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

[GhostShiroyama]

When and if Final Fantasy 14 finally dies like it deserves, I'm buying a bottle of champagne to celebrate.

[Xenich]

Lotro was good up until the implementation of real life currency, but that wasn't the only thing to contribute to it's decline in quality.

Agreed, that was a big one, but they were already on the decline before Moria was released (ie the sale of Turbine and the change in direction for Moria and its features).

While I did enjoy the "mechanics" of many of Morias dungeons, I really disliked how short they made them as they turned into speed run dailies. What really annoyed me was when they started breaking up all the older dungeons, turning them into instance runs, etc... game turned into a gimmick and lost its whole "feel" of play. Oh, that and I wanted to murder the developers for allowing people to buy traits.

I spent an enormous amount of time working on filling out all my traits because I knew they would be useful. I did this when the ******* were mocking me how stupid I was only to whine like little ******* once we started doing some of the more difficult raid content and they realized those traits were actually useful. So naturally, what did people do? They whined to the ******* company to provide a means for them to buy them... ****!

[Vergil]

Imagine how much better this genre would be if the internet was walled off for Whites only

[Norfleet]

Imagine how much better this genre would be if the internet was walled off for Whites only

Well, if you were willing to forgo the profits, you could make the game challenging enough to require at least a 100 IQ to play. That would wall out enough of your disliked ethnicities to make them a non-issue.

[Norfleet]

With the use of AI technology that could change. Imagine if you could log into a new MMO that interested you, and you were guaranteed to meet other avatars with similar play schedules that meshed well with the topics you like to talk about, the amount of interpersonal drama you secretly want, and had the same level of combat skill. Does it really matter if those people you only interact with in the MMO are real?

What do you mean, CHANGE? In a given MMO, half the players you meet are probably bots anyway.

[Maledict]

It was probably said before multiple times, but MMOs served the purpose the evolved social media serves now. The vast majority of potential userbase shifted to Discord servers and whatnot. The normie culture through technological process became so parasitic off of what used to unite hobbyist nerds the spaces for hobbyist nerds evaporated. It also was swiftly followed by the longhouse censorship enforced by women.

I remember when Guild Wars (not the furry sequel) really knew how to snipe me with their box art:




And the other weren't any worse. I still feel a very particular, strong way seeing them. I can't fathom how we've lost a world so beautiful...



And that's what Guild Wars (2) is now:

[jdcp]

I remember when Guild Wars (not the furry sequel) really knew how to snipe me with their box art:

You know for this one I wanna laugh at you, I wanna shame on you, I want to call you a bunch of derogatory names and **** on you.

But you're right, you're ******* right

It was probably said before multiple times, but MMOs served the purpose the evolved social media serves now. The vast majority of potential userbase shifted to Discord servers and whatnot. The normie culture through technological process became so parasitic off of what used to unite hobbyist nerds the spaces for hobbyist nerds evaporated. It also was swiftly followed by the longhouse censorship enforced by women.

yeh agreed, it's like habbo hotel, progress has rendered it into nothing.

[Maledict]

You know for this one I wanna laugh at you, I wanna shame on you, I want to call you a bunch of derogatory names and **** on you.

You should call me any derogatory names or slurs you want. Language must be preserved.



I legitimately wouldn't mind having all 3 of these on my wall as decorations. My buddy got a quality poster of the alien from ME, that ******* degen.

[mynameismortis]

I have over 1k hours on guild wars 2,playing on and off from like 2019 before they changed the model to yearly expac/passes which is one of the worst decisions they have made.Expacs are like 2 maps that could be done in 2-3 hours,new subclasses that are either completely broken or bare with no new features.Wpvp and ranked pvp are abandoned + full with wintraders (shoutout to naru).And from what i have heard from wow and eso players its same like there.Why do all these companies do the same mistakes over and over again?And when will they close like New world.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I have over 1k hours on guild wars 2,playing on and off from like 2019 before they changed the model to yearly expac/passes which is one of the worst decisions they have made.Expacs are like 2 maps that could be done in 2-3 hours,new subclasses that are either completely broken or bare with no new features.Wpvp and ranked pvp are abandoned + full with wintraders (shoutout to naru).And from what i have heard from wow and eso players its same like there.Why do all these companies do the same mistakes over and over again?And when will they close like New world.

