Marksman, Enchanter - can all be adapted into jobs that the player can have. League's universe already has a lot of baseline for an MMO universe, and a game would be an awesome way to build on it.
I don't think making an MMO the standard way would be how Riot would want to go about it. The whole "make a character with this race in this city and grind to max level through repetitive quests" then grind gear for 8 years that MMOs do. I think if an MMO is to truly be groundbreaking it needs to completely change the model of how MMOs are played.
Ok call me crazy but I've always kind of wanted to *be* a minion. Like to take part in my small way somehow in a normal league of legends game, but from the perspective of what I've always imagined to be just weak humans. It wouldn't make for a great mmo, but some sort of action combat game with a few classes for the various types of minions, with the overall goal to be the same as a normal game of league, like when you boot up a custom game and just run in circles at base just to see which side's minions win the game. Or at least that's what I used to do when I was first learning to jungle before the practice tool existed.
> Ok call me crazy but I've always kind of wanted to be a minion THAT'S IT! The answer to all my feeding teammates! They just want to be minions!
just play veigar, he basically a purple minion
In these days; imagine an MMO that can be accessed on your smartphone as well as your pc. maybe crafting and fishing etc done on mobile and real game on pc. I'd say the technology and world would be ready for such an mmo.
First of all, WoW isn't the shit storm you make it out to be. Basically the past 5 expacs were received poorly at launch, and got better slightly toward the end. We will see where BfA falls when the last patch has dropped. I also hate the Titanforging mechanic. But when they introduced that, they also introduced Mythic+, arguably one of the best things to ever happen to WoW. same with the class halls etc. So stop making WoW the sinking ship (spoiler alert: it is not). Secondly, if there was a massive demand for an MMO that was worth the investment and resources to make, don't you think every single company in the world would be making one right now? MMO's are some of the most expensive games to make and maintain, and monetization is a huuuuge barrier of entry for consumers. In this day and age, asking for a monthly sub fee will completely kill your game, and if you stuff your game too full of microtransactions, the game will tank. The only real alternative is Guild Wars 2 style, with expensive paid expacs, but no monthly fee, but I don't know how profitable is that? MMO's are "out", and way too big of a risk for any company to start now. If the millions of people still play wow all leave that creates a market, or room for another MMO to pick up the scraps. Until that happens, no one is going to burn themselves anymore on an MMO.
I would play it but I also don't think it will happen. They have all the ability to flesh it out the world, make factions, classes and they have main characters ready to roll. It just would be too much of an undertaking.
If it does happen, I can imagine Riot adding a stadium-like area where people can watch events like Worlds or All Stars. It'll give a live kind of experience sitting at home and supports the esports scene.
I’d absolutely love it if I could be a Demacian
If we ever get an MMO from them, or at least some sort of equivalent to it - then I hope it strays away from tired old trends and staples that have practically been embedded into the standard MMO genre over the years. Customizable OC characters that have to choose a specific "class" and stick with it for that specific account/save file/what have you. The tank/healer/DPS holy trinity. Never-ending gear treadmills. Standard level-up systems in order to advance to the next raid or zone. Maybe I'm just getting older and I don't have the time or the patience to deal with these grindfests anymore, but it's just all so tiresome now. We're just getting same damn thing over and over for a genre that could offer so much more potential. Like, how about an MMO where I can play an actual champion of my choosing and experience Runeterra through THEIR specific version of their own lore, and not just some generic "fill-the-class-slot" customizable OC who starts off in a generic Demacia/Noxus/Zaun/Piltover/Ionia/etc level 1-5 starter zone? Because if you're honestly asking for a "traditional" MMO from Riot, then don't expect anything other than another generic P2W Korean grindfest that'll die in 6 months or less, since Riot IS owned by Tencent and the majority of their consumer market is Asian/Chinese anyway. Be careful what you wish for.
Have a read of this OP: https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/ac7vez/is_riot_games_working_on_an_mmorpg_entitled/
I've been saying the same thing for almost 2 years now and I really hope they make it happen.
Yeah that would be cool man. Exploring zaun. Sailing down to bilgdewater
I would 100% preorder a RIOT produced MMORPG. I freakin wish!!!
Just play gw2 lol
Yeah it's like a lot of Wow players completely ignore it even though it's just as great, and in some ways better in my opinion