MMO? Okay

Technology and Gaming
#1

MMO? Okay

Hey guys, I just wanted to make this post to see what your feelings and thoughts are about the MMO scene right now… Not really sure how many of you actually play MMO’s, but enough of you probably do to make for some decent intelligent conversation! =)

I played WoW since first day release and before that I played Dark Age of Camelot actively, which in my opinion was the best MMO ever created simply because of the flawless pvp (RvR) end game content.

Right now SWTOR is the new hot shit, but here are my thoughts… I’m 20 days and 42 levels into this game and I feel that it will, with 100% certainty fail and have less than 1 million active players 1 year from today… Here is why…

  1. RPG style questing is a fantastic idea in theory and was extremely exciting during the first 5 hours when I was crazy high… but once I remembered (around level 12) that this is an MMO and I’m playing for endgame content not questing, I quickly started skipping through every single conversation.

  2. I have not once gotten the feeling that I am exploring an exciting new world, or universe for that matter… Remember playing WoW for those first few days and just running out into the world, it just felt massive. You would run from zone to zone completing quests and if you pressed M you could actually see the massive world map and how small you really were. In SWTOR there is no similar feeling… many of the ‘huge’ areas are boring looking city- planets that make me feel like i’m playing the old single player RPG ‘Knights of the old republic’ rather than a full scale pay to play MMO. When I press M its this blue terrain-less space map appears that is just silly and useless. The few good planets and areas to explore do not make up for the enormous lack-there-of.

  3. Okay, I know I’m level 42… but this is not my first mmo and I can read/use youtube therefore I have seen the endgame content. Warzones are boring and pointless… after the newness fades from each the lack of well crafted game-play becomes clear. Of course going into a dungeon with your guild to defeat some bosses and get loot is fun, it should not BE the game. After a player reaches max level and acquires the best gear there just does not seem to be a reason to come back for more. WoW had a similar problem and released the arena system, but the overall gameplay in WoW was good enough for ‘battle grounds’ and PVE instances to almost ALWAYS be fun.

  4. I have a pretty legit computer, I can play Skyrim on ultra with no problems any other new game, any online game… all good. SWTOR however, seems to have this ridiculous amount of strain that it puts on my computer and the not-even-so-fun warzone pvp seems to lag about 30% of the time. From what I’ve read in forums there are a vast amount of people with a variety of issues concerning how the game runs and it seems to run pretty poorly in general. Now do note that this wouldn’t really be an issue if the game did not lack in so many other areas.

  5. The actual game-play combat in SWTOR feels like a WoW- remake, but worse. That combined with what I’ve listed above and… even killing npcs for quests is that much more unsatisfying.

I was very excited for SWTOR to come out and I honestly thought that it was going to deliver on all fronts even if that only means having equal game-play quality with the same end game systems as WoW. It simply did not deliver on any of these fronts and in my opinion cheaply tried to create a ‘Star Wars of Warcraft’ without the fluid game-play and large immersive world. The failure of creating an enjoyable system similar to wow in design and the lack of new systems on their part makes this MMO a complete failure.

The 12 levels of voice acting I listened to was pretty good though.

But the future of 2012 looks fairly promising with Guild Wars 2 on the horizon. I spent a small amount of time playing the first Guild Wars, but from what I’ve seen and read it sounds like they are not just trying to push a new MMO out onto the scene but they are actually creating a game that people are going to enjoy and continue to enjoy for some time.

World vs World vs World reminds me of Dark Age of Camelot. An MMO should have open world pvp that is ongoing and rewarding… because well isn’t war between factions… or guilds for this matter… the main subject of an MMO?

Regardless of how Guild Wars 2 turns out, at the very least it will probably deliver a large open world that we will all enjoy exploring.

#2

Really? Twice?

At least you put it in the right section this time.

#3

MMOs need to get rid of targeting-type combat and replace it with real combat mechanics (like Skyrim or better)

#4

Guild Wars 2.

#5

Lol, wow man. How many other MMOs have you played since WoW? If you had moved on you would notice that almost every MMO out there looks and plays like WoW, but only a few are better(WoW sucks btw, I still don’t get why people play it.)

MMOs better than WoW(no particular order):
1)FFXI
2)Aion
3)Tera
4)EVE Online
5)Fallen Earth F2P
6)DC Universe Online

MMOs differen’t from WoW:
Tera
FFXI
Fallen Earth
EVE
DC Universe
City of Heroes
not many more, mot if not all of them are pretty musch WoW clones with new skins. (excluding some of the newer steam F2P MMOs.)

Also, if you are still playing WoW I feel sad for you man, no offense, but that game is a joke, a new Panda expansion pack? The story doesn’t even take it’s self seriously. The community is stale and boring, the classes are unbalanced, need more?

Upgrade to Aion, the game is going full F2P in spring, at least the have some decent graphics and a good looking environment.

#6

And now with no mention of special operations. There should be a +1 internets for that

#7

To MDIGN…

lol dude are you for real? I have not played WoW in probably more than a year, currently I’m getting my cs team ready for next season and GO and trying to make top 100 teams in LoL… and waiting for guild wars 2.