GW2 entered into managed decline after PoF released (season 4 greenlit but no 3rd expansion was greenlit) because Anet wanted to make a different game. They were moving devs off of GW2 to this other unannounced project. Because there was no certainty that GW2 would continue past season 4, S4 was written as a soft ending. S4 ended and the layoffs happened, and then GW2 was greenlit for another season rather than a real box expansion. That's why they tried to rebrand season 5 to Icebrood Saga and tout it as "an expansion level season". NCsoft then gazed at Anet and told them to cancel their other project and to make a third expansion, so Icebrood Saga was aborted because they didn't have enough devs to finish both IBS and make EoD at the same time. EoD released and then NCsoft told Anet to make GW3, so they once again shifted people off of the GW2 dev team, with the remainders producing these new mini expansions to throw a bone to the GW2 fanbase and keep them thinking about Guild Wars until 3 comes out for them to check out.

From a business perspective I'd say that focusing on GW3 is the right call as right now there is a big hole in the MMO market. WoW and FF14 are shadows of what they once were and are many years into steep population decline, and they are heavily dated and have severe onboarding issues. They are not attracting enough new young blood to replace oldtimers who are losing interest. It has been over a decade since Age of Reckoning, the Tortanic, Rift, Wildstar, etc came out and then died. Kickstarter MMOs like Shroud of the Avatar, Gloria Victis, Camelot Unchained, Star Citizen, Crowfall, Ashes of Creation, etc, are niche and are the laughingstock. An entire generation of gamers have grown up in a post MMO era, having played Overwatch, Fornite, Genshin, Helldivers, Marvel Rivals, etc, having never really known MMOs. I think the environment is ripe for a new high production value MMO to come in and grab a lot of young people's investment and be set for several years to a decade. Where Winds Meet is that MMO for the Chinese audience right now. The MMO market is undersaturated with Amazon's LotR MMO cancelled and the Riot MMO in development hell, etc. There is hardly any competition on the horizon unless the Riot MMO project starts amounting to anything. It's the opposite situation of the gacha market where there are 20 high production value gachas in development each with a team of hundreds of devs that are about to release over the next year and all predictably die since that genre is already saturated.

The only real question is how competent is ArenaNet's current staff to execute the game. It'll probably be crossplatform and made to appeal to a global audience rather than mainly Americans (the white middle class of gamers is shrinking). I expect it to be even more heavily monetized than even GW2 where all of the mounts skins and good armor/weapon transmogs are on the cash shop. They might implement a gacha like Genshin or Where Winds Meet.

[Maledict]

GW3

GW3 is being made? Do you reckon it is going to be a furry **** game like GW2 or hot woman based game like GW1?

vs

[Val the Moofia Boss]

GW3

GW3 is being made? Do you reckon it is going to be a furry **** game like GW2 or hot woman based game like GW1?

vs

Yes, GW3 is being made. Last year a NCsoft executive accidentally blurted it out when defending himself at a shareholder Q&A.

I hope it has playable beastmen. I was just having discussion about it on RPGcodex yesterday. A huge part of GW2's appeal to me was being able to play as a big, cool, powerful inhuman beastman, and the male Charr PC's voice acting by Lex Lang and Ron Yuan. If I could only play as a boring human then a lot of my interest in the game would have evaporated.

[Maledict]

I hope it has playable beastmen. I was just having discussion about it on RPGcodex yesterday. A huge part of GW2's appeal to me was being able to play as a big, cool, powerful inhuman beastman, and the male Charr PC's voice acting by Lex Lang and Ron Yuan. If I could only play as a boring human then a lot of my interest in the game would have evaporated.

Beastmen were ruined to me by furries.

Nowadays I'd be happy to see a game in a multi-race setting where you can only play as a human.

[mynameismortis]

I have over 1k hours on guild wars 2,playing on and off from like 2019 before they changed the model to yearly expac/passes which is one of the worst decisions they have made.Expacs are like 2 maps that could be done in 2-3 hours,new subclasses that are either completely broken or bare with no new features.Wpvp and ranked pvp are abandoned + full with wintraders (shoutout to naru).And from what i have heard from wow and eso players its same like there.Why do all these companies do the same mistakes over and over again?And when will they close like New world.

GW2 entered into managed decline after PoF released (season 4 greenlit but no 3rd expansion was greenlit) because Anet wanted to make a different game. They were moving devs off of GW2 to this other unannounced project. Because there was no certainty that GW2 would continue past season 4, S4 was written as a soft ending. S4 ended and the layoffs happened, and then GW2 was greenlit for another season rather than a real box expansion. That's why they tried to rebrand season 5 to Icebrood Saga and tout it as "an expansion level season". NCsoft then gazed at Anet and told them to cancel their other project and to make a third expansion, so Icebrood Saga was aborted because they didn't have enough devs to finish both IBS and make EoD at the same time. EoD released and then NCsoft told Anet to make GW3, so they once again shifted people off of the GW2 dev team, with the remainders producing these new mini expansions to throw a bone to the GW2 fanbase and keep them thinking about Guild Wars until 3 comes out for them to check out.

