Why Aren't There Any Good MMORPGs? A Critique of Pure Power
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- čas přidán 14. 05. 2024
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Why Aren't There Any Good MMORPGs?
A Critique of Pure Power
The MMORPG as a genre of games is not in decline, but it is certainly stagnant. The market for MMORPGs, however, is more ripe than ever: gamers are hungry for a genuine MMORPG experience that developers aren't providing. The issue, I posit, is in the balance between Action RPG and Social RPG: it is the realization of both that makes the MMORPG something truly special.
Let's take a look together at the problems with modern MMORPGs, and why an overemphasis on one particular ARPG characteristic, the pursuit of pure power, has led the genre so astray, to the detriment of all gamers.
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If you liked this video, check out Adam Millard's video, "RPGs Were Never About Roleplaying"
• RPGs Were Never About ...
This isn't a collaboration, just really coincidental timing and mutual respect. Appreciate you, Adam!
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You can learn more about Doctors Without Borders at www.msf.org/.
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/ moonchannelyt
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Chapters:
00:00 - Intro, The MMORPG in 2023
03:21 - Sponsored By Factor
04:04 - The Spectrum of Action to Social RPG; the Three Fundamental Online RPGs
05:52 - The Action RPG (ARPG), the Game Without Roleplaying
09:26 - The Social RPG (SRPG, for Purposes of Video), Social Roleplaying Without a Game
12:30 - The MMORPG, Power Fantasy
16:39 - The Pursuit of Pure Power, a Problem for Modern MMORPGs
23:06 - Proposed Solutions, Reduce Soulbinding Equipment
26:16 - Imbalanced Drops Can Be Good for MMORPGs
27:35 - The Problem with Level Scaling
28:58 - The Poorly Designed Zone, and Simple Suggestions for Improvement
34:21 - Conclusion
36:01 - Special Thanks, Check out Adam Millard!
36:27 - End Credits Gag
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Track list:
Intro - Temple of the Moon, World of Warcraft [WoW]
Sponsor - Level 1-1 to 2-4, Overcooked
Spectrum of ARPG to SRPG - Theme of Prontera, Ragnarok Online
ARPG - Tristram, Diablo 2
SRPG - Ellinia Field, Maplestory
MMORPG - Durotar, WoW
" - Red Glowing Dust, EVE Online
Pursuit of Pure Power - Rogue Encampment, Diablo 2
" - I Miss You, Ragnarok Online
Proposed Solutions - A Land Restored, Guild Wars 2
Imbalanced Drops - Ul'Dah Night Theme, FFXIV
Zone Design - Limgrave, Elden Ring
" - Ul'Dah Night Theme FFXIV
Conclusion - Teldrassil, WoW
Credits Gag - Able Sisters, Animal Crossing Wild World [SILVAGUNNER]
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Attributions:
• RPGs Were Never About ...
Galapagos Finch Footage
• [Diablo IV] Whirlwind ...
Whirlwind Barb Footage
• Instantly Killing Uber...
Blood Orb Necro Footage
• Asmongold Reacts To Th...
Onyxia Wipe Animation Footage [I couldn't get the real one to load into my editing software no matter what I did! Sorry Asmongold, I hope you don't mind. Please don't hurt me]
• Path of Exile: Deliriu...
Path of Exile Delirium Footage
• 4 STRENGTH 4 STAM LEAT...
4 Strength, 4 Stam, Leather Belt?? [uggh ooggh] - Hry
Reflecting on your first WOW experience reminded me of one of my first MMORPG experiences with Perfect World. My low-level self just wanted to explore because the world looked pretty, went too far into a high-level territory, got killed and respawned in a town I had no business being in yet. The whole area was surrounded by mobs that one-shot me no matter how hard I tried to sneak past them, and I was stuck.
Enter awesome player significantly higher level than me recognizing I was stuck, who chatted with me about the circumstances that led to me being there, and then invited me to join his party so he could *literally carry my low-level butt through the sky and to safety* (being carried was a feature that was probably part of the romantic elements I never explored beyond "Oh, look, you can marry someone in game and literally carry them over the threshold. Neat."). After that point, he helped me gain experience and showed me a lot of the pretty places to look at because at the end of the day that was all really wanted to do with the game. If I wanted to explore more, I needed to be strong enough to get there, and that was my only motivation to gain levels. No pressure to have the best build, no want for a story other than my own, and a very kind person I made a lot of fond memories with. It remains the best MMO experience I ever had.
And now I'm sitting here realizing my experience could be the first chapter of an isekai fantasy novel with a ridiculously long title, and I may need to write it now.
If you do end up writing that novel, please share it with me!
@@sorcerousfang I know a good title: "I got Log Horizon'd into the MMO I just started and was literally carried." If there's one other common thing with all those LN names, not just the isekai ones, they're all self-descriptive.
If you haven't seen Log Horizon, I recommend watching it, especially if you ever need inspiration for your story. It's not a power fantasy and instead focuses more on the politics of the players and guilds stuck in the other world. It'd probably between the the center and bottom right corner of the MMO spectrum in this video if you made the spectrum about isekai stories. There's still plenty of action but it's not the main focus in the slightest.
Re:Zero would probably be closer to the center as it's more of a character-driven story where the main character's cheat power is that he doesn't stay dead but time rewinds for him every time he does die and he has no real means of fighting back against most of his opponents on his own 90% of the time so he has to figure out strategies to solve mysteries and defeat his opponents with the allies and resources he has available to him.
This brought tears to my eyes. My first MMO experience was in a free-to-play game called Fiesta online. I was 10yrs old and had no idea what I was doing, but thought the cleric with his mace(I didn't even know what a mace was) and shield was pretty cool. Got into the game, completely lost, got stuck in some dungeon/pvp zone not knowing where I was supposed to go to complete my beginner kill 5 lvl 1 mobs quest.
Just when I was about to give up on the second day of trying, 2 random players saw me in the pvp zone and helped me out. I could barely type too 😅. It must have been rough for them, but they were patient. Will never forget those two. That's why I still firmly believe MMOs are not just full of the incel neck beards out there.
WE HAD THE SAME EXPERIENCE OF GETTING LOST IN PERFECT WORLD AND BEING FLOWN AWAY BY A HOT BARBARIAN. (What class was your romantic hot date?)
I feel like there's another aspect as to why MMORPGs aren't what they used to be which you didn't touch on: The inevitable demystification of MMORPGs - and games in general.
In the first months, maybe the first year of WoW, the whole game was still a big mystery. Let's say you saw a guy with a cool looking sword in town. The only way to figure out where they got it from was to ask them. That gave the guy a way to brag about his accomplishments and it gave you something cool to strive for. Something you discovered serendipitously, something that not everyone would have on their radar because not everyone saw cool sword guy or if they did, not everyone asked.
Additionally, if you started a quest with only vague directions, your options were 1) run around all over the place until you maybe stumble across the objective and 2) ask in chat once you lost patience. Again, that gave people a sense of their knowledge, their experience with the game having value. And it gave you an appreciation for those that would help you, even if that help was just in chat and not bound by any game mechanics.
And then came the online databases which logged every quest, every item drop, and had the whole game world all mapped out. They made all that previously arcane knowledge public. And with that, the answer you would get when asking people in-game would usually just be "look it up yourself". Likely because that's what the person answering had done themselves. Anyone could learn anything without even engaging with the game itself. That also meant players didn't value that knowledge anywhere near as much as it was no longer sourced from personal merit or experience.