And as for the mmo’s that you listed as “Better than WoW”… are you trolling?

Aion was a terrible waste of time, DC Universe is a complete and utter joke… among players and devs… FFXI is not the full package…

EVE Online is alright if you’re into that… Tera who knows, could be good… and Fallen Earth is alright but not something any competitive gamer is going to take seriously.

And you did not mention Warhammer Online or Rift which thus far have been the only two MMOs worth playing at all in my opinion. Warhammer was almost perfect with their open world rvr system and Rift is a great game but missed by a hair with the end game content and could even be fixable…

The point of my post was to explain how SWTOR tried to re-create WoW and failed because the MMO community is past wanting what WoW offers and wants the next level of the MMO experience from a competitive standpoint and from a PVE casual stand point.

#8

With that kind of mindset, what is the point of enjoying any RPG until the final battle? You are completely and utterly missing the point.

So you’d rather one giant planet with everything on it to explore? Fair enough. But that doesn’t work here. Star Wars is more than just the conflicts of one planet, it spreads galaxy wide and in order to represent that you actually have to travel. I understand where you’re coming from; I often open the map to find the area I’m in is surprisingly small. But personally I would trade one giant world for the multiple cultures, races and exotic locales we get to visit by going to other worlds. Have you been to Hoth or Tatooine? Would you want one world of pure snow or sand? The comically aligned environments in Warcraft simply don’t work here.

You realize you’ve completely contradicted yourself. You skip the meat of the game - that being the immersive questing - and then complain about the end game lacking?

Since you’re seemingly unaware, I’ll point out SWTOR has been out for 2 months.

Of course the end-game sucks, of course the warzones need touching up, of course there are going to be technical problems. WoW runs dry about a year or two (depending on the pace of released content) after each expansion. The endgame is boring after you’ve done it for months, so they release an expansion to keep you interested. That’s how it works.

What you seem to have missed is the fact SWTOR is more than partially about the story. It’s about enjoying yourself as you work towards the top; not just enjoying what’s available when you get there.

You’re completely missing half the game; if you want pure raiding and pvp, that’s perfectly, perfectly fine - but this game is more than that.

It plays like an MMO if you want it to, but it’s a single player RPG just the same if you want it to be. I played WoW for more years than I will ever want to admitt, but it was tedious and it was boring to level up. In SWTOR, you have 8 classes, all with different quests of their own, on top of the fact you can craft the character and shape the storyline to your own desire. I could play the same class twice and still not see all the content on offer, because the story changes with your choices. What you do has an impact. A choice you made at level 20 might very well come back to bite you in the rear at 40.

Go make another character and this time pay attention to the story and the quests. Enjoy yourself while you’re leveling for once, and by the time it takes you to go through the endless hours of trying out different stories, the game will have new end-game content for you to complain about.

It really does utterly baffle me how people like you can skip the intuitive changes made in this MMO - case in point, the dialogue - and then complain about it being a failure. It’s been out for 2 months, has ANY MMO released been completed on launch? No. They put in as much content as they could before the timeframe got ridiculous. It’s an MMO, there will be content updates, patches to fix technical problems, WoW was no where near perfect when it launched, but everyone seems to overlook that in favour of it being a revelation in the MMO world. WoW is still not perfect, and it never will be. Crafting an MMO is an ongoing process. It just boggles my mind that you’re going to berate the end-game content of a game that’s been out for less time than a typical summer break.

It’s not for you? That’s fine. But claiming the game as a whole is a failure because it rips off/doesn’t rip off enough from your favorite games is pure foolishness. Ignoring the selling point of the game in favour of what you’ve grown accustomed to as the ‘end all be all’ of MMO content is ridiculous. Other games have to release expansions to keep people interested. But you know what? Even when other games fail to meet everyones’ high expectations, SWTOR will still be a fun game to level up in.

#9

but I do agree that WoW sucks and people probably should stop playing it… the only reason I could think of is to play arena 5v5 at top level… but that even gets boring because you just face the same people and set ups…

#10

I don’t know what you’ve been looking at, but Rift is so much a WoW clone that they even made a “Lite” version for up to lvl. 20 just to attract more players. I have played Tera, so yeah it’s good, but it’s in closed beta so that would explain why you haven’t.
Aion is bad? What in the world are you talking about, you said that you don’t like Bioware’s SWTOR for it’s RPG and you want end-game, but Aion is very fast and fluent, so it shouldn’t take long before you get to it’s endgame content, but it is pretty much a WoW 2011 with upgraded visuals and smoother gameplay.

DC Universe + sucks? That doesn’t even make sense, maybe that’s because it’s not your type of game, I find it that some people like pressing ‘1’ ‘2’ ‘3’ ‘4’ and blam mission complete, boss destroyed. DCU is tuned towards real-time combat. With that in mind you won’t like Tera, it’s real-time skill based combat.