From a business perspective I'd say that focusing on GW3 is the right call as right now there is a big hole in the MMO market. WoW and FF14 are shadows of what they once were and are many years into steep population decline, and they are heavily dated and have severe onboarding issues. They are not attracting enough new young blood to replace oldtimers who are losing interest. It has been over a decade since Age of Reckoning, the Tortanic, Rift, Wildstar, etc came out and then died. Kickstarter MMOs like Shroud of the Avatar, Gloria Victis, Camelot Unchained, Star Citizen, Crowfall, Ashes of Creation, etc, are niche and are the laughingstock. An entire generation of gamers have grown up in a post MMO era, having played Overwatch, Fornite, Genshin, Helldivers, Marvel Rivals, etc, having never really known MMOs. I think the environment is ripe for a new high production value MMO to come in and grab a lot of young people's investment and be set for several years to a decade. Where Winds Meet is that MMO for the Chinese audience right now. The MMO market is undersaturated with Amazon's LotR MMO cancelled and the Riot MMO in development hell, etc. There is hardly any competition on the horizon unless the Riot MMO project starts to amounting to anything. It's the opposite situation of the gacha market where there are 20 high production value gachas in development each with a team of hundreds of devs that are about to release over the next year and all predictably die since that genre is already saturated.

The only real question is how competent are ArenaNet's current staff are to execute the game. It'll probably be crossplatform and made to appeal to a global audience rather than mainly Americans (the white middle class of gamers is shrinking).

Wait and see are my words.Though from Anet i dont really expect anything innovative or market breaking.I hope that after the success of games workshop's newest games,we would see mmo in the works that is either 40k related or fantasy.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I have over 1k hours on guild wars 2,playing on and off from like 2019 before they changed the model to yearly expac/passes which is one of the worst decisions they have made.Expacs are like 2 maps that could be done in 2-3 hours,new subclasses that are either completely broken or bare with no new features.Wpvp and ranked pvp are abandoned + full with wintraders (shoutout to naru).And from what i have heard from wow and eso players its same like there.Why do all these companies do the same mistakes over and over again?And when will they close like New world.

GW2 entered into managed decline after PoF released (season 4 greenlit but no 3rd expansion was greenlit) because Anet wanted to make a different game. They were moving devs off of GW2 to this other unannounced project. Because there was no certainty that GW2 would continue past season 4, S4 was written as a soft ending. S4 ended and the layoffs happened, and then GW2 was greenlit for another season rather than a real box expansion. That's why they tried to rebrand season 5 to Icebrood Saga and tout it as "an expansion level season". NCsoft then gazed at Anet and told them to cancel their other project and to make a third expansion, so Icebrood Saga was aborted because they didn't have enough devs to finish both IBS and make EoD at the same time. EoD released and then NCsoft told Anet to make GW3, so they once again shifted people off of the GW2 dev team, with the remainders producing these new mini expansions to throw a bone to the GW2 fanbase and keep them thinking about Guild Wars until 3 comes out for them to check out.

From a business perspective I'd say that focusing on GW3 is the right call as right now there is a big hole in the MMO market. WoW and FF14 are shadows of what they once were and are many years into steep population decline, and they are heavily dated and have severe onboarding issues. They are not attracting enough new young blood to replace oldtimers who are losing interest. It has been over a decade since Age of Reckoning, the Tortanic, Rift, Wildstar, etc came out and then died. Kickstarter MMOs like Shroud of the Avatar, Gloria Victis, Camelot Unchained, Star Citizen, Crowfall, Ashes of Creation, etc, are niche and are the laughingstock. An entire generation of gamers have grown up in a post MMO era, having played Overwatch, Fornite, Genshin, Helldivers, Marvel Rivals, etc, having never really known MMOs. I think the environment is ripe for a new high production value MMO to come in and grab a lot of young people's investment and be set for several years to a decade. Where Winds Meet is that MMO for the Chinese audience right now. The MMO market is undersaturated with Amazon's LotR MMO cancelled and the Riot MMO in development hell, etc. There is hardly any competition on the horizon unless the Riot MMO project starts to amounting to anything. It's the opposite situation of the gacha market where there are 20 high production value gachas in development each with a team of hundreds of devs that are about to release over the next year and all predictably die since that genre is already saturated.

The only real question is how competent are ArenaNet's current staff are to execute the game. It'll probably be crossplatform and made to appeal to a global audience rather than mainly Americans (the white middle class of gamers is shrinking).

Wait and see are my words.Though from Anet i dont really expect anything innovative or market breaking.I hope that after the success of games workshop's newest games,we would see mmo in the works that is either 40k related or fantasy.