Soon enough, you were not only expected to stop asking "dumb" questions, you were also expected to know every boss in a dungeon before you stepped foot in it for the first time. Which brings us nicely to the "Why it's rude to suck at WoW" video that others have already mentioned.
Unlike the issue discussed in this video, I don't see any way out of the demystification I described. The sites that enable that knowledge to be available for anyone at any time without touching the game won't go away. For any major new game, there are a dozen already set up during beta tests. The internet has changed since WoW released. There is no going back.
One might argue that the easy way to keep some of the mystery alive would be randomized content with some very rare elements. But then your hard-earned knowledge of these things is worthless - to you and to others. Because it can't be employed in any useful way as the parts of the game it pertains to are just random.
A little anecdote to illustrate my point:
Roughly a year ago, in July 2022, there was a major community interest in Nier:Automata for a couple of days. A single-player game that was already 5 years old at that point.
Someone had supposedly found a previously undiscovered area of the game. Over a few days, they posted screenshots and short videos of that area, along with some light description and questions, indicating they were rather young and not comfortable with all the attention. That mystery had people enraptured for the short while it lasted, even ones that never played the game. But try as they might, nobody could reproduce it, nobody could get there on their system. How was this possible? How was this missed all this time? Was this even in the game the whole time? Was it just patched in recently? Or was it a marketing ploy? Or a mod beyond anything previous seen? Or completely faked footage? Nobody knew.
The story ends with the whole thing being a "hoax" (if you will) by a few modders who had figured out how to manipulate the game's files in previously unknown ways. But that's not the point. The point is that mysteries like this don't just capture attention of the whole community, but even of people outside of it. That is how rare things like this have become. And that's how much people still long for them.
Why not just leave about 50% of quests out in the open on maps and such, make about 10% of various secrets part of the main campaign's path, and then make the remaining 40% of be actual secrets that are either locked behind the post-game or players have to do specific things to unlock them. Then, after players find everything within the game, give them a "new game +" and put in 5 more secrets that tantalizingly tease and excite players for future projects. This could be something interesting to try out if someone has the money, resources, and time to burn.
@@emperorbooglitch8540 that still doesn't solve the problem of online guides making these "secrets" more of just, a thing to learn.
Reminds me of when I played WoW for the first time and didn't even know about all the quest addons and such, I had to do the druid quest to unlock the marine form, and had no idea how to get to the zone where the quest took place in.
I started stopping players I met on the road to ask for directions, and it felt like real life lol "Follow this road until you see a fork on the road, turn right, make your way to Ironforge, take the train to Stormwind, then..." something like that, I don't remember EXACTLY the directions, but the experience itself I do, to this day.
And even arriving at Stormwind, which was totally different than the Night Elves areas, was something that I remember fondly.
I thought about how every game you can just look up how to beat day 1 nowadays, and the next big adventure that "Feels like playing an old game" was going to have to be one that actively sent bad information to reviewers, developers, and its own API somehow, and that the only way to truly find anything in the game would have to be IN the game somehow. A game that renders having your phone open or another tab open in the background useless, slow, boring, and wrong. Maybe players literally have to gather at a help desk. Maybe map/item locations can be bartered. Even the most antisocial are more inclined to give out knowledge if it's encouraged. Maybe it gives you special social points you can spend in that super fun summer beach swimsuit shop. Literally anything that removed the overbearing oppression of the fact its just numbers to waste time.
@@emperorbooglitch8540 people are bound to make online guides of the secrets anyways, making them public knowledge
“Comparison is the thief of joy.” This profound quote applies not only to MMORPGs but modern video games as a whole and perhaps the internet at large. Your videos always just speak to me Moony. Thank you so much
and the FOMO (the "fear of missing out") can be part of this.
I tried to find who said the quote (comparison is the thief of joy) first, but no surprise, I found multiple contradicting results, many just attributing it to a (favorite) famous person (for reasons of self-interest - political, religion etc) - basically fallacious argument. (If I say this famous person said it then more people are going to believe me etc)
anyway it makes me think of: (caveat - I haven't verified the source)
George Bernard Shaw once quipped, “The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you’re happy or not.”
MMOs tend to devolve into solo-action combat or social chatrooms.
What they fail to realize, they can have BOTH aspects fulfilled without endangering the other. Imagine one part of the playerbase playing stardew valley crafting &growing food for the hardcore players. And them in return gathering rare ingredients so the casual playerbase can upgrade their farms & tools to provide better service for the hardcore players.
Time spent playing should be beneficial to all, regardless on how you want to play.
I think i've seen some games try to emulate this. Maybe they did it wrong because they basically forced it, by having players only able to progress by joining a guild. Then guild members divide work between them.
The problem is, to me this felt like going to work instead of playing a game. You spend more time mining ore than doing the fun stuff, because that's your role in the guild.
Angels Online feels like it could have been the best MMO ever made if the developer and publisher were good
I remember ArchAge or whatever it's called, is your statement true for that game as well?
Puzzle Pirates kinda does this. All the items needed by the high-end combat players are sold in shops run by other real players. Those shops exist in towns that are run by real players and are staffed by workers who are real players, and their crafts use materials that had to be gathered by real players. Most of the combat revolves around ship combat where everyone has a role that's necessary to keeping the ship running - one person sets the course and steers, a handful man the sails, some load the cannons, some repair holes, some bilge water, and these all affect each other in various ways.
It's a great system that I think about all the time, but unfortunately it's not actually a particularly fun game to *play*, and a lot of those non-combat systems (especially the town ownership and landlording) suffer from some of the same problems as real-live equivalents e.g. consolidation of power into fewer and fewer power player's hands.
I feel like thats what Ashes of Creation is attempting to encourage, although I have a feeling it'll fail on the "casual" side. It would need a much more proper farming experience that would make people actually want to farm over leveling/fighting. I also think farming can extend beyond just resources and into things like mounts and cosmetics. It's something FFXIV actually does pretty well minus the social aspect (besides sea fishing which is probably the only good example in an MMO). All of the crafting classes have a mini game that you have to do when crafting high quality gear or crafting something for the first time. Mining and Botany are probably the most "meh" of the crafting and gathering jobs in FFXIV. Fishing on the other hand is the best. You have a significantly deeper but not necessarily more complicated/tedious mini game that requires a degree of knowledge that you'll pick up over time by Googling stuff or asking other Fishers. Then it also has the sea fishing which basically just groups up a bunch of people into a single instance and essentially acts as a private room to just chill and talk about stuff. Plenty of newbies and veterans still run it so you'll often see the veterans giving tips whenever the newbies ask about stuff. It's essentially the online equivalent of going on a fishing trip with some work acquaintances.
Hey Moony, big fan! I'm an endgame maplestory player and I just want to point out that Maplestory hasn't been a social game for the better part of a decade. Originally it was very social, but it's been almost an entirely solo experience for a rather long time. Player power is extremely vertical and it takes well over a year of dedicated play to participate in endgame bosses. I think it's not unreasonable to say it's a hard minimum 1000 hour grind just to participate in the latest content. Very rarely does a player do it that quickly though. The players who just chill in henesys are basically the equivalent of people who play rp servers and hang out in goldshire minus the erp. They're sort of the exception. The vast majority of players are people who are actively trying to get as far in the game as possible, 99.9% of them never actually make it to end game though.
Hi Chaos! Thank you for the input: it's been a little while since I (or frankly, anyone I know) has touched upon Maple Story. It was, however, once my youngest sister's favorite game, and I have fond memories of watching her socialize with her friends while hitting tree stumps with daggers.
If anything, the fact that even Maple Story has gravitated towards pursuit of pure power shows, I think, how mmorpg developers may have lost sight of what makes these games great.
