What can be done to revive the MMO genre? Can it be revived? Is there any hope?

[Xenich]

Even things like class reliance help promote social play, but modern MMOs went away from these things due to demands.

Class reliance does have its drawbacks, though: I can't imagine how a dev would manage to balance it such that all classes are played in the ratios they demand by fiat design. If you need exactly a 3:1 (or any other) ratio of A:B for your group content to function correctly, how do you enforce that players adopt these ratios in the playerbase? If you don't enforce the ratio, one class will become overpopulated, and this will result in a miserable experience for those players. If switching out is then difficult, those players will opt to gripe rather than switch.

I don't mean reliance is "required", rather that these tools naturally produce synergies in play that aid to such for optimal makeup. You have the traditionally balanced concept of a group (healer, tank, DPS) and many games have focused on this being the specific required balance in play. I think that should be the overall goal for the ideal group for apex content, but there should be a means for other classes to synergize through various tools to achieve success in various content even if limited in selections.

EQ did well with this due to the numerous skills/abilities that classes had which allowed for different party makeups and sizes to achieve success. I think EQ could have expanded on this in both class progression as well as content design to create a balance in play that focused people to group, but did not establish the requirement of having to have X, Y, Z party makeups constantly. Some makeups were less optimal than others, but the point was that each class had tools that could work in various ways to support group play depending on content. This I think helps to reduce the issues with class reliance always being focused to the traditional balance in party makeup.

Pantheon I think is failing on this front to an extent. They are missing the concept of flexible play in group focus while pushing specifically for a balanced group forced style of play. That is, to even succeed in content, you must have class X, Y, Z in many cases which was not the case in EQ and you begin to run into the problems as you pointed out.

Granted the "perfect" group will always exist, but the idea is that less than optimal party sizes and makeups still have tools to succeed given proper content selection for that makeup.

This also requires that classes are not balanced between each other exactly, rather that each class is given practical tools to deal with the content themselves yet those abilities provide additional tools and aids when synergized with other class abilities, outside of the traditional "holy trinity" design. Think of how many classes in EQ could find ways to group with less than ideal makeup to handle various content while not being the optimal or perfect group.

This would encourage players to seek other classes because their tools combined with others would produce success. Then you can begin designing content around group play where soloing becomes impractical for most classes and this concept of play is progressed to the point where the most difficult content would strongly encourage optimal group makeup. I say encourage because I think that players who are extremely skilled in play and very clever with their application of their abilities should be able to find ways to do that content with less than optimal groups.

This actually worked pretty well in EQ, though... class envy wars constantly screwed this up due to the expectation that each class should be balanced between each other tit for tat (and according to a template group design), or... each given a specialty role that was above all others. I think that works against healthy group play and why modern MMOs ended up with simple designs due to the constant nerf disputes.

Also, keep in mind when I say class reliance, I am saying all aspects of play, not simply combat. Classes that buff, transport, provide travel aids, etc... are all forms of reliance in play. All of the other aspects of obstacles in play can be aided by various class utilities. The more non-combat obstacles you have, the more you can provide various classes with means to help in dealing with them which creates reliance by other classes regardless if it is combat or not.

[Xenich]

The problem with this is that it's effectively the same argument that leftists make when they complain about normal people reviewing, curating, youtubing about, etc., their pronoun games: "these games aren't FOR you, chud, and you're ruining it for us by complaining!"

Xenich has convinced me with his argument that the market for his kind of "old-school MMO design" is not big enough to sustain the kind of game he wants, since devs always end up making changes to suit the preferences of a larger majority of players. It also seems likely that the current normie MMO market isn't very stable either, leaving the genre dead in the water for now.

It's not inconceivable that normie MMO players really don't know what they want and would enjoy a Xenichcore EQalike if they gave it a try; it's just a bad argument, just like it was a bad argument with Concord.