I don't think you need to reinvent the wheel. Time has filtered good game design concepts and now it boils down mostly to technically executing as many things as possible to a high degree. Netcode, movement, UI, QoL, satisfying combat, character progression, animations and ability VFX, sound design, soundtrack, zone design, things to look forward to doing to keep you logging in every day, etc. It's no good to have a crazy weird game design if the whole game just feels bad (see the low production value kickstarter MMOs, or even Star Citizen which has a dev team of hundreds but the game just feels bad to play in so many areas with stuff not working, the sluggishness, glitchy animations, low FPS, randomly dying, long travel times, losing your stuff on death so you never feel a desire to invest in better equipment and thus a lot of your motivation for playing is gone since what's the point of amassing money if you never want to spend it, etc).

The videogame industry reached market oversaturation a few years ago and line isn't going up anymore. A lot of companies are clamming up because they don't want to take a risk in such a risky industry. If you are going to dump a lot of money on an MMO then you're doing it because you really like MMOs and want the game to exist. If you want easy money then there are "safer" types of games or business ventures to invest in. Games Workshop is not a MMO company so I don't think they would be really interested in all of this hassle or money on the line for a high production value MMO today. Anet however is specifically an MMO company and the people are there to make that kind of game, so ofcourse they would be more inclined to make another one.

[Lich]

someone could make an MMO that's not a bloated piece of ****

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I have been mulling on some key things that would have to be addressed for a modern MMO (Retail WoW, GW2, etc, came out 12+ years ago. Let's not call them modern anymore).

I have a long list of things but I am not going to post them all at once, lest it become a huge indigestible wall of text that nobody reads or discusses.

• Global simultaneous crossplatform release
• Marketing campaign
• Patch cadence and retention
• Appealing to young players and retaining them without closing off new players
• Progression
• Tutorialization
• Monetization (aka how to entice whales and leviathans to spend on an MMO without antagonizing Western gamers)
• Player identity as expansion selling points
• Combat design and chat
• Combat design: pressing a button millions of times to hit like a wet noodle
• Encounter design
• Do not waste your time developing raids
• Megaservers and instancing
• Global chat
• Economy and RMT

(As much as I reminisce about ye good ole faction wars, I should probably do a section on how companies shouldn't bother with PvP given how we had a litany of MMOs coming out advertising their PvP only for them to all die)

Global simultaneous crossplatform release

This is one of the key reasons why Genshin Impact was such a big deal. Everyone everywhere could download the game on what they had and check it out for themselves. No one had to wait years for a port or for it to be licensed and arrive at where they were, long after the game was old news and the narrative about whether the game was good or bad had set in. Historically, no matter how big a game is in its home country, if it has a delayed overseas release then it will arrive as a wet fart.

The white middle class of gamers who can afford PC rigs is shrinking and that demographic alone is difficult to sustain a high production value game, while globally console and mobile gaming has grown huge. Lots of people in Southeast Asia don't own gaming rigs with state of the art Nvidia cards, but they do have phones and that's what let them play Genshin and thus spend money on it. Even though I call myself a PC gamer and primarily play gachas on PC, I do also log in to them on the phone on lunchbreak to check some stuff out or get something done quick. If I could log into a MMO on the phone that would be very helpful too.

Crossplatform means that the game will have to be on either Unity or Unreal engine as it greatly simplifies simultaneously releasing on multiple different platforms and having everything connected to each other. GW3 is currently being developed on Unreal Engine 5 probably for this reason. It is just too expensive and risky to try to make your own inhouse engine and then trying to port it to PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, phones, etc, and then getting all of those versions to work with each other.

The UI will need to be designed with small phone screens in mind. You probably will not want something like WoW's UI where mobs have tiny nameplates with microscopic buff or debuff icons that you need to be looking at and mousing over to read for major mechanics. Your game to be playable with a controller. Naoki Yoshida generously did not patent FF14's controller hotbar scheme, but for reasons I will get to later I do not think you should have a typical MMO hotbar setup with dozens of redundant buttons to push or ridiculous rotations to memorize. Console and phone players will not be able to type text as fast so you will need to let them pick from a few preset communication options like in Overwatch "I need healing" or contextual pings like in MOBAs or WoW.

(For English voice acting, please avoid the American videogame/anime voice actor pool. There are several great VAs here but not all of them will be available and the pool is overall amateurish. Get theater talent, radio drama people like from Focus on the Family, or British actors).