That said, I did cut a section out of the video discussing my thoughts on how some social rpgs purposefully have an almost impossible, extraordinarily grind heavy end game for the sole purpose of preventing players from reaching the "end" and thus encouraging socialization "forever" -- this being a flaw of the Social RPG. I'd have to develop my thoughts on that topic a bit more though: maybe we can discuss it in a follow-up video someday!
@@moon-channeli think fallout 76 deserves the spot where maple story should be for while it has almost no social features whatsoever, the game is yet incredibly social despite the inability to be social through joint hardship.
And I'm one of the 99.9% of endgame players who felt like my entire experience is incomplete. My main is/was a Blaster, who i got to lv 245 i think, and due to the overwhelmingly grindy nature of maple (in addition to nexon's new shady practices like NFTs), i just called it quits ^_^
@@g1gabytez We need a successor badly
While I'm not 100% endgame yet (still only half-done my liberation quest, not doing Kalos boss runs or anything), I can confirm this. There's an argument to be had that most of the social aspect of the game has moved to discord, since it's easier to join voice chat or organize guild activities that way, but it still stands to reason that in-game communication is largely gone. People do find social groups, but the sad part is that it's often locked behind finding people at a certain skill level, which takes time to progress to.
I can't believe you reminded me that cosmetic items used to be a thing you just unlock by playing the game instead of through in game shops. That is such a more fun way to do cosmetics not only because it makes them feel more rewarding (as a sign of your accomplishment) but can add to the social aspect of the game in a way more impactful game than "My character looks like this because I paid $20. You must also pay $20 to look like this".
See I'm never impressed when I see people with rewards like that. Like gee you either have disposable income or irresponsibly bought something. Even when it looks cool, I just kinda shrug. I only am impressed now days when I know it took something crazy to get loot in game. I honestly don't care if the person I'm playing with has tons of money or barely a dime. I'm not playing to admire someone else's wealth.
You can have both obviously
Your Elden Ring example illustrates something that's gradually dawned on me: when I say I want multiplayer games, I mean I want games _structured like single player games, with a focus on immersion_ -- which can be played with my friends. The co-op campaigns in Halo or Kingdom Hearts Days, a variety of multiplayer mods for Mario 64 or Jet Set Radio Future -- those are my gold standard, because pure power takes _such_ a back seat that enemies seem to have a 'canonical power level' instead of floating, disjointed numbers creeping ever upward. Areas in the game are _core memories from the plot's progression,_ rather than pastures where busywork mobs can spawn.
I think this desire for immersion is represented in story fiction _about_ MMORPGs as well. Many such manga present more of a CRPG/immersive sim vision for the genre, where physics and environment can eke out chaotic, almost unreproducible results -- truly subjective experiences. Maybe a level 20 boss monster slips on an oil slick, cracks its head open on a brick wall, and falls off a cliff, awarding a 'win' to the hapless level 1 adventurer who ran around like a headless chicken trying not to get stomped to death.
If you have never played Super Mario 3D World, then you absolutely, 100% should. It's exactly how you described, a single player game for up to 4 people to play together. The modern Mario side scrollers are like that too, if you fancy that.
MMOs should give you systems that encourage communication, interaction and so on and not just "progression". At a certain point in progression, many things wed rather solo i am sure.
Though, it is important to keep in mind that you as a player need to try to engage other players. If someone isnt looking to chit-chat, whipping them via ingame systems rarely helps.
I feel like Destiny (1) deserved to be on this list. I ticks all the boxes he said. And as you've said, it ticks that single player immersive experience, but brings co-op and the epic save the party moments in as well.
Absolutely agree. One of the reasons why I could never get too invested in MMORPGs is because the fighting and exploration lacked immersion. Exploration is usually a linear skill/quest requirement, and combat is almost exclusively a stat check. There are no physics, no options for improvisation, no immersive near-death experiences, it's all about having the right gear and pressing the right spells at the right time, and that's just not fun for me. I wanted to hop on with friends and have unique experiences depending on our playstyle or crazy ideas, even if they occasionally break the game, but I never got that with MMORPGs...
Try Warhammer 40K: Darktide. Great to play with friends, difficulty increases are elective, and the game is so chaotic at higher levels that even if you don’t optimize, you’ll do great if you can just adapt and ride the waves of chance. it emphasizes cooperation with teammates, and just being in the right place at the right time. But if you want to optimize and grind, you can do that too and it feels pretty rewarding to finally get the perfect weapon drop.
I think this problem extends outside the mmorpg genre and into any multiplayer game really. Too many games focus on players who want to optimize everything instead of fun
This. It's also why e sports will never take off as a well funded public pass time. Because watching people sweat over optimization and percentage points isn't fun in the slightest.
i've noticed in fighting games that this happens as well. i feel like characters over time can get buffed so they lose the unique characteristics that make playing them enjoyable, and developers are quick to eliminate new metas even when they contribute to a character's basic gameplan. i've always wondered why developers don't lean into those characteristics! if you have to buff them, focus on the character's _essential_ gameplan. that's the reason most players choose them as a main.
CZcams is already flooding with 'best X for Y' videos for Baldurs Gate 3 and its been out officially for a day. A story RPG getting meta optimization videos is the worst thing ever.
@@strayiggytvdespite your individual opinion which you are entitled to, it is a fact that eSports is already a multi-million dollar global phenomena. There are thousands of people watching a StarCraft 2 tournament on Twitch right now as I type. Many countries openly embrace eSports as part of their new cultural fabric, like Saudi Arabia and South Korea for example. Colleges and high schools around the USA have thriving eSports clubs/teams.
"Given the oportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game" I don't remember where I heard that but it's true.
I think a core problem that is not due to game design is that people have went from "Cool! I can play with other people!" to "Oh god, I have to play with other people!". I think this is just a logical evolution of people getting accustomed to playing online games. The wonder of the new passes and gives way to datamining and pure optimization, the world of a game merely becoming a system of interconnected elements to break as efficiently as possible, with other players being roadblocks. Therefore, I think something like when WoW was new can never happen again. It was a combination of good game design and a sufficient pool of people who still looked at online gaming with wonder. That, and we entered a time of overabundance. Choice paralysis is a thing, and the countless options of things to play devalue the idea of investing in a single game. This is not only true for games, but for pretty much everything else, too. Compare going to a video store, discussing what to take home for 30 minutes, and then really enjoying whatever you took home to aimless Netflix zapping. There's so much you COULD watch that you can't settle on anything.
for an mmo to really be good you have to break people that refuse to see it as something more than empty systems or make it clear they aren't really welcome.
The only solution is creating two totally different games in one. Countless options for social activities for casuals and a massive in game store existing parallel to an aggressively competitive action based gameplay with levels and skills acquisition. I hear Maplestory 2 nailed this pretty well actually (before it was canned in all regions besides Korea)
This might end up being expensive or time consuming but I honestly can see it lasting quite a long while. One half of the team would be solely dedicated to the social "party fiesta" style content while the other half focuses on game balance, combat, monsters etc. Keep both styles totally separate but also totally accessible if some work is put in. For example, say a warrior wants to clear mobs faster but a certain staff he needs requires a certain level of "reputation" in order to unlock it for combat. Now he has to socialize, play mini games, make friends, buy a house, etc in order to boost his reputation points and unlock it for battle. Perfect way to ease players into alternative ways of engaging with the game. You could even at the beginning of the game have players pick a villager, defender or a volunteer role. Villagers would be the chefs, farmers and miners. Defenders would be the swordsmen, the wizards and archers and volunteers would be a special class that can only be achieved at at a certain level that hybridizes the defender and villager roles. Overall, it only takes some very thoughtful and intuitive game design to play into what people expect and demand rather than trying to recreate a nostalgia 'spark'.