It's a fine argument. Attempting to cater to an audience other than the core one is how hobbies and genres become casualized and ruined. Hobbies aren't for everyone. Whether there are enough fans of old school MMO design to sustain a game catering to them, I don't know, but it doesn't seem there are many developers trying to find out. Developers make changes that alienate their core audience in an effort to capture more players all the time, even when continuing to cater to their core players was demonstrably sustainable. It's not fair to say that old school design principles were unsustainable just because WoW came in and inspired every developer to chase the casual crowd; that only proves that developers/publishers wanted more money, not that they couldn't get by otherwise.

People are free to criticize whatever they want, but criticizing an old school MMO for following old school principles is like complaining that turn based strategy games aren't real time. There's nothing wrong with turn based games; they just aren't for everyone.

If I like real-time games and don't like turn-based games, it's entirely fine and reasonable for me to post a review on a turn-based game I tried saying I would have liked it if only it were real-time. That's an entirely valid opinion and there's no reason not to express it. Whether the developers care is another issue. If there are only like three people who like turn-based games and they stop turning a profit because everyone wants a real-time game instead, then yeah, devs who want to make money are going to start jumping ship to make real-time games instead. People who want turn-based games would have to lower their expectations to the level of cheap itch.io slop because a big studio can't afford to make them.

It's true that it's possible for devs to get wrong signals, too. If real-time fans are just a lot more vocal than turn-based fans, it might seem like there aren't enough turn-based fans to sustain a market. That's a good reason for turn-based fans to work harder to make their preferences known. But I'll be honest with you: when it keeps happening again and again over the entire MMO or strategy game landscape, I'm going to strongly suspect that the signals are basically right, just as I strongly suspect there isn't really a huge contingent of secret pronoun-game fans keeping their mouths shut and getting disappointed.

Under normal economic conditions, if most major players in an industry are going broke chasing after a market that doesn't really exist and neglecting one that does, that's a huge opportunity for someone with more realistic expectations to make a comfortable profit in the smaller niche. We see this happen in real life now and then. To be sure, people miss opportunities all the time; maybe nobody has bothered to do it right yet; but that's an argument for giving it a try. I certainly don't think the MMO team Xenich mentioned should quit. "Those filthy casuals just don't know what they want" is still a bad argument just like it is when leftists cry about people ruining their pronoun games.

This is the point I am getting at with M&M for instance. They have selected a specific niche group, designed around it and most importantly budgeted for it. As I said, I think their total expense not too long ago was around 70K? That was for what, 5 years of development so far (started in 2020)? Here is their road map.

HighLevelRoadmap2025.png

Roadmap2025.png

So they should hit EA in Q1 2026 for open beta, which based on their progression should mean they launch fully for 1.0 not too long after.

If you consider their budget for the past, and even decide to triple it by release (over estimating), that is still only 210k in their expenses. They have 10k on their mailing list currently. Consider an EA price at around 40 bucks and that comes out to 400k just in EA sales. They are going to use a sub model, so lets say $15 bucks a month and lets say only 1/2 that number subs (5k), so that is around 75k a month (900k a year).

I have no idea how long it will take them to produce the new modules, but all things considered I doubt it will take them that long once the game is finalized so you consider box sales for each new module they add.

Even with extremely small numbers, based on their development budget, I don't see how this could not sustain itself and chances are, there will be more interest than I have accounted for (by a lot if you consider the talk by those playing pantheon currently).

So this type of project is completely viable, providing they attend directly to their niche market and pay attention to their budgets. Of course, the game has to be good, but if you talk to those who have been doing the testing, they are extremely happy with the results so far.

Point is, there is a market, it just isn't a massive one and it can be successful I think if it stays focused.

Pantheon on the other hand, I am not so sure. It already caters pretty heavily to modern audiences and seems to continue on with its attempt to draw in WoW players which is causing issues with its core crowd. This I think could be a problem for them as those modern audiences tend to not be reliable and if they don't remedy the issue with the core crowd (ie special rule-set server), they may end up losing both in the long run. Then there is also the fact that they have spent far more money on their project (5-6 million) and they have no solid road map or development plan provided yet (other than the basic 2 year till release rumor).

As I said previously, I think M&M is the best test case for this whole argument, but we will have to see how it does. I think it can and likely will succeed to those goals, but it won't be a mainstream market game, it never really intended to be and I think that is why it will likely succeed on that front.

