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Star Wars: Galaxies was pretty good before the combat update and everyone got a free Jedi slot, if only for the general sense of mystery surrounding the jedi character unlock process. When the first player-character jedi was unlocked, Imperial mission terminals started putting out bounties on them, which is a pretty hilarious game mechanic.
Game was great and my only memory was just like making random camps in the desert and dancing
I am scarred for life after seeing my Wookiee pistoleer doing the Pulp Fiction dance.
It hurts because I want MMO's to be good so badly, but I 100% agree, most of it is trash.
I mean I really haven't touched the genre since Everquest and early WoW, but from what I have seen it's too obsessed with high end raid content and everything before that is a rush to get to the level to partake in that content. Ultima Online seems like a really interesting game because it was a sandbox mmo, you could do a bit of everything. Hell, even Everquest which birthed the high end raiding scene at least had an interesting world to explore and challenging content before the high endgame dungeons. Everything, imo, keeps trying to recapture the lightning in a bottle that was WoW.
Ultima Online seems like a really interesting game because it was a sandbox mmo, you could do a bit of everything
Yes, it is the holy grail of MMO for me.
Was it that good? From what I read it sounds really interesting and a lot of mmo players hold it in high regards.
Honestly, it was clunky, it froze often, it wasn't perfectly balanced, but it had a huge open world, you could do mods and own shards (own servers) and so there was a lot of community spirit. Also griefing naturally, but not so much for Freeshards.
I will never forget some friends I made, some stories woven, nor some battles that happened (one time the capitol was invaded by reptilian forces as an event and there was a lot of fuckery going on). Also looking fondly back on being able to kill all units in game in the beginning (including NPC kings).
ugh sounds so fun. i missed Ultima but used to read and daydream about it. the game was gone before I was finally able to get my own PC. le sigh
So unstable it was, and so bad my internet connection that most of the time I also daydreamt about it instead of playing. So you def. got some of the UO experience (esp. since it was so buggy that often there were days and sometimes weeks in which one couldn't play).
You bring up a good point, meta and power gamers beat the fun out of games and take away the mystery of social aspect of what made those games special. Part of the magic was figuring out how things worked and forming bonds with people you could trust. Something is lost when you can just pull up a wiki of character builds min/maxed for optimal play. I hate that, a lot. I was in an RP guild for the few months I played everquest and it was one of the most immersive experiences I ever had in a game. It really felt like I was living in that game world. Sadly RP'ing feels like a dead art in mmos today, something that's only done in tabletop I suppose.
It was very much an “explore and see what you can find” sort of experience.
This needs to come back, this is what's lacking in these mmos. It doesn't even need to be a strict sandbox like Ultima, it can be class play and dungeon raiding like everquest or wow, but at least make the world alive and gives players a reason to go out and explore. It's amazing, we have all this game tech and yet developers still want to make games where you follow the quest markers. Shit like this is why I wish games didn't have such huge budgets and developers could get away with smaller more independent teams making games they actually want to play, rather than chasing focus tested market trends.
hey let's make a big open world and release content designed to put everyone in the same place.
The death of the theme park MMO formula cannot come quickly enough. The only two that ever succeeded with it were FFXIV (after a miraculous 2.0 rebuild of the whole game) and World of Warcraft. Every single other one, no matter how polished and fun, could not keep up with XIV and WoW, and died for it.
Ngl I would play the shit out of that if we had a Hexbear server and decent life skills to level up like cooking, farming, building, and tailoring. Minecraft doesn't really scratch that itch.
What they're actually asking themselves is how many microtransactions can they cram into their always-online RPG to yield maximum returns.
Take old school runescape for an example. Its the 2007 ish version of Runescape with some new content. "New" Runescape added a lot of ways to get materials easier and to train skills much easier. Old school only has the older grindy ways of getting it (except in certain situations where a boss drop has completely tanked the value, such as flax going from ~100 to 1 gold). Old school has a lot of bots as a result, and despite the community constantly complaining about it, if those bots didn't exist prices of common mats would be insanely priced, because no one is a 8 year old who wants to pick flax for 50k an hour when you can easily make 300k+ without paying attention.
Theres some super interesting economics all over Runescape. The newer version is continuous since the 90s, so there's some items that cannot be obtained anymore. Party hats go for 3x max cash stacks last I checked. But one party hat (Blue I think) significantly less expensive, because there once was a dupe and someone duped a load. There is also all of the "normal" market economics too. Panic when items might be changed, crashing because the meta changes, literally treating items as stocks (with day trading, called merchanting, being super common).