FFXI not the full package? You’re kidding me right, your kidding me?
What doesn’t it have, what do you ‘think’ it needs lol. I think you’re talking about FFXIV I heard it was bad.

I haven’t tried Warhammer Online, but I guess I might soon since you believe it should be on my list.

I agree with you that SWTOR tried recreate WoW, but what you don’t see is that alot of MMOs are going the WoW route Rift being a prime example, and so is Aion. LoL is also a joke, it wasn’t made for competition, it was made for casual gamers.

#11

"What you seem to have missed is the fact SWTOR is more than partially about the story. It’s about enjoying yourself as you work towards the top; not just enjoying what’s available when you get there.

You’re completely missing half the game; if you want pure raiding and pvp, that’s perfectly, perfectly fine - but this game is more than that."

…KAON -

is it really? its more than that? I don’t believe so. Seeing as I’m a huge fan of Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Knights of the Old Republic and Never winter Nights, I do not think that the ‘story’ in SWTOR is even half that of any of the REAL RPG’s I’ve listed above.

The stories in SWTOR are boring and placed in a setting and game genre where it is already hard to CARE about npcs and what happens to them making the entire RPG experience lacking. They spent too much money and time on voice acting and single player quest story lines.

If the single player RPG experience were actually on-par with other real single player RPGs than SWTOR would be a much better game. The fact of the matter is that it is not. Maybe it is to the few people who like Star Wars enough to be entertained by anything Star Wars related, but for someone looking for the next generation Massively Multiplayer Online game SWTOR falls short.

On the other hand, if SWTOR had this half-ass boring misplaced single player RPG questing system… but ALSO had a completely functional end game system that kept players coming back for more in both PVE and PVP even completely equal to that of WoW or even Warhammer Online then SWTOR would be taking off like a bat out of hell with nothing stopping it.

BUT… seeing as Guild Wars 2 is coming out in what looks like 3-5 months, I honestly see NO REASON to play SWTOR unless like I previously stated you are simply SUCH a HUGE Star Wars fan that anything Star Wars related entertains you… and in that case enjoy. But for the rest of us… the future of the MMO Experience is not going to be a half ass combination of single player RPG mixed with a sloppy and UNORIGINAL end game experience.

Like I said in the OP… 1 Year from today I’m 99% certain Swtor will have less than 1 million active subscribers.

#12

First off, let me say. I have never EVER cared about Star Wars. I have never seen the original movies, never understood the references, and never saw the appeal in a lightsaber.
I had absolutely no interest in SWTOR up until October of last year when some friends had gotten into a closed beta. They said it was worth checking out, so I figured there was no harm tossing my name in for the open beta.

I can’t emphasis enough how backwards your assumptions are in my case. The hardest part about playing the game for me is having to deal with the Star Wars aspect - a universe I never knew/cared about or felt invested in. So you can throw your assumptions of ‘blind fanboyism’ out the window.

Secondly, I’d still like you to point me to a game that had fully fledged end-game content and a perfect pvp system at launch. There are plenty of MMOs out there that failed at launch because they lacked endgame for the impatient. You know what you’re still not understanding about SWTOR? The fact that even with impatient people driving to see the raiding and pvp at 50, there is still more than enough to keep you interested and occupied while leveling. It’s not a grind, it’s not mindless questing, and if it is then you’re doing it wrong. This game will have endgame content. Every MMO would have great endgame content if people gave them time. But in the meantime, this game is actually worth playing for the leveling alone. But I’m just going to talk myself in circles trying to emphasize a point you clearly don’t seem interested in.

Thirdly. To quote you:

You don’t care about the NPCs? That tends to happen when you ignore everything they say.

#13

bottom line

https://www.keenandgraev.com/2012/02/16/gw2-wvwvw-explained/

gw2 will become the most played/highest quality mmo experience for anyone who is interested in playing a skill based mmo…

i’m sure they will also have plenty of combat for pve nerds who just want to slay dragons

#14

I enjoy rusty hearts, the end.

#15

I don’t understand why MMO means definately PVP and not COOP.

#16

Perfectly balanced MMO about PVP / PVE is Eve Online, clearly the most complex game out there but it requires skill and brain, so most people just stick with WoW and other nobrainer games.

#17

I’ve been playing Lotro for quite a while now, it’s pretty good if you’re into Lord of the rings and have read the books, the mmo is based around the books, so just having seen the films is not enough to fully understand what’s going on.

#18

^I’ve played LotRO in the past, but then I realized it was F2P but P2W so I quit.

#19

…runescape

yes. lets do this now.

#20

GW2 sounds very interesting, I heard that you only have to buy the game and pay no subscription fees, this is one of the main reasons I might get it. I also love how they zoom in on the characters and context so that the story seems interesting and so that I won’t have to squint at my screen to read the tiny text on my large HDTV. I wish I could get my hands on a beta though.

Also, I don’t think I gave Rift much credit where it’s due. It’s a good game and very addicting, and also a good price, but I still stand by my word that it plays alot like a WoW clone, I also love the deep and detailed environments.

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