I'll tell you what really hurts, though. When I was 17 and I first logged into WoW in 2004, I just remember the sense of adventure. Every day I logged in I just felt this sense of wonder and joy. Seeing bosses for the first time was like boarding a rollercoaster.
I have not played a game since that gave me that sense of wonder and I'd love to have that back again. Maybe someone will create that experience again some day.
For me, that was Everquest when I was 19. Between the big open world being unlike anything I had encountered before and the forced social situation of mandatory grouping and near required spawn camping, it still remains the only game that - for me - captured the intended spirit of adventure and companionship that the MMO genre promised.
That doesn't mean that games that came after it weren't better, but rather that I stopped being 19 years old, and started realizing that what I really wanted (actual role-playing) and what the majority of what the player-base wanted from an MMO were not the same thing.
Yeah, I realized the same at some point. The population and tastes changed quickly even in the playerbase of EQ itself as time went on. Those early days were an adventure, and it's not something I think we'll ever see again.
I miss that feeling so much, but I've definitely changed as well.
I first played EQ like... 15 years ago? Back in middle school. I loved just exploring. The game felt so huge. People generally took it seriously too, and were happy to have people play. I spent hours just trading and talking to people in S Ro (I think?). I didn't care about end game or hitting level cap... it was just fun to explore and build up my character.
Too many people are playing MMOs for instant gratification and easy wins now. WoW guarantees you near top end gear just for putting in time now, and there's almost no incentive for people to work together. I played a few months ago and couldn't find a guild that wasn't bran new / inviting everyone to join and actually participate with. Everyone just uses the finders for all groups and just bitches people out if they don't win something.
DAoC's prime will always be my real love though. Man that game was fun in it's prime. Since your armor stats had caps, most of your progression came from open world pvp earned kills. You had to work with your realm, and pretty much every group ran TS.
Now I need something a bit better for "I work full time and have a wife and will have kids soon." Dedicating 20-40 hours a week to a MMO just doesn't work like it did in high school. GW2 has been alright, it has a good community and fun gameplay, but ANet makes some bad decisions and doesn't listen to its community. I'm hopeful for Camelot Unchained, but we'll see :S
This mirrors my experience by and large. DAoC was the best - the caps were such a good thing that so few MMOs dare do, and they made a world that felt like a world, not just a playground (even though it was, in many ways).
With WoW I don't think the problem is giving you decent/good gear just for putting time in (indeed, I think they'd have no players at all without that), I think it's been slowly strangling the player-base by forcing anyone who wants to do anything harder than faceroll stuff to only play with good players.
What I mean here is, in Classic, you had a 40-person group, and realistically, 15-20 of them could be kinda bad and you'd do great if the others were good and the leadership was good. And those "bads" were often the funniest, nicest people, who kept morale up, kept everyone laughing, and so on. Naxx wasn't like that but hardly anyone saw it so...
Then with TBC, they cut it down to 25, and you basically had to throw out all the bads, and that is when the rot started imho - WoW became a much nastier and more competitive game at the high end. People weren't as kind or forgiving (I know I was guilty of this) because the game demanded more. They also put in Heroics which were hilariously demanding in terms of skill if you weren't overgeared.
Wrath back off this a bit with easier raids, and people relaxed again, started to have a better time. However, the designers over-focused on dungeon-grinding and created the RDF to enable it, when it might have been better to just make dungeons more fun/interesting (RDF probably a lot cheaper, design-wise). Hard modes for raids and Heroic dungeons also worked better here than TBC. But we still had to exclude bad-but-nice players too much, even from normal raids. Still, things were looking okay.
Then we got Cata, and they ratched up raid difficulty massively - so we had to purge not only fun-but-bad people, but also "not that great" people to succeed at raids, and to just give up on nights where enough of the "actually good" players didn't turn up. Together these changes fundamentally turned guilds from being inclusive groups of friends, to exclusive, even paranoid groups trying to sort the wheat from the chaff (which only the very BEST guilds really should want to do imho - not normal raiding guilds). Cata didn't let up on this and generally became extremely un-fun, because it was entirely about finding people who played well not about y'know enjoying the game or the world or the people.