I had a character in Ultima Online, that was not a crafter or focused on combat. He was herding/stealth/lockpicking.
I would herd dragons into one corner and have free pickings from all the chests.
Since the dragons were not killed they would not respawn on me, and since they were grouped up in one place, it was hard to engage them without dragon one away at a time.
That gets into a topic of what makes a good style of competitive game and what makes a good style of co-operative game.
I personally love co-op. But some co-op games expect both players to be skilled to the extreme. Bringing in a 2nd player who has anything less than high skill is a death sentence. That ruins the whole play with and help your friend experience.
An example where co-op works well is Destiny. Some help, any help is usually better than none. Even accidentally running into places where I was severely under-leveled for a boss, I still helped by reviving players and keeping their backs clear. Initially, it felt a little bad. But after I revived the higher level player twice, I came away feeling like, yes I need to be higher level, but I did help the win.
@@user-tf1oo9rj6u Co-op games are fine when the group fight against NPC. If L4D has taught me anything, that is to never design co-op game pitting 2 groups against each other.
I've been playing FFXIV since Stormblood, and it's pretty much the only MMO I play (not counting the small amount of FFXI I've dabbled in). My first data center was extremely cliquey and rude, but my second was incredibly friendly and patient with me. Many thanks to the person in Tam Tara who, after calling me out, immediately became polite when I admitted I was new, and enthusiastically took the time to answer a brand new Arcanist's questions about DoTs and my carbuncles!
Most of my guild is older adults with jobs, so most of my social interaction (outside of being brought to rp venues) has been in learning parties for high end content, many of which have been lots of fun! (Yes, I am one of those that enjoy high end content.)
I do have some issue with your solutions - FFXIV used to allow a lot of rewards to be sold, but they're soulbound now because the devs are trying to cut down on real money trading (RMT) and botting. I've seen it in Eureka, one of the special zones: When I first played Eureka in Shadowbringers, despite it being old content, it was a highly social experience because if a player dies, they lose exp unless raised by another player. One of my favorite experiences was watching a rescue party fall off a cliff, then need another rescue party in turn - in the end, it took five rescue parties before they were raised. Last time I went in, after the influx of new players and the increase in RMT traders, I saw bot players camping special encounters so that human players couldn't do them - in turn, this crashed the in-game economy for the rare items and mounts from the encounters. In general, Eureka is now far more empty and less social with only the bots, the players only interested in the untradable rewards, and the occasional new players trying to figure it out left.
I've unfortunately also seen something similar happen with high level players in low level areas - I once had to leave and come back to kill a mob I needed to kill for a story quest, because it also happened to be one that dropped a popular crafting item, and a level-capped player kept sniping them.
I do think it's a shame, especially after the influx of new players, that people often seem to have the misconception that high-end content is the only valuable content and the only way to get decent gear. There's plenty of other things to do if that's not your thing, and if people bother you for it, they're the ones who are in the wrong.
The whole botting thing is an interesting problem; much like w/ social media I feel like the only real solutions involve having Real People Really Moderating these spaces, manually, which obv has a cost in both time & money and probably doesn't scale well AT ALL. I'm not much of an MMO-head, but maybe running smaller servers or even dedicating (developer + player!) time to smaller games is something? Not that funding stuff like that is easy, though.
@@dovedozen The most efficient way of dealing with bots is by having players report them. However players will only report bots if they think it actually does something. While I understand that banning bots in batches tends to be better for technical reasons, if its not done frequently enough some players will get the impression that the devs dont care. I think the best solution is just making smaller, more frequent, ban waves.
I always hate hearing about bots ruining games and I always report every bot I find. I think a lot of people underestimate the negative effects of seeing blatant bots in a game has on the players of that game. Seeing the rampant botting in Lost Ark made me decide not to try to get back into it.
@@09f9 Coming from someone who tried to get into Eureka and the other 1 or 2 special zones (I can't remember atm, you'll understand why), but bounced off was because it was 1) boring as hell
2) way too grindy (sorry I'm not from some Asian country where grinding is the most fun thing ever/being forced to do it)
3) too convoluted
4) disconnected to everything else (like you said)
5) the rewards/end goal just doesn't match up with the effort having to be put in
6) (this is a problem for A LOT of things in FF14 unfortunately) there's not enough information/guides IN GAME so it pulls me out of the experience (there's no reason why a lot of the info, even on their own site, shouldn't be available in game somehow)
7) the people there are unfriendly/unhelpful or seem to not want to waste their time in there helping others who are learning (this is not an issue I've had during normal gameplay as plenty of people have stopped and helped me out or answered questions and seemed to be happy to do so, and I've turned around and done the same thing when I could).
Some of these apply to other aspects of the game, like the end of each expansion only allowing us to get 500 of the newest item currency per week, and then replacing it and the gear you could get every few months.
@@autisonm I think I have a potential solution or at least idea that could help with the bot problem: give players that report a bot some in-game reward when the bot is banned, like a mount/pet/title or something. This would give players an additional motive for reporting bots as well as notify them when their report actually had an effect, reassuring people that reporting actually is helpful.
I think there's a similar issue in Genshin Impact where there's basically no end game content and so hoyoverse makes a lot of enemies and bosses which are still easy to the sweats who constantly grind their characters and teams but can be quite annoying for casual players who just want to go through the story.
Yes! I really liked the story of Genshin (apart from the sometimes plodding-along pacing) but *damn* did combat get annoying with some of the new enemy types.
@@NoGoodHandlesLeft Genshin's combat core just isn't well designed. It's invulnerability spam on both player and enemy side. The only ways to make something difficult are time limits, one-shot attacks (anything else you can heal/shield through) or disabling most of player's kit. None of which are good options.
The fact that you can produce such large, high-quality work so frequently ON TOP OF practicing law is nothing short of astounding. Keep up the good work, man
Bro is saul goodman if youtube was his hobby instead of scamming people
Was Ragnarok Online hours of repetitive grind loop in the same areas? yes. Was it also the best time I've ever had in a MMO? also yes. God I miss it so much.
I still remember running around kiting and jupiter-thundering mobs in the clock tower. Those were simpler times, but it was so much fun.
And there was always the option to just go to Prontera and chat with people.
God, jupiter thundering anything was peak childhood memory for me. Such a satisfying sound and numbers popping up rapidly.
Ragnarok online was some of the best years of my life.
Ragnarok online was peak mmorpg...
...until renewal ruined it.
I've been playing on a classic RO private server called Payon Stories :) it's lots of fun, and even has some custom content to keep it fresh.
This feels like a sequel to Dan Olson's "Why it's Rude to Suck at World of Warcraft"
I saw the thumbnail for it while doing research, but didn't have time to watch it. Now, I think I might have to!
Between this video and that one it feels like the problem with MMOs are the makers of such games ever listening to power players at all.
@@strayiggytvI don't kmow if I'd go *that* far. After all, power players are, by and large, the people who play your game most, so it makes at least some sense to listen to them some of the time.
But there's definitely a salient point in that, whether intentional or not, the things that power players tend to want usually make the game demonstrably worse for non-power players.
The reverse on the other hand isn't true as often. The things that non-power players want (when they want anything specific at all) tend to make the game better for non-power players and simply do nothing for power players.
I can see how it might be frustrating for those power players, but the experience not continually improving isn't the same as it being made worse, and a lot of people *really* don't appreciate that.