Marketing campaign

Historically with MMOs (and big 2000s and 2010s games in generals), they were unveiled far too early, years before the game actually launched, leading to the novelty wearing off and people going into the launch more jaded or with expectations that would not be met. Another major issue is that their announcement often relied on a prerendered CGI trailer made by some other company and had nothing to do with the actual experience of playing the game, and then we would go years before seeing tidbits of actual gameplay footage. It became a meme. Show what the game actually looks like ingame and how movement and combat looks from the get go.

Youtubers have become the bane of new game releases (particularly live service games that need a customer base to establish), as they form opinions and then those opinions are regurgitated by their subscriber base. It only takes a few Youtubers with a negative perception of your game to poison the perception about it, leading to a doomspiral in newcomers and player population and the future of the game.

For the next big MMO release, it should only unveil within a year/12 months max of the actual release date. The company also needs to try to entreat youtubers well. Fly them out to the studio, give them a tour, let them get an exclusive sneak peak at the game and play it, do a Q&A interview with the youtuber so that they fly back home in a good mood and have something to give to their audiences.

Patch cadence and retention

The advent of Genshin Impact and other high production value Chinese gacha games has caused a lot of consternation amongst the WoW and FF14 playerbases. "Why do I pay a $15 monthly sub to only get a 4 hour patch once every 5 months, while in Genshin I get a patch with new playable characters, area, gamemodes, events, etc, every 6 weeks for free?". (Bear in mind that modern gacha character kits have become ludicrously elaborate, moreso than many endgame MMO classes). A new prestige MMO release is not going to be able to get away with Blizzard/Square Enix/Arena Net levels of complacency. That means having multiple dev teams working on different patches and zones simultaneously. GW2 came close to achieving this in the mid 2010s with season 3 and season 4, a new patch and map releasing every 2 months. But then their pipeline was broken when they moved devs off to work on their other unannounced game that then got cancelled. This is not unrealistic.

It is also for this reason that the next big MMO will probably have to be on Unity or Unreal engine. Historically, high production value games with inhouse engines have difficulty with quickly onboarding new hires because they have to be taught the tools. This is part of the reason why WoW had a content drought during WoD (leading to a severe population drop) because they hired hundreds of new people, requiring the veteran devs to stop working on the game and teach the new hires how to use WoWedit. The only way to get content out fast is to have a lot of dev teams rotating patch releases, which means you need to be hiring lots of people to fill those teams and hiring replacement devs when people leave. This is an industry where people rarely stay at any studio for more than a few years and you want to minimize the amount of time wasted on training people to use your engine.

The next big MMO release might want to take a cue from gacha leak culture and have some juicy new info coming out almost every day. r/Genshin Leaks has 570k people religiously following every day just to find out the name of the next character, what element or class he/she will be, what cool ability that character, the nuances of their talents, etc, which then spurns a lot of speculation and discussion about the character's lore, how they might play and fit into team comps, etc. It has long been suspected that after the initial big Genshin leaks in 2020 and 2021 that the gacha companies realized just how important this was and now deliberately leak tidbits of info every other day to keep people obsessed with the game. People are getting excited to spend hundreds of dollars and are writing fanfiction before the character has even been officially revealed! When combined with the six week patch cycle, there is always something interesting to follow, be it the new content currently releasing, the marketing trailers for the next patch stuff, or the leaks for the patch after that. As opposed to the current WoW/GW2/FF14 format where the game can go several months without any morsels of info and people just stop thinking and talking about the game.

[Norfleet]

(As much as I reminisce about ye good ole faction wars, I should probably do a section on how companies shouldn't bother with PvP given how we had a litany of MMOs coming out advertising their PvP only for them to all die)

PvP is a fundamentally unstable business. If you have open PvP with meaningful game relevance, somebody eventually wins and the game is over, so you need some mechanism for addressing that, such as round-based play. If you put PvP in a box where it doesn't impact the wider game, then it becomes an irrelevant adjunct that gets ignored by players and devs alike, and you get the mechanical asymmetry that characterizes PvP in a PvE-centric game.

This is one of the key reasons why Genshin Impact was such a big deal. Everyone everywhere could download the game on what they had and check it out for themselves. No one had to wait years for a port or for it to be licensed and arrive at where they were, long after the game was old news and the narrative about whether the game was good or bad had set in. Historically, no matter how big a game is in its home country, if it has a delayed overseas release then it will arrive as a wet fart.

It does not hurt if your game is not actually a game, but a tool of Chinese state cyberwarfare, and therefore, is not obligated to actually make a profit, merely get enough people to install it so that their machines are infested with your spyware.

The white middle class of gamers who can afford PC rigs is shrinking and that demographic alone is difficult to sustain a high production value game, while globally console and mobile gaming has grown huge.

Aiming for the AAA audience has always been a mistake. World of Warcrap understood this also, which is why World of Warcrap ran on office potatoes, so people could goof off on it at work.