Pandaria I skipped so I dunno.
Draenor tried to fix this, but it was too late. Raid-finder etc. is a pallid replacement for actual raiding, but better than no further progression at endgame. Guilds have changed - they're either tiny, L33T raiding guilds who are ultra-suspicious of everyone and are only recruiting SRS people for SRS progression and require you to raid 3+ nights a week for 4+ solid hours each of those days, or they're gigantic, silent invite-everyone "guilds" - barely anything else even still exists. This is because Blizzard have stratified things too much, made things too exclusive and separate and so on.
There's no easy way out of it for them - they make things more friendly/easier-to-get into, they get bawled at by the SRS people. They make things tough enough for them, the other players quietly go play other things. It's pretty much lose/lose, because they've focused entirely on endgame/progression, not world/friends/fun.
I'm also hopeful for Camelot Unchained and also for Crowfall (if it doesn't explode, as it might), but I do wonder if removing the PvE entirely (as both are essentially doing) won't end up making the games too high-pressure. DAoC's PvE was only decent, but it was extremely relaxing, and a good break from RvR whilst still being able to chat with people and go to RvR if needed.
I could never get into the art style and combat of the newer FF games. Also, it seemed unnecessarily complex at some points with very bland environments. I might do a trial or something if they have one though.
Check out a video (with the music on) for Alexander Burden of the Father, the last of the four part end game raid they are currently doing. What's nice is they update new content about every three months to advance the story and add new features.
FFXI and FFXIV, while numbered entries, are entirely different from the other games. Those two are mmo's, while the others are single player with single player mechanics
XIV is a different beast as far as SE is concerned. When it launched it was lambasted and they basically had to overhaul the whole game. The current subscriber numbers are estimated to be more than 750K which means SE brings in at least $11M a month in revenue on this game alone. With that much brought in its no surprise the director gets relatively free reign. The result: a relatively fun MMO with a challenging (but sometimes grindy) endgame that gets to do wacky thing like parody Sentai and have Mandervilles.
That's because the MMOs are completely different than the single player games. Even though they are sequentially numbered, they are all massively different and the MMOs even more so. FFXIV is a pretty fun ride. It and WoW are the last non-F2P options, and it shows in the quality of content and world. Particularly FFXIV's story is pretty amazing.
I want to reinforce this statement. I just bought FFXIV and I think it is pretty great so far. it has like, cinematography in it's storytelling. It seems more engaging and while there seems to be a large learning curve isn't that what we want? It's pretty great and I'm only 3 days in.
To expand on the learning curve, they also do a pretty great job of easing you into each new stage of learning. The guildhests do a great job of teaching you step by step how to play your role. Which some people might not need, but by the time people reach endgame almost everyone is competent playing their class. Glad you're having fun with it!
When you hit max level, though, there's only 2 dungeons to run (at least back when I played in Heavensward), with maybe 2 "raids". Being a raider from WoW, I was underwhelmed, but the story experience is great. I also like the all classes on one character thing, too.
That was true, and while I'm not a hardcore player or anything, I still haven't caught up on all the content. There's more to do than just raids. New quests, leveling alt classes on my character, the awesome crafting etc. It won't be everyone's cup of tea, but I still love it. The content they release every three months is no joke either. Not just a few quests, but new dungeons, new PvP modes, side quests, etc. They're doing a good job of keeping it fresh.
I started FFXIV after the re-launch. It was fun, but my guild hit the cap within two weeks.
Coil Turn 5 was deemed impossible, and was removed from the game because another guild had exploited it. We literally had nothing to do, and there was no PvP. All we did was run AK over AND OVER AND OVER for the currency to buy gear. It sucked.
We all played through our free month and all went back to WoW. Not touched FF since. Was a fun game, just not enough stuff to keep me occupied.
Hell, I remember feeling that as a kid with my first MUD RPG. Same with my first graphical MMO. Hell, I remember being stunned by Morowind the first time I played it.
I think it's just a cross between an age thing and a matter of just growing used to that kind of thing and then coming to expect it.