Which, to be fair, maybe it is reasonable to expect that it get continually better for you, especially if you're paying a sub for it, but it's just the indifference to the experience of lower level/investment players that's bothersome.
@@SaberToothPortillayou need to ask the people that abandoned the game what they think, not the guy playing every day and complaining. The last guy obviously is having a better time than he is letting out...
Usually power players want more systems, new more complex stuff. Adding to the complexity of a game is never good to hook new players.
@@Puerco-Potter It's not only off-putting to new players. These systems often imply one "correct" way to play the game and thus hinder any kind of free play.
It reminds me of how World of Warcraft has a huge spike in player count whenever a new expansion releases. A lot of people just explore the new zones and have a good time with friends, and leave as soon as there is nothing else to do other than daily quests, M+ and Raiding.
Moony's adoration for his younger sisters is indescribably precious.
Makes me think of an old blog article from the era of the Wii titles something like The Bird Man Fallacy which discussed Sony and Microsoft throwing their own money into motion control because they had assumed that motion control was the only thing the Wii had they didn't, in the same way that people throughout history assumed it was feathers that enabled birds to fly and covering themselves with feathers would give them flight: like the key to flight is an air pressure differential, motion control was not what made the Wii fly. I was heavy into game dev blogs at the time of WoWTBC and the Big Talk around what made these games so satisfying was the dopamine tease of power progression: constantly be drip feeding new challenges to the player, giving them new tools to learn, and rewarding them for overcoming the new challenge. It's still a major play in every design book, in indie games and every Mario title. It's the lean toward ARPG: they assumed the power pursuit cycle was what people loved about the game because it was the measurable dimension of their design and the assumed "secret sauce" that made WoW or EverQuest the successes they were, and that the fun social stuff was a side effect of making the power pursuit cycle more attractive. I hadn't thought about how "cart before the horse" that was to ignore how the game subtly encouraged socialization, just that there must've been design errors in the pursuit like most long-time game players must.
Though it really felt like opening the floodgates to modern microtransaction free to play / pay to win gameplay, I really missed Maplestory. I miss that feeling of a cute social hub mixed with the game, but that’s also kinda lost so much value today between discord and the way we socialize in online competitive games.
I think there are lots of factors, but I think the main problem isnt MTX per se, its just that MTX was added in substitution for game content, instead of in addition (as it would be to the detriment to the MTX sales). I think this isnt unique to MMOs, but rather the gaming industry at whole. Ultimately MMO's subscription fee for new content became significantly eroded and people outside of the hardcore audience just went an spent the money on the latest new game as it was better value for money. It also doesnt help that as MMO's age, additional content becomes harder to make outside of single player focused content.
@@checker297 mhm. And like, it lost a lot of identity. As much as I liked seeing new worlds, having tighter places where you’re forced to run into people like in henesys, the harbor, or ships. Teleportation for quick quests became a norm and the fantasy of exploration and interaction faded a lot. The solo grinding that was a focal point became *the* focal point, at least in my experience.
I think the closest experience to the socializing since was meeting people and playing monster hunter. Hunts were long enough so during prep we got to have just conversations.
Pokemon Go for local meetups as well, but that’s verging into a physical space activity more than mmo.
Love the Adam Millard reference, I was so happy to hear your name at the end of that video!
I was quite shocked! I had a "look Ma I'm on TV!" moment, when it came up.
I still think of Moon Channel as a very personal project: just a small, fun CZcams experiment. I'm quite humbled by all the positive reception it has been getting!
mmo is dead because unlike mobile games nothing sticks around more then a few months and everyone only makes mmorpgs for pc anymore not consoles the real games market for the masses 600$ for a gtx 1060 at walmart shrink flation anyone
yes pc may be free most gamers game on console because of the trash way pc are sold in the usa
like solar your not getting the best products your getting trash someone needs to deal with america your not number 1 and charities are just stock exchange
I like how FFXIV introduced the Blue Mage class as it requires a party of other blue mages to do stuff and get spells, it's the most social I've been in the MMO, I also love how they give an option to avoid socialization as it is a final fantasy game and some people are in only for the plot and references, not wanting to play with other players who basically have memorized and optimized the layouts of the maps
The introduction of each class was fine, but I really did feel the tutorial for each was severely lacking. Like ok they'd show you a small snippet of what the basic gameplay was, but it would never really go past the barebone basics. The dancer tutorial was a real travesty. For each of these classes, I had to look up online on what exactly the game was trying to teach me to do.
I have a good memory of helping my friend grind the Shiva boss with a couple other friends in order to get his blue mage spell from her and we'd play the "screenshot game" where we'd try to do dumb emotes/poses and get stepped on by the boss and snag a screenshot of the lucky player. It was stupid and it was fun!
I'm not kidding, this video is helping me figure out the work life balance in my life. Forgetting to focus on community and family leads to burn out. The balance is necessary. Much love Moonie.
i remember one time, early on in my time playing ffxiv. i was doing some crafting in one of the starting cities and hadn't really upgraded my crafting gear in a while (i was probably only around level 30 at the time anyway). some random person i'd never met before came up to me and started crafting as well, then they opened a trade menu with me and offered me a full new set of HQ gear at my level they'd just made right in front of me! i was confused at first and thought they were offering to sell it to me and explained i didn't really have a lot of gil, but they said it was a gift. i never saw that player again but i think about them all the time. i made sure to pay it forward when I got my crafters to a higher level, too - i found another random player crafting at a low level and did the very same thing for them
I've actually done this before. I remember doing this exact thing when I was first leveling my crafters way back when in I think Heavensward or ARR. I want to say it was Aleport.
An interesting idea that this video made me think about, is how the season pass model that so many games do now seem to be similar to the power-sociability scale. Another example is Monster Hunter, that's been going on for almost 20 years now, but really blew up with World a couple years ago, that has a lot of sociability and community focus in its content, though it's often very limited due to the nature of the gameplay loop. I wonder if the popularity of these games can be attributed to players searching for the niche of the MMO in other types of games.
I would argue that Ragnarok Online is simultaneously an ARPG and a Social RPG, and because of a poor optimization of the hybridization, both the Social and Action aspects can be really exclusive, because you need incredibly social skills *and* incredible action gaming skills. It was, genuinely, one of the video games of all time.
Ah, an update to this: I'm realizing you're talking about the original designs of these games, and I apologize that I thought that you meant RO in its current state.
I would play the kind of game you have described, but I do foresee a problem, specifically regarding the trading. You said people selling items for real money would be fine, but this can get out of hand very quickly. My experience is with Escape From Tarkov, which describes itself as an MMORPG, and for the sake of this, we will take their word for it.
In EFT, you risk losing all the gear you bring into a raid, which is a PvPvE instance. Every time you go into a raid, there's money at stake. If you lose your good gear, you might have to grind other maps to buy it again. You get used to it, as it is part of the game, but it's rough sometimes. Now, there is no way to buy in game currency using real money, but that hasn't stopped people from doing so off platform. Initially, the buyer and seller could load into a game as a team, and the seller could drop a backpack filled with cash onto the floor to pick up, and the buyer could move the money into their secure container, so they wouldn't lose it on death. Things have gotten more complicated now, and the systems in place to stop this directly affect regular players' experiences.
