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I don't understand where new MMOs get their playerbase from. Like if I was an MMO player why would I lose all my progress to switch to a new one? I thought one of the main points of MMOs was playing the same game forever and ever
For a lot of players, the part on the beginning of the MMO where you're progressing quickly is the best part, and reaching the part of the game where progression starts to slow down is exactly the point where you start looking for something new.
I've had a lot of praise for FF14, but I'm currently at endgame and haven't touched it for over a month because grinding the same four fights over and over for the next three months is a lot less interesting than literally anything else I could be playing.
Eh, at really high levels in MMOs you are only logging in for special events and to raid.
I have active endgame accounts in three MMOs and I might spend 2-3 hours a week playing each game if there is not a holiday event or new content.
It's because eventually you either 1) "Beat" the MMO you're playing (it takes months for a given MMO to come out with new content, usually the hold-me-over stuff until then is repetitive and boring), or 2) You become deeply pissed off with the product you're currently playing as you take a closer look into its dysfunctions that will never be addressed by its owners. Once that happens, players want a new experience. There's also some nostalgia chasing involved as a game you've fallen in love with mutates around you over time.
The fact that South Korea is a hyper-capitalist pseudo-cult dictatorship ran by a few corporations in a trenchcoat is reflected by their game design. Whenever you play a K-MMO you can practically taste the social alienation.
ah so its exactly like the US then, ngl as an asian i dont really like how westerners talk about places like South Korea and Japan as though their uniquely terrible capitalist hellscapes when the fact is that neoliberal hellscapes are practically universal
I played the tutorial and I don't get it. Why are so many people playing this? It doesn't seem particularly remarkable. Was there some giant marketing push I just didn't notice because I've arranged my life to be ad-free?
like the other person said, it's got really satisfying diablo type gameplay with mmo features. Considering the current state of MMO's, it's not surprising it's taking off.
yeah there was definitely a big marketing campaign. maybe it was on twitch or something.
it's pretty and the free and the gameplay seems alright
Early game sucks. You gotta get to like level 25-35 where you first hit decent dungeons and setpieces before you "get it".
uncritical support for the DPRK in its heroic struggle to liberate occupied Korea from the genocidal American empire
TBH it feels like doing chores. It's a completely professional, well put-together game, but it actively pushes you away from combat half the time because of the XP disparity between combat in the wild and running boring quests. It undermines its Action-MMO genre claim by consistently incentivizing non-action behaviors. It takes almost 20 minutes to get out of the second tutorial (after the real tutorial, which you can skip - surprise, there's still a tutorial) sending you on all sorts of annoying chores to introduce a number of game systems. By the time I was finally in the field doing something, I was already bored.
Beautiful game, tech seems solid, art theme is strong and consistent, and there are flashes of interesting gameplay... But the core game design is a more banal variation on every other MMORPG since WOW broke the market and eliminated alternative game-design models from MMOs.
Edit: And as an aficionado of Diablo-clones, it only vaguely feels like Diablo-style ARPGs. It almost hits the combat-style correctly, although the way it forces you to cycle your skills is less Diablo than traditional MMO, but a lot of abilities don't feel all that impactful. It also misses the big rewards of Diablo-style games: massive piles of skinner-box loot and combat-XP. Getting piddling XP from wiping out a pack of monsters is depressing as fuck.
Honestly I think PoE is prolly the peak of action rpgs and it's also free if you don't mind the cash shop shit
I'm still salty about the hard nerf a couple of patches back, but yeah, PoE is the best we've had.
What was the hard nerf? I have friends who play but I've never tried it
They came in pretty hard on damage numbers two leagues back. Just generally lowering the damage curve and increasing mana costs for damage-oriented support gems.
You're right about everything, except the game is also pretty good. If you're an mmo fan it's a good game, if you're not then you're not going to enjoy it.
If I had to describe it in the shortest possible way it would basically be One Piece the MMO.
Oh and also the dungeons and big set-pieces are MILES better than every single other mmo on the market. There are moments that are seriously huge and epic and bring a massive smile to your face, legitimately good dungeon design.
The only thing that really bothers me as a woman playing it is that I don't wanna wear heels but don't have a choice. It definitely has some boobies and butts in it but it's pretty fine, the men are more sexualised and perfectly sculpted than any western game too so it feels like it evens out.
Ugh. See that's a trait that makes me want to give a pass on the game. The part about any woman in the game portrayed between the age of 18 and 25 is in high heels and short skirts and boob window NieR levels of dress for no other reason than to splatter sex appeal all over the screen. It's nice when if they do that at least they do it for both sexes. Final Fantasy XIV was good with this in some ways. It's hard to play US or Japanese or Korean or otherwise games with really blatant traditional gender role affirming stylizations. Just gets gross.
FFXIV is definitely a lot better about it in my opinion. I really do not dislike FFXIV's approach, it feels like it respects your choice to be sexy or cute or homely or an armoured battlemaiden. The problem with Lost Ark is it looks like in early development the only thing they thought about was sex appeal and they didn't really get around to making it a player choice until later in endgame development after some updates and new content. So it seems like you don't really escape from sexy outfits until endgame and skins. Feels like something they're actively trying to cater to with non-sexual content releases though. But yeah. Early design choices are obviously like that.
I'll be honest though I really like Nier and feel like they made it fit quite well with all the themes they were covering. I guess part of me is just also sort of not too upset about women being sexy. There's right and wrong ways though. I dislike the trend of practically deleting all femininity altogether more, a lot of western companies are overcompensating in the other direction waaaay too far to the point of ridiculous.
Ughhhh~ I just did more research. There's gender locked classes? Why the hell is this a thing? Why's it still a thing? I really don't know where in the development cycle this comes across as "yeah this is a good idea." But yeah I get your point on the overcompensation. The whole bowl of fruit thing with WoW. Sexy is ok. But what rubbed me wrong with NieR is it's sexy all the time of the day. There's no change to the attire or posture that will take away from the sexy because Yoko Taro says "I just really like girls"
They've been actively making counterparts to the genderlocked classes. Striker is the male Wardancer for example. They're different but not really by all that much.
I installed it, saw that characters are permanently locked to one of a bunch of tiny sub-region servers as if this were still the early 2000s, and immediately quit out and uninstalled because that design is always a trainwreck in practice.
isn't this the one where they charge ridiculous rent on player-owned properties and fuck something up every update
That was New World. Amazon's not the developer on this one, just the publisher. It's developed by a korean company called Smilegate.
thank you. there are so many new MMOs coming out it's hard to keep track
If you're not paying, you're the product, etc, etc.
I did like Genshin Impact. But by and large, F2P games are just time-sucks that are trying to be money sucks. I want to say something about OP's comments on ethics in gamer consumerism, but... sigh :very-intelligent:
I don't mind a time sink if it's fun and I can do it with others :shrug-outta-hecks:
As far as the original post in general - I'd say it's just gaming and really not that serious
I also enjoyed Genshin Impact
I don’t mind a time sink if it’s fun and I can do it with others
Sure. And that's definitely the line between good and bad games. Is what you're doing fun?
But Gacha games and other F2P models tend to make the game play either tedious or impossibly difficult past a certain level, in order to lead players into paying for power-ups.
I also enjoyed Genshin Impact
I never spent a dime on it and I had fun the whole time. It had strong Zelda vibes.