[rustys-name-is-kumar]

but if you talk to those who have been doing the testing, they are extremely happy with the results so far.

the type of people this appeals to would also eat **** so who cares

mmo-rons never learn

[Norfleet]

I don't mean reliance is "required", rather that these tools naturally produce synergies in play that aid to such for optimal makeup.

Well, requirements can be hard or soft. Whether it's a hard requirement where the game physically REQUIRES you to queue with a specific team composition of, say, 3 DPS, a healer, and a tank, or simply a soft requirement where trying to progress alone becomes increasingly difficult to impossible, the result is ultimately the same: The class balance expected rarely matches the population that emerges organically.

You have the traditionally balanced concept of a group (healer, tank, DPS) and many games have focused on this being the specific required balance in play. I think that should be the overall goal for the ideal group for apex content, but there should be a means for other classes to synergize through various tools to achieve success in various content even if limited in selections.

We also tend to observe that, with the inevitable powercreep that follows the life of any MMO, the balance tends to quickly break down and become almost entirely DPS-leaning, with high-performance groups tending to brute-force speedrun content by massive DPS alone.

but the point was that each class had tools that could work in various ways to support group play depending on content.

It will inevitably prove to be the case that not all content is created equal, and as such, not all classes are created equal. The content set invariably seems to converge on a small subset of meta-relevant content, which in turn defines the meta-relevant classes. This heavily biases the playerbase towards those classes, which then biases future content towards those customers.

Granted the "perfect" group will always exist, but the idea is that less than optimal party sizes and makeups still have tools to succeed given proper content selection for that makeup.

This logic requires that the devs be working towards something other than a financial motive to extract resources from their existing customerbase, though. Otherwise, you have to make content which caters in some way towards that base, which in turn creates a convergence towards that base as the marginalized population drops out.

This also requires that classes are not balanced between each other exactly, rather that each class is given practical tools to deal with the content themselves yet those abilities provide additional tools and aids when synergized with other class abilities, outside of the traditional "holy trinity" design.

The question is how miserable the experience of trying to deal with it the player is either forced to cave and find a group, or simply ragequits out of frustration, and more importantly, WHEN. If class A hits this wall at level 10, but class B doesn't hit this wall until level 30, people playing class A are going to be deeply frustrated when they find nobody to team up with at the point where they start needing it, because class B is all off on their own and has outlevelled them, while by the time class B hits this wall, class A no longer exists in any numbers because most everyone has already quit by then.

This is usually what drives me to take up multiboxing because other people are consistently unreliable and flakey.

Also, keep in mind when I say class reliance, I am saying all aspects of play, not simply combat. Classes that buff, transport, provide travel aids, etc... are all forms of reliance in play. All of the other aspects of obstacles in play can be aided by various class utilities. The more non-combat obstacles you have, the more you can provide various classes with means to help in dealing with them which creates reliance by other classes regardless if it is combat or not.

Noncombat utility is another primary driver of multiboxing, because classes that provide out-of-combat aid tend to be great, but also often are just load inside combat endeavors, which is what is generally required for advancement in play, and no one really wants to be carrying load that isn't theirs.

[Xenich]

but if you talk to those who have been doing the testing, they are extremely happy with the results so far.

the type of people this appeals to would also eat **** so who cares

mmo-rons never learn

Yet this game only matters to the people who would play it. The question is, are there enough to make the game successful in its venture according to those metrics. Considering the cost to produce/maintain and the interest by those who would enjoy this game, It is reasonable to expect that there are.

After that, what doesn't matter are those who dislike the game because the game was never intended for them anyway.

[rustys-name-is-kumar]

The question is, are there enough to make the game successful

no

hence why these types of games die and the mmo field is a wasteland of trying to copy games from decades ago. m&m has 0 chance of being a success and i will personally dab on you once this happens.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

We also tend to observe that, with the inevitable powercreep that follows the life of any MMO, the balance tends to quickly break down and become almost entirely DPS-leaning, with high-performance groups tending to brute-force speedrun content by massive DPS alone.

I think this has more to do with how content and the reward structure is designed.