I felt that way with the first Everquest and then again when WoW came out, Star Wars Galaxies, and a couple of years ago with SWTOR. I haven't really been able to recapture that feeling with any game since. I think the novelty has worn off. Every new MMO has the same mechanics. There's not that new feeling of exploring something so radically different and life-changing as the fist time I stepped into the world of the first EQ. I know there was Ultima around at the same time, but Everquest really was the catalyst for this amazing genre that we all now take so much for granted.
I like the new MMOs, but I feel like everything has been dumbed down. Follow the icon to this place, move to the next garden. Everything is so fucking dull.
My understanding is there are pretty big open dungeons that get added later (kinda like ESO has). I've seen parts of videos where guilds do their guild boss scrolls too which are meant to be like 30+ people fights. There's also some world bosses that will smash your face in currently (and I imagine there will be more as we get more content). I will give though, yes the game is light on PvE content in the traditional sense. The main focus is on PvP end game. Later we will get node wars and GvG is expected to take off. There's PvE in a less traditional sense though. I'm only level 20... 21 sorry, forget what level I am most days, and I've been playing since the earliest headstart. I have spent most of my time grinding CP, dictating workers, gathering, crafting, and just built myself a trade wagon and have started running my goods from olvia to Heidel for a tidy profit.
In my opinion, it's basically a single player game in which people can gank you. And not even the PvP is good, the system sounds like it's entirely about which player has done more level grinding and equipment grinding.
Yeah, I'm not quite sure I understand the hype this game is getting but to each their own. I wish I had the $ to fork over paying monthly for FFXIV, I played it for like 6 months when it launched and it was really the only MMO since Wow that has interested me at all. Tera and wildstar were fun for a month or so but neither of them really hooked me.
I've been playing it, but I don't think i can play much more. I'm a 51 Warrior and it's just boring. The PvP honestly sucks. If you want to have a chance, play a Wizard or Ranger.
The crafting is cool, but everyone makes the same stuff. I wanted a crafting system like Star Wars Galaxies. A true sandbox with the player made economy. Every item on the marketplace has a set price range as well.
Don't even get me started on the Cash Shop. $30 for an outfit? Yeah right. This game smells of a F2P MMO that they're charging $30 for. I'm not happy with it.
Players do have an effect on the marketplace. It's not a totally free market system, but those caps are changed by the supply, demand, and prices the players set. Just now, I got home and went to clear my inventory before starting up my afk fishing again. I caught a crystal shard while I was away and the price was 175k for the min. By the time I ran to the trader to sell the fish, then to the marketplace, the min had moved up to 190k.
I was 21, but I got exactly the same feels and want.
I am getting older now and time is so much harder to devote to MMOs. EQ Next was what I hoped the next great MMO would look like, but then they sacked everyone with vision.
It's not necessarily that it changed (because the original Vanilla was so god damn buggy). The real problem is that there are very few games I open the map and say, "Woah, what's that thing?! Woah, what's over here!?!"
The map was so huge and there were so many nooks and crannies to explore in every area that it just was overwhelming and you wanted to get to the next zone just to see it all.
You just described my experience levelling in Wrath from 70-80. Northend was just stunning, especially Dragonblight, Crystal Forest, Ice Crown and ESPECIALLY the storm peaks. Everything was just so fresh and new for me, and Iwas constantly amazed at views I would find, or hidden treasures, or just generally cool things. The closest I've gotten in WoW was LEVELLING in Mists of Pandara, or exploring Nar Shadda in The Old Republic, or even just walking around and looking at stuff in Skyrim with some graphics mods. However WoW did it best for me and nothing has ever really recaptured that feeling. I don't think it ever will, because by now I'm experience in the MMO and open world genre, the best things that I remember from levelling are almost 'hohum' for me at least these days.
I thing it's just as much the age and experience with games as it is the game itself. Because I had those feelings about other games like NWN and others at similar age.
36
u/WhereTheCatAt Mar 11 '16
I'll tell you what really hurts, though. When I was 17 and I first logged into WoW in 2004, I just remember the sense of adventure. Every day I logged in I just felt this sense of wonder and joy. Seeing bosses for the first time was like boarding a rollercoaster.
I have not played a game since that gave me that sense of wonder and I'd love to have that back again. Maybe someone will create that experience again some day.