The point here is that Real Money Trading (RMT) as the devs call it, is the leading cause for people to want to cheat in the game. The reason why at so many points in the game's history, every raid would have blatant aimbots, flyers, etc, and why even now every raid has at least one cheater with ESP, is so they can loot all the best items to sell for real money. At one point, maybe even now, the sellers would kill everyone in the lobby, and have the buyer pick up all the expensive things to sell, directly, so these inventory restrictions wouldn't affect them. All these cheaters make enough real money that they are able to continue to buy new accounts, many of them stolen, either from legit players, or bought using stolen credit cards, etc.
Dealing with these people is a game of whack-a-mole on two fronts, banning accounts that cheat, as well as countering the cheat software. I'd say both require resources that could be spent elsewhere, so unless you have a Valorant like kernel level anti cheat, or you at least have endless money and talent, like Microsoft or Amazon, I don't think it could work very well. Ubisoft still experiences a wave of cheaters at the end of each season of Rainbow Six Siege, where people try to push their ranks to get the unique season cosmetic charm that reflects their highest rank, but they did cheap out and outsource their anticheat. Even cosmetics are a motivator here, as you can see.
You might picture someone making a quick buck selling an in game item to another player, but let me assure you, people get obsessive. If there's money to be made, organized groups will get in and grind the hell out of the drops, and tank the "street value" of items. There are some games, like PUBG and CSGO, that at points I played exclusively because I could get drops that I could sell on the steam market place to use to buy other games. And this has not gone in vain, as I made back all the money I spent to initially buy them, and then some, by selling loot boxes. I have a friend who has 10 CSGO accounts that he grinds weekly. And honestly, if I had the patience, or any interest in playing the game, I might as well. This is to speak nothing of scammers, whom you might be liable for if you condone trading. Someone might take you to court, and the judge might not directly dismiss it.
What I'm saying here is that the trading of items opens a whole can of worms that smaller developers understandably might not want to. I'm sure there's a clever solution that doesn't affect regular players' enjoyment, but there's a thin line between chaos and order in this space. Something to think about.
Dang, I feel like a lot of these point apply to other hobbies as well.
As a CZcamsr, I have seen how competition can sap the joy out of video making. The social aspect is important.
Power player here. You're absolutely right. I have a PHD in PoE, and I often end up attempting to create emergent gameplay by powerleveling friends and curating their builds for them because they can't be bothered to study every meta. Although I enjoy the extreme grinds my friends do not which turns a game which could have amazing fun social gameplay into an experience that's mostly single player.
Thank you for your comment, Doctor. It's always nice to receive an expert's opinion on a video!
Social MMOs seem to genuinely be a product of their time, as a unique experience of talking with strangers and making friends online before smartphones and social media. The next evolution was effectively Facebook/Zynga browser "games" era, and companies ultimately figured out you don't really NEED any games to keep most people engaged on a social platform. Discord (and social media as a whole) effectively became the Social RPG's final form and thus killed the genre for everything else.
Even Maplestory hasn't been much of a "social" game for the past decade, with most of the game becoming a mostly solo daily chore/grindfest to gain power just like any other KR MMO. Chatting around in town still exists, but its more of a tiny niche compared to it's golden age in the late 2000s/early 2010s, with most players who want that experience sticking to VRChat, Second Life, or Discord/Reddit. At it's most extreme, social media followers/upvotes/likes basically ARE the new version of social RPG cosmetics, and our reality has effectively become the Monkey's Paw version of "I wish everyone played my social MMO" where society as a whole now chases clout on Twitter/TikTok/Instagram etc.
One of my dream projects is an MMO in which “Massively Multiplayer” is an integral, irrevocable part of the game’s story and design. Emphasis would be placed on the player as a member of a group. The concept is based in my fascination for sociology and anthropology. I know it’s highly unlikely to ever exist, but I can dream, can’t I?
The second a player finds alone and unable to do anything meaningful they would leave the game
The original plans for Uru (part of the Myst series) were very similar to that. The idea was a large multiplayer adventure game with people collectively exploring the ruins of an ancient civilization, as political conflicts start to break out over what to do with what they find. Sadly, Uru never really came close to fulfilling its dream for a variety of reasons.
For the record, it is still alive in a 100% free form, although with a small enough player base that none of its more grandiose ambitions will ever be achieved. Still, there's nothing else quite like it that I know of.
Haven't you ever heard of EVE?
I think the reason those games simply don't happen I think the reason those game simply don't happen is because they probably have a really short life cycle. If the game never really gets popular, then it doesn't really function properly, and if it gets popular but goes into decline, it also stops functioning properly.
The only real way I could see this working properly is if you get a shit ton of semi-realistic NPCs to populate the world when players are missing, but that's an entirely different problem in its own right.
@@pennyforyourthots no different of a game fill with bots
completely off topic but i love how you always find away to include maya fey in your videos as a sort of ‘persona’..i adore her and it makes me smile whenever i see any AA characters pop up during the law sections :’)
That Ragnarok Online music during the Chart explanation took me back to my childhood. 😭
It's really interesting seeing this video shortly after FFXIV announced their new expansion and development roadmap, which consisted of a lot updates to their cosmetic and housing systems rather than anything to do with combat content.
your wow anecdote brought me back to my first wow experience as a wee night elf. i stumbled into a faction war somewhere between the barrens and night elf territory and, not knowing how inconsequential my damage was, i tried to take part by throwing spells into the mix. i didnt understand that i wasnt even scratching the max level players duking it out but i felt so included and the fight was so unexpected and epic that i truly believed i was doing my part
i later learned of course that all i may have done was soak up a shaman's lightning bolt that could have hit a max level ally but in the moment when i didnt know any better i thought i was playing the coolest game imaginable. id love for a game to actually deliver on that fantasy, that even though i was just a low level nobody i could have been making real contributions to that fight somehow
Part of the difficulty in achieving this balance is the players themselves, not just in what they say, but how they play the game.
I remember when I tried playing an MMO and there were raids with seemingly interestingly designed mechanics that should have required players to actually cooperate in different roles, but the problem was no one actually played the raids in that intended fashion. Instead, the community had long since figured out to exploit those raid mechanics to clear the raid with maximum efficiency. The final boss itself still needed a full party of 12 to defeat as quickly as possible, but the actual task of reaching the boss was something that only 2 or 3 experienced veterans engaged with while everyone else stood around waiting.
As the old saying goes, if given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.
One interesting aspect from tradable equipment is that they can negatively affect real-world economies. There were cases in countries with weaker currency in which the population could make more money by playing MMOs, selling equipment and exchanging the currency than by doing meaningful work. Over time many people stop working to play MMOs and the economy breaks
There is one aspect of FFXIV that the playerbase has been craving since Endwalker skipped over the inclusion of exploration zones from stormblood and Shadowbringers. And I believe this video sums up why. In these zones you were forced to work with your fellow players to learn about the zone, use community resources, and work together to farm, and take down boss monsters while learning how to spawn the bosses, and to sneak past enemies too high level. And in Bozja southern front, they had the boss go for a round two, but it was in a duel against the best player from the huge group fate. If you stuck around to cheer them on and they won you got a buff simply for spectating the best player beat a boss solo. Ffxiv has potential to grow into an amazing mmo, but it feels like they might be getting pulled in lots of directions with how best to accommodate every style of player. Especially with the power players pushing for more ultimates even tho its content that only a small part of the community will ever touch. I hope dawntrail opens up the experience to more players and they nail the mmo part of the game on top of the great story.