(For English voice acting, please avoid the American videogame/anime voice actor pool. There are several great VAs here but not all of them will be available and the pool is overall amateurish. Get theater talent, radio drama people like from Focus on the Family, or British actors).

The American VA pool is insufferable and you're better off replacing them with robots trained on your original voice actors. This has the advantage of having a consistent voice for the character regardless of the language.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

PvP is a fundamentally unstable business. If you have open PvP with meaningful game relevance, somebody eventually wins and the game is over, so you need some mechanism for addressing that, such as round-based play. If you put PvP in a box where it doesn't impact the wider game, then it becomes an irrelevant adjunct that gets ignored by players and devs alike, and you get the mechanical asymmetry that characterizes PvP in a PvE-centric game.

The first MMO I ever played was Space Cowboy Online (later reopened as ACE Online and Air Rivals). That is a 2 faction war game where you play as fighter pilots on a colonized alien world, fighting a war between a democratic revolutionary city-state that is attempting to breakaway from a more authoritarian mother city-state. You created a character and the first 10 levels was you doing tutorial mission stuff for an academy, and then at level 10 you had to pick which faction to join and then your account was locked to that faction (couldn't create alts on the other side. Also if one faction was overpopulated then it was locked for a while until the active player levels evened out). There was a nation mission storyline you could do to level up, but at around level 50 your exp begins to massively plateau and at that point most people stopped levelling to then participate in the PvP nation war. (My dad kept grinding, but I saw that he was in the high level 70s to low 80s and would spend hours each night killing mobs in the asteroid map, only for his exp bar to move a fraction by the end of a play session. There were online leaderboards and there were only a dozen no lifers higher level than 90).

The two factions had player elected leaders (Chairman for the ANI rebels, General Commander as dictator in chief for the Bygeniou). The elections happened monthly through an ingame system where the population of each faction voted. The leader could then appoint his lieutenants or vice presidents, could set taxes, could distribute war chest money, and most importantly could schedule the Mothership Wars (usually scheduled on the weekends). The game world was a lane of maps from the Bygeniou capital city to the ANI city. The game servers would randomly spawn a NPC tower in maps that you had to defend or destroy to generate war points for your nation. Once your nation reached like 100k war points, the nation leader could schedule a mothership war where a mothership would spawn right outside the enemy's capital for 2 hours, and your faction's playerbase would have to organize an invasion into the enemy's side of the world and destroy the mothership. The nation leaders usually scheduled it on the weekend so as many players as possible could attend, and sometimes both leaders would schedule them back to back. These invasions were the main experience of the game. Every weekend you have thousands of players logging on and organized pushes into enemy maps, and hundreds of people dying in gate rushes as they are shot down by masses of defenders pounding the gate. You had M-gear (support class) players trying to sneak into enemy maps and find a hiding spot to port in more players and then attack from the rear, while the defenders had interceptors scouring the map and using radar trying to find these M-gears. It was great.

There were also three guild bases (flying aircraft carrier, huge space station, and huge underground castle) that would become vulnerable to attack every 2 weeks and had to be fought for. If a brigade (guild) claimed a base, then your nation got a lot of war points, so a lot of people turned up to fight and help a brigade on their faction win.

The experience was awesome and was quite structured. I would love to see it replicated. It was unstructured not a free for all like all of these other "PvP MMOs" that have come out after where you have player made guilds or nations taking over everything and suffocating everyone else out.

[Norfleet]

Never heard of it. I assume it's horribly weeb, given that it's you. What happened to it?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Never heard of it. I assume it's horribly weeb, given that it's you. What happened to it?

The game was doing well and the Korean devs launched an expansion that added a second lane of maps in between the two warring cities, going through a snowy continent with level 60 to 80 mobs. The maps looked great but most people didn't want to level grind past 50 and get aggro from these higher level mobs and maybe die and have to respawn way back in their capital city. So people preferred to push and pull the frontlines in the original lane of maps where the mobs peaked at level 50ish in the middle of the lane, though sometimes there were attempts at backdoor invasions through the second lane if the defenders were holding a map in the first lane.

That expansion was the last real expansion to the game. After that there was a drought where not much was happening, so eventually interest began to wane as it was people were pushing down the same lane and blowing up the same motherships outside of the same two cities over and over. But the real ground shaking event was when they (possibly the Western publisher Subagames, I don't know if the Korean devs were responsible) added a literal slot machine in the cities that you could walk up, pay real money with to spin, and get powerful gear from. Like levelling, gear in SCO/ACE/AR kinda plateaus after level 50 where it takes enormous amount of grinding world bosses like the two headed bird emperor at the top of a mountain map to craft their boss gear. Most people did not bother with that. Or you had to engage with the enchant system where the more times you enchanted a piece of gear to upgrade it, the higher the chance it would break. So most people only enchanted a few times and then stopped. But the literal slot machine allowed you to get something close to the crafted boss armors, and were even recolors of the boss armors. The slot machine also added really tacky looking modern looking plane armors that did not jive with the Gundam SEED aesthetic of the game. So this blew off a lot of the Western playerbase and diminished participation in the weekend mothership wars.

