finalark
SNORLAX
Let's be honest, nobody gives a damn about MMORPGs anymore.
Not that this is an entirely unusual phenomenon. Genres rise and fall in popularity. Outside of Nintendo and indie developers you'd be hard pressed to find 3D platformers anymore, even though they were huge in the mid 90s and only really fell off the face of the earth around the beginning of the HD era. While MMORPGs had a massive scene in the mid 2000s (thanks primarily to World of Warcraft, which was to MMORPGs what Mario 64 was to 3D platformers) it suddenly seemed to disappear overnight in the era 10s. Suddenly, nobody was talking about WoW. The massive train of imitators suddenly halted to a stop. So, what happened?
Externally, two major things inadvertently blew a hole in the SS MMORPG. The first of which was a little game called League of Legends, which initially began as a small game made to cater to fans of the Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients, or DOTA for short. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the game started gaining players like a snowball rolling downhill collects snow. Before you know it, the game becomes the single most played game in the world. No longer were three to for MMORPGs being pushed out to compete with World of Warcraft, instead we saw wave after wave of MOBAs created to compete with League of Legends. In the end, the long-fabled WoW killer wasn't another MMORPG, but something that nobody could have ever seen coming.
The second thing is yet another trend popularized by League of Legend: free-to-play with micro-transactions. For years, MMORPGs ran off of a subscription model where players would pay ten to fifteen dollars a month. And fans were fine with this, after all, MMORPGs are expensive to run and develop. But with the advent of free-to-play, a sift in attitude began. Why pay for a subscription fee when you can just get the game and play for free? MMORPGs devs seemed to agree, as many struggling MMORPGs converted to a free-to-play format and many new games just went straight for it. But there's one major problem with this.
Free to play does not work with MMORPGs.
As previously mentioned, MMORPGs are expensive. If you're a company and you're running an MMORPG you're going to need a good amount of cash coming in every month to pay everyone involved, continue to produce new content and support the game, and to turn a profit on top of that. Trust me, after playing a true blue big-budget subscription based MMORPG it's impossible to drop down to a free-to-play game. Just from the very way the game plays a majority of the time you can just feel the drop in quality. Not to mention that the games tend to quickly become pay-to-win or pay-to-progress. It doesn't help that free-to-play invites a very, very toxic community to the game. After all, who cares about your reputation in a game you're not even paying for?
Internally, the biggest blow that MMORPGs have ever taken was from cinematic gaming. It's no secret that some time during the HD era many games suddenly stopped being about game play and starting being about spectacle. The words "cinematic gaming" were coined in order to make this not sound as bad as it really is. MMORPGs tried to adopt this into their design some time in the early 10s (I'd say that World of Warcraft's third expansion, Cataclysm, and Star Wars: The Old Republic are the two biggest culprits for starting this trend). The problem is, just like free-to-play, MMORPGs do not play well with cinematic gaming.
Pre-10s, MMORPGs were very group oriented. Partying up with other players made fighting monsters and completing quests easier, in addition to giving you someone to chat with while you're enjoying game. Not to mention that many games had dungeons, dangerous locations that awarded tons of exp and great loot but could only be completely with the help other other players. These days, MMORPGs are focused on trying to wow the player with cutscenes and a linear story, giving players minimal reasons to interact with the community. This basically means that nearly every MMORPG made from 2010 onward is closer to a single player game with a chat room, relegating all the mutliplayer content to endgame, making leveling feel like nothing but meaningless filler. I can't even put into how much of a problem this is. Even the MMORPG that I consider the best on the market right now, Final Fantasy XIV, has this problem and has it hard. I've recently been dabbling in older MMORPGs like Final Fantasy XI or classic World of Warcraft and I was astonished at just how open and community oriented these games are.
So yeah, the MMORPG genre isn't the titan that it was once, dethroned by MOBAs. Like I said before, things rise and fall, so who cares as long as the genre is still there for people who truly love it? Well, as the title says, MMORPGs are stagnating, hard. Copying one game to death for a decade will do that. There's only so many times you can log into a new MMORPG for the first time only to be asked if you want to play the blue side or the red side, then proceed to be dropped into a world with cartoony graphics and hotbar combat where most of your game play revolves around right clicking an NPC with an icon above his head, collecting twenty bear asses, then return to the NPC who now has a new icon above their head. And that's what MMORPGs have been for the past ten years. From Rift to ToR to Wildstar it's always red side, blue side, cartoony graphics, collect bear asses, repeat. No game is willing to be bold and try something new, hell even the single most mold breaking MMO to come out in the past ten years, FFXIV, still has a lot of these elements. And it's not surprising that games aren't willing to deviate to hard from the WoW formula. As previously stated, MMORPGs are expensive and making something radically different that might not gel with the market is just stupid from a business standpoint. Even the king of the fools, World of Warcraft is stagnating hard. It's become a C-list game for Blizzard who would rather focus on the smaller, cheaper, more profitable games leaving WoW with features like selfies and twitter integration that practically scream "OH GOD PLEASE STILL THINK WE'RE RELEVANT."
In conclusion, I'll say that if MMORPGs don't want to decent into a bit of endless WoW clones with content gated behind dollar signs then there needs to be a game that does for the genre what WoW did back in 2004. There needs to be a game that's willing to be bold and take risks to move the genre in a new direction. But given that MMORPGs are a dying breed I doubt we'll see that any time soon. I doubt a whole lot of folks are going to read this wall of text, but that's just some things that have been on my mind since I started revising older MMORPGs.