All this is in a lot of games. I just know Runescape because I'm a reformed man.
I mean they're just in game markets with items, and real people. Depends on the game. One of them that's really interesting, (albeit it is essentially gambling) is Entropia Universe, one of the only games that has a set real world value, that you can buy, as well as cash out.
nothing will ever be better than world of warcraft, not even world of warcraft
Current generation of MMOs were a rip off of muds (EQ and UO were blatant), so not so surprising that this is their fate. People don't have time and g*mers are radioactivally individualistic, there is no camaraderie for MMO concepts like raids, guilds and groups to work. If you do reach your helping hand out its 50-50 get burnt and abused 50-50 conquer hell, split loot fairly and competently so to open advancement to all raiders, more of the former these days. Add on lack of time in the current economy (temporarily better with the pandemic) and there's no time for spend months on end on loot casino. People (maybe just me) would rather play something on their phone, maybe a nice game of chess.
Everquest has a new ruleset TLP server coming out soon and I'm really trying not to relapse into online g*ming. Haven't played live in a decade, just shitty toxic emus. Shit's worse than drinking, so I hope I don't fall back, the toxic community will still be lurking there, shit don't change without conditions doing so. Doesn't help I had 3 deaths in the family and major surgery coming up, so sweet, sweet MMOalcohol. I sold my old accounts back when I quit, so hoping that keeps me away.
Right, because of that mud/standard western rpg base that also plays to individuality. You kill 100 pixel beings, this is best taken advantage of by 1 person alone. Working in a group kills faster but you have to split the goods for each person you add on, experience is also split.
In EQ for example, you'd kill the boss and they only drop a fraction of the things you need vs people you required to kill them, like 1-6 items for a raid of 72 back in the olden days, and much of the time the items which dropped were trash no one could use due to being class locked, which further promotes that individualized character progression. Then for progression purposes it was similar, like 20 keys to the next tier raid zone but you have 72 people. MMO companies ofc don't want people to max out their character's gear too quickly else they'll stop playing and paying. What mmo companies (western ones at least) don't realize is they can escape linear progression of gear/levels/abilities/whatever and keep people on board, but linear is the obvious when money's on the line you'll go with ez. Team FPS games are more the future of MMOs than MMOs are as of now, and this will be the trend until they fix the no-collaboration issue.
The best done collaborative part imo would be end progression raiding (at least in EQ) but that was limited to maybe a handful of guilds, so very few people experience it. The guild as a whole needed to reach progression content for a certain degree of raids and gear, there was very much a sense of gear in a machine though. Downside this created a hyper competitive environment which had its own form of toxicity and got old fast, since you were expected to be at 100% every raid night no matter what reality says.
I expect EQ3 to pull a page from Hollywood and just make it P99/classic mechanics and setting with a totally new engine, redone code and pretty graphics. It wouldn't be a sought-after 'wow-killer' though.
A lot of people never experienced the EQ/FFXI-esque era of MMOs that required a lot of teamwork (and a ton of time investment). I want to believe that theres enough demand for it to run an mmo that caters to it because I really miss the kind of community and interpersonal relationships that propped up from these kinds of games but I'm not sure that we can go back.
Legit have memories of people in EQ classic being so polite because back then it was all so new and fresh. People are crazy jaded now.
I just want to play a MMO of the universe, or at least find an MMO similar to The World.
It was such a cool premise
I don't have the energy anymore to kill 500 boars to find pelts that don't drop enough or escort quests or have gear outdated in a month or two.
This is the main reason they are dying. The large majority of them are designed so that you can't get full enjoyment of the game without playing like 2+ hours per day.
There's too many great games out there that I'm going to miss out on already by virtue of not having enough time in my day, sorry but I'm not going to commit 1000 hours to some unbalanced mess of a WoW clone.
im bias af i love diablo 2 so, can't vibe too well with most mmo
this
although rp servers look like fun, i always feel too embarrassed to join in tho
Nothing will top Planetside (and 2 to a lesser extent) so thats fine we can be finished with them
I loved the original so much, even despite the Pay2win Gundam units I never got to use. There's a Planetside Discord that hosts servers for the original game but it's too much of a hassle to get into :sadness:
Yeah definitely one of those games that my memory of is something I shouldn't ruin by trying to play today lol