There have been private servers/emulators like Chrome Rivals that have exp multipliers to get people to 50 and back into the nation war experience ASAP, but the populace is nowhere near as large as it was way back when on the official Western servers.

[sheet]

MMOs were a relic from pre-smartphone days. No large playerbase will have the attention span to engage with the world in that way anymore

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Appealing to young players and retaining them without closing off new players

For anything to stay alive, you need more new people joining to replace oldtimers losing interest and leaving.

The history of the MMO genre is that they attracted a lot of youths/young adults who had unlimited free time to waste on a time intensive MMO. Once people finally finished college and started working or started a family, their free time was cut down. The response a lot of devs made was to overhaul the game to exclusively cater to people with limited free time. But this wound up severely damaging the new player experience as the no-lifers burned through the game fast, ran out of things to do, and then left rather than staying long term. Or the new players run into the wall of retention dailies that puts them off. This then causes the demise of the MMO as new players joining < oldtimers leaving. The game becomes top heavy and the fate of the MMO is sealed.

Live service game monetization models are about segmenting your customers and designing packages to meet each of their needs. The actual game design of the MMO needs to do the same and cater to both lifestyles. It needs to be able to no-lifed by teenagers to hook them in, AND also be able to be enjoyed by those people once they grow up and can't be no-lifers anymore.

Progression

Classic MMOs like FF11 and Vanilla WoW are built on having tangible, visible progression where you become powerful enough to overcome one zone, and can now set foot at the start of a new zone where you then need to become more powerful to continue advancing through it. Repeat ad infinitum. In Vanilla WoW, it could takes months to reach the level cap of 60 and be able to walk through any zone, but you were not done yet. You then had several raids to progress through which were kinda like more zones. You would progress from Molten Core to Blackwing Lair and so on. Unfortunately TBC and then the Isle of Quel'danas kicked out the supports from underneath this model.

This then leads us to the Retail WoW formula that most of the surviving MMOs are based on, where there is very little to no tangible progression. You very quickly reach level cap, breezing through zones with no effort or even outright skipping zones. WoW currently has something like 224 zones added over 21 years, but if you were to start now you would only see maybe 10 or 15 of them on your way to level "80" which you would reach in about one week of play. You would have skipped past 94%+ of the world! (There was a third numbers squish at the end of BFA that reduced the level cap of 120 down to level 50, so the current true level cap would be level 140). You are then geared and directed to do the latest raid, and once you do that you are done. You have killed the current last boss of the game. There is 34 raid tiers as of patch 11.2 but you only did the last one and skipped the preceding 33 raid tiers. You skipped 97% of the raids! This is insane, and leads to the current situation with MMOs where people will subscribe to check out the latest patch, do it in a few days, and then quit. Because there is no tangible, satisfying journey left to undertake. You can speedrun the latest raid on higher difficulties for better gear, but this gear will be powercrept by easily accessible catchup gear come the next patch, so most people don't bother. Obviously this is a tremendous waste.

You also need character progression on this long journey, not just the reward of reaching new zones. In GW2, you very quickly reach the level cap of 80. While GW2 has a good motivator to go through the story with the reward of discovery brand new high fantasy zones, you never really become more powerful or really progress your character anymore, especially once you unlock whichever Elite Specialization that most appeals to you. You can only have one Elite Spec equipped at a time, so progressing to further expansions and unlocking more Elite specs you won't use is not satisfying. FF14 is currently struggling with this where in the latest expansion Dawntrail, you don't really get new abilities to push, but at least there some of your current abilities get made into better versions.

Classes should be designed from the bottom up so that they are fun from the get go, not top down where you need to sink X hours to reach level cap and then you have all of your abilities and talents working together as a designer envisioned. You don't want to keep revamping classes over and over every few years as that will frustrate people content with their class and people returning from a hiatus who then find that their character doesn't play the same anymore and now they have to do extensive research to understand what is going on now.