1. Retail WoW and its clones are about speedrunning the same content over and over again. You do the same, latest raid over and over again each week in the hope of drops to raise your item level, which then resets when the next patch comes so you are always speedrunning the same content over and over forever. The consequences of running a glass cannon build and dying are also trivial. The solution is to have something like FF11 where you 1. go on a long journey where you beat each mission once or farm each artifact armor once and then move on to the next thing, so you aren't speedrunning the same content over and over. And 2. there are consequences for dying (such as exp loss, long run to get back, also ripping aggro off the tank with no way for him to hard taunt the mob off of you and dying is a very real possibility, etc) that makes pure glass cannon builds risky. On Horizon, the most commonly picked subjob for melee classes was not something that boosted damage like /Warrior or /Samurai, but /Ninja for the shadow clones to soak stray attacks.

Another issue is that RPG designers tend to be unimaginative, and most encounters boil down to winning by killing a target. Thus, you want to deal the most amount of damage possible to win as fast as possible. In MMOs, you rarely see scenarios designed where you need to win by doing other things than just killing, ie a bad guy is trying to escape the level with a hostage, and he has very high HP, so you'll want to try to snare him or block his escape. Warframe used to have missions like that. Or like in GW2 where there are large battlefield maps where points need to be captured and held.

The question is how miserable the experience of trying to deal with it the player is either forced to cave and find a group, or simply ragequits out of frustration, and more importantly, WHEN. If class A hits this wall at level 10, but class B doesn't hit this wall until level 30, people playing class A are going to be deeply frustrated when they find nobody to team up with at the point where they start needing it, because class B is all off on their own and has outlevelled them, while by the time class B hits this wall, class A no longer exists in any numbers because most everyone has already quit by then.

This sounds like an issue with the game not facilitating the formation of friendships and guilds from the getgo so that people view each other as people and as friends to play with, rather than as replaceable cogs in a machine to replaced for the more optimal cogs.

[Norfleet]

1. Retail WoW and its clones are about speedrunning the same content over and over again. You do the same, latest raid over and over again each week in the hope of drops to raise your item level, which then resets when the next patch comes so you are always speedrunning the same content over and over forever. The consequences of running a glass cannon build and dying are also trivial. The solution is to have something like FF11 where you 1. go on a long journey where you beat each mission once or farm each artifact armor once and then move on to the next thing, so you aren't speedrunning the same content over and over.

One-and-done does, however, create a rather high burn rate for content. If each player will only ever do something once, it becomes nearly impossible to keep pace with how fast players can chew down content: It can take weeks or months to create something that a player will devour in an hour or two. Thus all content-driven games must necessarily have some element of repetition.

And 2. there are consequences for dying (such as exp loss, long run to get back, also ripping aggro off the tank with no way for him to hard taunt the mob off of you and dying is a very real possibility, etc) that makes pure glass cannon builds risky.

Well, how a game should handle death is its own can of worms, with really harsh death penalties typically consigning your game to niche status.

On Horizon, the most commonly picked subjob for melee classes was not something that boosted damage like /Warrior or /Samurai, but /Ninja for the shadow clones to soak stray attacks.

Never heard of this Horizon. You say "was", though. Did something happen to change this state of affairs? Because that'd be what I'd expect, that at some point the model breaks down as the game ages and power creeps.

In MMOs, you rarely see scenarios designed where you need to win by doing other things than just killing, ie a bad guy is trying to escape the level with a hostage, and he has very high HP, so you'll want to try to snare him or block his escape. Warframe used to have missions like that.

I find that such missions are generally seen as arbitrary and capricious attempts to hamhandedly force players into solving things in a specific, railroaded way, and often widely disliked because they don't really interface with how the rest of the game is normally played. It's very rare to see a mission where you actually resolve such a scenario using the tools of the game as could be normally played.

Or like in GW2 where there are large battlefield maps where points need to be captured and held.

Well, PvP always makes things a bit more interesting, yes.

This sounds like an issue with the game not facilitating the formation of friendships and guilds from the getgo so that people view each other as people and as friends to play with, rather than as replaceable cogs in a machine to replaced for the more optimal cogs.