FFXIV I believe is a case of the devs trying to accommodate too many people at once. Though it is admirable that they are trying to include people who typically are intimidated by MMORPGS and putting in game design choices to get non-MMO players to play FFXIV it is causing a rift. You have the raiders, the HARDCORE raiders, the RPers (and I guess ERPers), the people who exclusively play for the story (which is unheard of in an MMO), the casuals, the single-players, not to mention that you can cross-play with someone in Brazil, Japan, the US, and Germany in a group, all with different opinions. As such the devs have to focus on some things but neglect something else. They spent a lot of resources on the graphical update and duty support (both of which was surely needed) which in turn cost the exploratory zone (which was split into Deep Dungeon, Criterion, and Island Sanctuary so essentially exchanged for more variety of content but not as long, grindy or deep as exploratory zones)
I'm here basically by accident as I'm not a big MMO player. And yeah, one of the biggest draws of FFXIV to me (though I still haven't started playing due to just how massive and daunting it is) is not having to deal with the usual hassle of dealing with people to get anything done. I want to play it because everyone talks about how it has a cool world, fun bosses and a decent story (something Final Fantasy hasn't had in a while). I know there's a sizable part of the playerbase that is like this (more putting up with the MMO elements than playing because of it, would prefer if it was single player, etc) and it must sound crazy to anyone big into MMOs.
If I find the combat loop fun I do have an interest in endgame content that has to be done with other real players, and some social stuff like those thematic events players make (like organizing for everyone of a given class or race do something together), but the interaction is not really why I want to play.
@@42Caio Honestly ffxiv is not as daunting as it seems. The game will drip feed you content as you lvl. As new systems become available to you, the game will take it's time helping you understand so there is never a point where there is more then one or two new things for you to do. There is also a dedicated chat network where people who signed up to be mentors will chat with and group with noobies for the sole purpose of letting you take your time and teaching you. The only downside to the system is the game decides for you when you are no longer a sprout, and cuts your access to these systems. In my opinion you will lose your sprout long before you are truly ready to face the high end content on your own, but there are lots of FCs that will gladly take you in and teach you. Also the game is worth playing for the story alone, that is 100% the only reason I play and once I'm done the MSQ expansions and patch content I un sub and wait for more.
Sonic is a prime example of how trying to appeal to everyone will ultimately wind up just pissing a lot of people off if you don't do it right and considering how SegaSammy was treating sonic, Sonic Team was not at all in a position to do it right. Even now they keep shoving Classic Sonic sections into Modern Sonic games like the 2point5D Sonic Frontiers cyberspace levels even though Classic Sonic is getting his own games now like Mania, Origins and Superstars.
@@42Caio I usually play most MMOs somewhat solo (especially if its an ARPG MMO like Lost Ark or Path of Exile) since I'm not a very outgoing person but I really enjoyed being forced to occasionally interact for like 15~ minutes with 3 other people. They were typically pretty nice (which is common in FFXIV) and most were competent enough to get through the content. It served to sorta "break the ice" with the community for me and it's one of the few games where I actually joined a guild. Outside of group content you're really not pressured much into speedrunning to the end game. FFXIV is designed to be something you can enjoy at your own pace despite the MMO elements.
Maplestory USED to be social a little over a decade ago. So what you are describing for the game is accurate for the past iteration. However now a days it has skewed far into the solo player experience with a big emphasis on personal damage. When they initially made this decision back then, it was the start of the games decline, while yes, damage was important the social aspect is what kept a lot of players engaged. It's the main reason I stayed so long on global until the game itself was so different I had to quit. Whenever I do want that again I hop on a P-server that emulates that old school environment and the social aspect is pretty much same as it was back in the old iteration.
Hitting us with that Prontera theme early on, nostalgia ripping the ol' heartstrings. Excited to catch this one early, this is a favorite topic of mine!
I hated soul bound items from the moment they were introduced. So much of my time in EQ was spent making money so I could by the items I wanted, not doing the specific things required to obtain them that I didn't necessarily like doing.
Great video, Moonie! Definitely agree on most points. Mid-way through the biggest point I could personally think of is not exactly the point you brought up "recommending devs to not listen to power focused players" but moreso that the power-focused players nowadays are trending towards behaviours that end up being a huge detriment to the community, e.g: expecting everyone to having researched any group content in advance, even content with low stakes or a low bar of failure (funnily enough, you could probably make an entire commentary on the topic of how people expect to interact with games of any genre and external information nowadays) or getting mad at people who don't want to take the most optimal progression path in a "single-player-like" game. And I say this as a huge spredsheet enjoyer myself, there's definitely a great deal of fun to be had in ARPG system optimization, but I just feel like people seem to have issues accepting how others play the game, which has deepened the divide between ARPG and SRPG players in an MMO.
It’s actually kinda funny how Maplestory gets put into the Social category because of its history. But in reality they’ve gone way down the endgame rabbit-hole like most other MMOs and they’ve trimmed much of the social aspects of the game out.
Peace be upon you Moon and happy August! :] I’ll be honest: i have little experience with MMORPGS since I usually stick to games like Pikmin or Mario Party (any suggestions on where I should start Moon IF i should even give it a try?) BUT! I have a solution to the whole power fantasy thing! Why not make that power become a reality by going to the gym with friends or having a family sports night or do some charity work cuz helping those less fortunate is a good way to make yourself stop comparing and start appreciating. Heck you can do it cosplaying too if you really wanna. :D but one thing is for certain…micro transactions gotta go. :/
Hello, my friend! I wish I could give a suggestion for a good MMORPG to play, but the video betrays my feelings on that topic a little bit. FFXIV, I think, is maybe the closest game to what I envision as being the "sweet spot" for an MMORPG!
...without dipping too much into the copypasta, Final Fantasy XIV does have a generous free trial which, while restricting your options, gives you infinite time to experience the game's content and will soon include the first two expansions. FF is a very story-focused game, though; all content is locked behind the extensive main scenario, and the story starts out rather slow. I still highly recommend it, though.
FFXIV is the only MMORPG I have enjoyed since my long gone days of RuneScape and MapleStory.
I never played WoW during it's golden age, so I can't compare to that, but it does have a lot of the things that the video suggested to fix MMOs, such as meaningful rewards for higher level players to play lower level content (roulettes), high level raid bosses in low level areas (hunts and hunt trains).
While I hadn't considered and now totally agree that it is sliding towards being a single player game with trusts,NPCs that you can play with instead of players, it is slow enough and boring enough that it becomes a nuclear option. Playing with trusts is not optimal over playing with other people unless literally no one is doing the content you are doing.
I think as far as FF14 goes, there's a funny saying that the 'true endgame' is housing and outfit glamours. Doesn't take a genius to figure out where on the scale that lands. If anything other than the slide to the bottom left of the chart, I'd argue it's more of a slide downwards as well - back when I started ARR, to see all the story content involved doing Coil; a very hard progression series of events with actual story content tied to it. Nowadays, that same content is 'normal' and 'savage', specifically unhooking a bunch of core elements from the action side, but leaving a carrot on the stick for the more hardcore to go and get unique rewards. In that sense too though, there's an argument that the endgame is still about the glamour, and not the actual numbers - they're a gatekeeper, but not the 'point'.
Though having recently returned to FF14 and it feeling like a very different game to the one I remember, there's a lot of interesting changes made over the years which I have a mixed opinion of far beyond 'youtube comments' but they too arguably exist to make the game more approachable and more 'individual' by trading out ability and job complexity for mechanical encounter complexity, downplaying the numbers and power grind more for execution of the gameplay itself - something which feels more compatible with a more 'singleplayer' feeling experience but also arguably removes a barrier to the more social elements by making progression through content theoretically easier with less grind for numbers.
I don't know if you'd agree but near the end of shadowbringers and the start of endwalker, the stat and even levelling system almost felt...unnecessary? It was nice hitting level cap but it was almost so easy as to not really mean anything, it was more a vehicle for showing where folks were in the story than a genuine measure of a player's power relative to the world.