The game needs to be challenging enough from the get go to incentivize you to group up with other players and start making friends. Like in FF11 where once you have solo levelled for a couple hours to level 10, you literally cannot solo level on same level mobs anymore as the mobs hit too hard and must join a party to continue. You do not want the current MMO problem where people spend however many hours reaching to level cap where they have never made a friend because they never needed anyone's help, and then suddenly they are faced with content where they need other people to continue. People were trained to believe they could play the game alone and then just quit at that point rather than suddenly socializing. GW2 faced this problem with the Heart of Thorns expansion where the difficulty of the overworld mobs was ramped up and you needed to group up, but because the vanilla game was so easy you could solo it the playerbase reacted very badly to suddenly having to group up after hundreds or thousands of hours playing by themselves.

Tutorialization

MMOs are infamous for how dreadfully unintuitive it is to play your character. You usually have a LOT of abilities that somehow can fit into a "rotation", but the game never ever tells you what the rotation is supposed to be. You instead have to alt+tab out to consult long class guides like Icy Veins to figure out the order in which you are supposed to press your buttons to do damage. These games need something like gacha game character comprehensive ingame tutorials where they hold you by the hand and walk you through each ability and how it all fits together. Also, don't have dozens of buttons to push to just do damage.

The American VA pool is insufferable and you're better off replacing them with robots trained on your original voice actors. This has the advantage of having a consistent voice for the character regardless of the language.

Well artistically I find real voice actors to be more interesting than an AI algorithm. And then business wise, unless you are a broke indie dev then it'd be preferable to hire real ones for the PR. Having a voice actor panel at conventions helps drum up interest and enthusiasm for a game.

MMOs were a relic from pre-smartphone days. No large playerbase will have the attention span to engage with the world in that way anymore

Gacha games strip mined MMOs for almost everything except the massively multiplayer aspect and are time abysses just like MMOs, and yet Genshin is one of the most popular games ever made. People absolutely do still have the attention span for these time intensive games and there is likely enough gamers out there interested in a massively multiplayer version of it. The main issue is that WoW did very well but spawned WoW clones, so there wasn't much of a reason to play those imitators of WoW. And then the kickstarter generation of MMOs were terribly executed (both in production values and in actual design qualities) and had poor to nonexistent marketing and thus didn't attract enough new players to stand up.

[DecadeRiptide]

Lots of things are missing from new mmo, including non-instanced player housing, no 1000+ player servers, and most importantly still no sex

[Oyster Sauce]

They'll try every possible approach except making a good game

[Norfleet]

Well artistically I find real voice actors to be more interesting than an AI algorithm. And then business wise, unless you are a broke indie dev then it'd be preferable to hire real ones for the PR. Having a voice actor panel at conventions helps drum up interest and enthusiasm for a game.

That might be true of non-American voice actors, but American ones are repulsive and actively work to drive people away. Plus, you'd still HAVE the original voice actors, they'd just be AI-translated to American. Advantage: They don't speak English, so they can't say anything inappropriate.

[Stack of Turtles]

World of WoW makes literally dozens of money to this day, so I'm not sure it needs "reviving".

[Val the Moofia Boss]

World of WoW makes literally dozens of money to this day, so I'm not sure it needs "reviving".

The game is a shadow of its former 12 million concurrent subscriber self. Retail WoW is not a real MMO but a lobby game that has narrowed down to the people who can stomach standing around in town waiting for M+ party to form and speedrunning the same half dozen dungeons over and over again for arbitrarily higher statted gear that will be powercrept by next season's easily acquired catchup gear. Or doing 3v3 arenas in the same maps over and over again. Or doing the latest raid over and over again. It's also a game for old people. Young gamers like zoomers and alphas don't care about WoW. That generation has not known MMOs.

[Stack of Turtles]

World of WoW makes literally dozens of money to this day, so I'm not sure it needs "reviving".

The game is a shadow of its former 12 million concurrent subscriber self. Retail WoW is not a real MMO but a lobby game that has narrowed down to the people who can stomach standing around in town waiting for M+ party to form and speedrunning the same half dozen dungeons over and over again for arbitrarily higher statted gear that will be powercrept by next season's easily acquired catchup gear. Or doing 3v3 arenas in the same maps over and over again. Or doing the latest raid over and over again. It's also a game for old people. Young gamers like zoomers and alphas don't care about WoW. That generation has not known MMOs.

Okay but it's still turning a profit so they have no reason to change anything

[Decline]

From a business perspective I'd say that focusing on GW3 is the right call as right now there is a big hole in the MMO market.

The problem is that GW2 is already a shadow of what GW1 used to be and all the important people have left the company before GW2 released.

If you have open PvP with meaningful game relevance, somebody eventually wins and the game is over, so you need some mechanism for addressing that, such as round-based play.

Up next: State Dep demanding round-based plays from China and Russia.

There is no such thing as an eternal winner, there is only eternally bad game design.