I've not seen a game even really try. Certainly it flies in the face of the natural introverted instincts of the typical vidya game player.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Never heard of this Horizon. You say "was", though. Did something happen to change this state of affairs? Because that'd be what I'd expect, that at some point the model breaks down as the game ages and power creeps.

FF11 Horizon, which some of us here on the HQ played together last year. AFAIK Ninja still is a popular subjob.

One-and-done does, however, create a rather high burn rate for content. If each player will only ever do something once, it becomes nearly impossible to keep pace with how fast players can chew down content: It can take weeks or months to create something that a player will devour in an hour or two. Thus all content-driven games must necessarily have some element of repetition.

Opening coffer keys to get someone's artifact boots or doing a mission like killing three dangerous mobs to raise the level cap would take us an entire play session, and these are for relatively "simple" things but complicated by the difficulty of the game design as far as time to travel and having to avoid and fight through dangerous mobs. Just getting through the base game's nation missions, the level cap unlocks and finally reaching the cap of level 75 took 200 hours.

Well, PvP always makes things a bit more interesting, yes.

I didn't mean PvP, but the big PvE event maps like Silverwastes, Dragon's Stand, Dragonfall, Drizzlewood Coast, Dragon's End, Gyala Delve, etc. Those maps are on a 2 hour timer where to progress the map, you need to split up the players into three or four+ different groups that push down different roads and simultaneously capture and hold different locations. The first of these event maps, Silverwastes and Dragon's Stand back when they were released in 2014 and 2015, were tuned to be much more difficult than regular maps and would kill people walking around in glass cannon builds. It pushed people to adopt more tankier builds and/or to form parties with healers and buffers and debuffers to reduce incoming damage and live.

[Xenich]

The question is, are there enough to make the game successful

no

hence why these types of games die and the mmo field is a wasteland of trying to copy games from decades ago. m&m has 0 chance of being a success and i will personally dab on you once this happens.

You are the only one taking an absolute position here.

So I say that it has a good chance of success within the scope of being able to fund their continued development of the game as I have discussed.

Your position is that they have "0 chance".

So we will see.

As for you giving me crap, again... you are the only one who has a strong attachment to the outcome of this. If it does not turn out to your expectations, will you accept it or will this turn into a process of moving goal posts?

Again, I will be clear. Success is being able to acquire a base which will pay for the creation and continued development of the game at a level they see as acceptable to do so. That is the definition of success here to which I have discussed.

[rustys-name-is-kumar]

Success is being able to acquire a base which will pay for the creation and continued development of the game at a level they see as acceptable to do so

sounds like some sorta carny speech for, "yeah this game is gonna have like 50 players"

[rusty_shackleford]

There's actually nothing wrong with a game having 50 players as long as their idea wasn't to attract millions.

[Tweed]

There's actually nothing wrong with a game having 50 players as long as their idea wasn't to attract millions.

Although it's creepy when you have a game world that was meant for upwards of several hundred to a thousand and there's only 50 left. Or the world has expanded so much that there's a ton of dead space.

[rustys-name-is-kumar]

There's actually nothing wrong with a game having 50 players as long as their idea wasn't to attract millions.

not exactly hitting that massively multiplayer quota though innit

[rusty_shackleford]

There's actually nothing wrong with a game having 50 players as long as their idea wasn't to attract millions.

not exactly hitting that massively multiplayer quota though innit

I've never found much value in the 'massive' part anyways.

[Xenich]

Success is being able to acquire a base which will pay for the creation and continued development of the game at a level they see as acceptable to do so

sounds like some sorta carny speech for, "yeah this game is gonna have like 50 players"

If their subs can pay for their development, and continued development, is it not a success?

[Tweed]

There's actually nothing wrong with a game having 50 players as long as their idea wasn't to attract millions.

not exactly hitting that massively multiplayer quota though innit

The massive part usually plays into it when you need to trade with someone or find random pickup groups. Otherwise you have your friends list or at least your list of "first call" for groups.

In games like UO the massive part played a bigger role since it tried to be larger world.