Not that this is an entirely unusual phenomenon. Genres rise and fall in popularity. Outside of Nintendo and indie developers you'd be hard pressed to find 3D platformers anymore, even though they were huge in the mid 90s and only really fell off the face of the earth around the beginning of the HD era. While MMORPGs had a massive scene in the mid 2000s (thanks primarily to World of Warcraft, which was to MMORPGs what Mario 64 was to 3D platformers) it suddenly seemed to disappear overnight in the era 10s. Suddenly, nobody was talking about WoW. The massive train of imitators suddenly halted to a stop. So, what happened?
Externally, two major things inadvertently blew a hole in the SS MMORPG. The first of which was a little game called League of Legends, which initially began as a small game made to cater to fans of the Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients, or DOTA for short. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the game started gaining players like a snowball rolling downhill collects snow. Before you know it, the game becomes the single most played game in the world. No longer were three to for MMORPGs being pushed out to compete with World of Warcraft, instead we saw wave after wave of MOBAs created to compete with League of Legends. In the end, the long-fabled WoW killer wasn't another MMORPG, but something that nobody could have ever seen coming.
The second thing is yet another trend popularized by League of Legend: free-to-play with micro-transactions. For years, MMORPGs ran off of a subscription model where players would pay ten to fifteen dollars a month. And fans were fine with this, after all, MMORPGs are expensive to run and develop. But with the advent of free-to-play, a sift in attitude began. Why pay for a subscription fee when you can just get the game and play for free? MMORPGs devs seemed to agree, as many struggling MMORPGs converted to a free-to-play format and many new games just went straight for it. But there's one major problem with this.
Free to play does not work with MMORPGs.
As previously mentioned, MMORPGs are expensive. If you're a company and you're running an MMORPG you're going to need a good amount of cash coming in every month to pay everyone involved, continue to produce new content and support the game, and to turn a profit on top of that. Trust me, after playing a true blue big-budget subscription based MMORPG it's impossible to drop down to a free-to-play game. Just from the very way the game plays a majority of the time you can just feel the drop in quality. Not to mention that the games tend to quickly become pay-to-win or pay-to-progress. It doesn't help that free-to-play invites a very, very toxic community to the game. After all, who cares about your reputation in a game you're not even paying for?
Internally, the biggest blow that MMORPGs have ever taken was from cinematic gaming. It's no secret that some time during the HD era many games suddenly stopped being about game play and starting being about spectacle. The words "cinematic gaming" were coined in order to make this not sound as bad as it really is. MMORPGs tried to adopt this into their design some time in the early 10s (I'd say that World of Warcraft's third expansion, Cataclysm, and Star Wars: The Old Republic are the two biggest culprits for starting this trend). The problem is, just like free-to-play, MMORPGs do not play well with cinematic gaming.
Pre-10s, MMORPGs were very group oriented. Partying up with other players made fighting monsters and completing quests easier, in addition to giving you someone to chat with while you're enjoying game. Not to mention that many games had dungeons, dangerous locations that awarded tons of exp and great loot but could only be completely with the help other other players. These days, MMORPGs are focused on trying to wow the player with cutscenes and a linear story, giving players minimal reasons to interact with the community. This basically means that nearly every MMORPG made from 2010 onward is closer to a single player game with a chat room, relegating all the mutliplayer content to endgame, making leveling feel like nothing but meaningless filler. I can't even put into how much of a problem this is. Even the MMORPG that I consider the best on the market right now, Final Fantasy XIV, has this problem and has it hard. I've recently been dabbling in older MMORPGs like Final Fantasy XI or classic World of Warcraft and I was astonished at just how open and community oriented these games are.
So yeah, the MMORPG genre isn't the titan that it was once, dethroned by MOBAs. Like I said before, things rise and fall, so who cares as long as the genre is still there for people who truly love it? Well, as the title says, MMORPGs are stagnating, hard. Copying one game to death for a decade will do that. There's only so many times you can log into a new MMORPG for the first time only to be asked if you want to play the blue side or the red side, then proceed to be dropped into a world with cartoony graphics and hotbar combat where most of your game play revolves around right clicking an NPC with an icon above his head, collecting twenty bear asses, then return to the NPC who now has a new icon above their head. And that's what MMORPGs have been for the past ten years. From Rift to ToR to Wildstar it's always red side, blue side, cartoony graphics, collect bear asses, repeat. No game is willing to be bold and try something new, hell even the single most mold breaking MMO to come out in the past ten years, FFXIV, still has a lot of these elements. And it's not surprising that games aren't willing to deviate to hard from the WoW formula. As previously stated, MMORPGs are expensive and making something radically different that might not gel with the market is just stupid from a business standpoint. Even the king of the fools, World of Warcraft is stagnating hard. It's become a C-list game for Blizzard who would rather focus on the smaller, cheaper, more profitable games leaving WoW with features like selfies and twitter integration that practically scream "OH GOD PLEASE STILL THINK WE'RE RELEVANT."
In conclusion, I'll say that if MMORPGs don't want to decent into a bit of endless WoW clones with content gated behind dollar signs then there needs to be a game that does for the genre what WoW did back in 2004. There needs to be a game that's willing to be bold and take risks to move the genre in a new direction. But given that MMORPGs are a dying breed I doubt we'll see that any time soon. I doubt a whole lot of folks are going to read this wall of text, but that's just some things that have been on my mind since I started revising older MMORPGs.