[rustys-name-is-kumar]

If their subs can pay for their development, and continued development, is it not a success?

no because i'm comparing it to its competition it has decided to enter into the ring with

you should play better games xenny. in fact i am not suggesting but i am demanding you change your gaming preferences to align with mine.

[Stack of Turtles]

MMOs are ****** garbage and suck.

[rustys-name-is-kumar]

prolonged exposure to mmos makes you become universally worse at every other type of game out there

[Xenich]

If their subs can pay for their development, and continued development, is it not a success?

no because i'm comparing it to its competition it has decided to enter into the ring with

That was never my argument and I made this clear.

you should play better games xenny. in fact i am not suggesting but i am demanding you change your gaming preferences to align with mine.

Rather "Troonish" of you.

[rustys-name-is-kumar]

That was never my argument and I made this clear.

doesnt matter if you wanna look at it in a mega extreme microscope, the rest of the world wont

hence why m&m is a game that has no point in being made. they'll see **** graphics, **** gameplay, a population at odds with the sort of social-heavy game it wants to be, just because you're totally fine with playing some pile of crap doesn't exempt it from inevitable comparisons. this game does nothing different that you haven't seen before, a lot of what is suggested or shown looks like it has been copy/pasted from EQ already, i cannot imagine why you would ever want to pay an on going subscription to reward devs who can't even give you basic expectancies in 2025 like good animations and an art direction. a game like this should be widely ridiculed and the devs shamed into becoming uber eats drivers that steal half my mcdonalds fries every order.

i'm just telling it like it is baby

[Xenich]

That was never my argument and I made this clear.

doesnt matter if you wanna look at it in a mega extreme microscope, the rest of the world wont

hence why m&m is a game that has no point in being made. they'll see **** graphics, **** gameplay, a population at odds with the sort of social-heavy game it wants to be, just because you're totally fine with playing some pile of crap doesn't exempt it from inevitable comparisons. this game does nothing different that you haven't seen before, a lot of what is suggested or shown looks like it has been copy/pasted from EQ already, i cannot imagine why you would ever want to pay an on going subscription to reward devs who can't even give you basic expectancies in 2025 like good animations and an art direction. a game like this should be widely ridiculed and the devs shamed into becoming uber eats drivers that steal half my mcdonalds fries every order.

i'm just telling it like it is baby

Is he stupid or something?

[rustys-name-is-kumar]

Is he stupid or something?

lol nice low effort **** you donated to disguised as "0ld skewl", hope your voodoo3 can run it :3

[NotAI]

Roblox has worse graphics. Balatro has no graphics.

I personally do prefer the BEST graphics but many people clearly do not.

Half the online games have positively vomit inducing half-arsed realistic graphics.

Half the games in 2024 had worse graphics than that niche dungeon crawler, Legend of Grimrock, from 2012.

I would even bet that if somebody just makes a better Daggerfall, that **** will sell. With sprites and all the ********.

Given what steam sales are for various things, there are no rules. Nobody knows anything, like in films. Too many conflated and bundled variables involved.

I do agree that MMOs need to change. They need to be more hardcore, like in the past. But they cannot be just that. They need a lot more reactivity. (Money.) Bartle had argued this point.

But new features means marketing cost. (Money.) That's the ultimate chicken and egg impasse for indie, in the end. The cost of marketing to succeed is generally what makes many genres, for the time being, effectively dead.

[rustys-name-is-kumar]

how does a game that looks this **** have this sort of fps performance btw

[rusty_shackleford]

Grafix looks fine to me.
Bad performance is not ok tho

[Yankee Zulu]

Yeah mmorpgs are dead. Oh wait, theres another mmorpg coming up.

https://www.pocketgamer.com/odin-valhal ... obal-2025/

17 mln downloads in Asia alone. MMORPGs are dead. End of story.

[TKVNC]

Asians play MMO's because unlike the West they can't buy some overpriced German car to show off to their neighbours.

Case closed. MMO's are dead. Just play something like Zomboid with a few friends.

[Yankee Zulu]

In your dreams. Those who say mmos are dead are just suckers who cant commit to an mmos which require time to play.

https://www.gamespot.com/gallery/top-20 ... 2900-6301/

Two of the most popular games on steam are recent mmorpgs.