Despite the admittedly interesting raid encounters of the game, it always felt like the best aspects of FFXIV were it's social aspects, and I always hoped they would lean MORE into those aspects, things like expanding the gold saucer and the mechanics of the hub areas.
@@capnbarky2682 The levelling system, I feel, is mostly there to help people grow accustomed to their tool kit. You can hit levelcap doing nothing but the main story no problem. It's def not a gatekeep
The callout of "Comparison is the thief of joy" was important for me to hear. I've had issues playing video games recently because I'm so focused on trying to 100% them because of how I see other people playing games.
Meanwhile, only a few years back, I was ecstatic to beat Cynthia in Pokemon Diamond even though I used countless revives, ethers, potions, and ultimately had to use Struggle to defeat her. I was happy, but now, I kinda feel like getting to use all that stuff is cheating, even though it's encouraged in-game.
Anyways, great video essay, your stuff is always good, and this one helped me personally deal with my own gaming issues (even though I've never touched an MMO/RPG in my life)
27:55 Yes... I don't understand level scaling with mobs. It's not fun in warcraft, and it has actually made me not want to play Diablo IV. Why would I want to continue playing if my gear and stats get weaker relative to everything in the world whenever I level up? It completely dismantles any feeling of progress.
From a social point of view maybe make a mentor system instead? Don't scale the world to the player, scale the player to their friends.
To these games, the progress is not comparing yourself to the mobs, it's comparing yourself to other players. That's why it's a "multiplayer" game even though you technically barely interact with other players.
@@belldrop7365 in diablo especially. Other players are just kind of there?
There's zero reason to party, so it's strange to make the PvE experience so dull.
The ideal mmorpg concept reminds me of Attorney Online, the online ace attorney game in which you can roleplay in the courtroom and if you're in a vanilla/vanilla-esque server, roleplay cases. I remember going in and seeing all these experienced people arguing in the courtroom. The community was small and there were some very well known people. Just seeing their conpetence in the game and working with them to be included in a social circle was an amazing experience. After I became experienced myself, it turned into a different kind of fun where I could teach newcomers the game or treat the experienced ones like my friends
As a current Guild Wars 2 player.
I get the feeling Moonie hasn't played GW2 in years. As they do a lot of his suggestions.
World bosses in low level zones to bring high level players back? Account bound items far outnumber soul bound?
Leveling is fairly quick and once you hit "max level" there are a ridiculous amount of horizontal power progressions to tweak your power without flat out leveling your power.
Silly little events sprinkled throughout the year.
Yeah, felt like GW2 was left out of the talk almost entirely. GW2 solved a lot of these problems in a couple years after launch, other ones with first expansions. Unfortunately it was internally mismanaged several times and never capitalized on all its advantages - it split and angried its action community with dungeons and raids, and alienated its social community with aggressive cash shop and lackluster social tools. And it could've been _the_ go-to MMO today.
29:00 the zone designs examples, you can take xenoblade chronicles too. The zones are masterfully designed. Great hidden paths to find, pockets of different levelled monsters wayyy above your level, as well as superbosses which motivates you to come back to that zone even later in the game. I wish more games, mmo or not, created with this sort of great level design.
Old School Runescape just added an update where you cut trees faster if you do it with other people :)
Wow, this encapsulates and cohesively displays what I still ramble about to this day. I saw this coming as soon as I learned the details of The Burning Crusade, and since then I watched one of the oldest hybrid (casual with raiding) guilds (mine) on our server slowly fall apart and then eventually die.
This is really insightful and I appreciate your thoughts on this a lot. I hope we see some MMOs really go for this again sometime. FFXIV and GW2 are probably the best balanced ones right now but they’re definitely not quite there.
I think a good way to balance social vs action in hard/endgame content is that having more raid members makes the content easier, but it can still be cleared solo with absolute optimization, like old maplestory and zakum. It was reasonable for even the most average guild to defeat zakum with the full raid party within a year of release, but a solo clear was an achievement for well over a year. A top player can still aim for greater heights while normal players can play the content and band together with others.
A problem with MMOs is that there are only combat roles. They could have explorer roles, scouting roles, crafting roles, builder roles, trader roles, etc etc.
All equipment have the OPTION of soulbinding which allows for some buff -> possibly for further personal customization. There, easy soulbind solution.
It was fun for me to play as buffers/healers or crafters.
But it looks like these days are gone forever 🙁
yea, they could also make different dungeons/raids have variance & rng that allow for all roles to shine so all classes can have irreplaceable niche usages >->
@@sdjhgfkshfswdfhskljh3360
I've only stumbled across your channel today but I want to say that I find your vid style to be great and I've learnt a lot already. Keep up the great work.
I keep getting flashbacks of Warlords of Draenor - my last wow expansion I played.
You mentioned mounts. One of my fav memories is grinding old raids for them. My best friend got the tiger mount (me and the other guy already had got a mount in other raids) so we enthusiasticly gave it to our friend. We loved tooling around on them because of what it meant.
Old WoW had a raid boss in the Duskwood zone. Watching a swarm of level 1s try to take it on is an enjoyable memory.
Ive really enjoyed listening to your analysis - I felt you hit most of the points I would have. Good fun :)
I appreciated the Shalandis Isle theme in the background. It's such a beautiful track that completely took me by surprise the first time I came to the island. I ended up just standing there and listening for a long time. One of the best experiences I've had in an RPG.
33:00 in maple story there were party quests that required players of all classes to be completed. Every part of the quest had a challange that were solved like a puzzle by one certain class skill.
when at the end you mentioned adam millard, my smile got so big, thank you moony, you have great taste in reccomending that video!
and always remember about the galapagos finch! XD
this was a really good breakdown, well explained!
ive never been a fan of mmos before ffxiv, and what i enjoyed most about it was the fact that people engaged with each other a lot. i was lucky, but not alone, in finding really friendly randos who offered to help guide me and show me how to do dungeons etc. which made the experience really memorable
im excited for Palia to fill a newer section in the social rpg
Man when you mentioned Habbo Hotel that unlocked some old memories when I was 14/15 and craving socialization because I wasn't allowed to go out much by my mother. Good times.
Great video! I think the argument on the power social sweet spot is a good one.
From my perspective, the decline of WoW's social element started around the time they introduced instanced battlegrounds. There was an interesting sweet spot just after honor points were first pushed but before battlegrounds came out that showed a huge amount of player interaction that would just *cripple* their servers (anyone remember the Tarren Mill circle jerks?). But once BGs came out in full swing, combined with the pursuit of power (honor points) meant you had a lot less players engaging outside of their little power hungry bubbles. Sure, it might have kept a few PVP-averse players from quitting as their direct interactions became less, but it did so at a trade off of overall long term retention of players. Then they just hit the gas on that design philosophy and made nearly everything instanced. On top of that, the merged multi-server queues meant it was nearly impossible to organically make local consistent friends.
Another interesting point you made was regarding the problem with soul-bound items. I agree with that notion. In fact, I'd argue games like Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies (RIP) had gone in the right direction with this with gear/consumables that were all player crafted. In addition to that, buying those goods required either direct interaction with player merchants or their storefronts. I argue that this helped player to player engagement that wasn't dependent on skill or power. This died with the advent of global auction houses (which nearly every MMO has since used, because we gotta copy ALL THE FEATURES these days).
Interestingly, SWG died largely due to that power gain obsession once the path to becoming a jedi was leaked. All the system designs that forced player to player interaction (I thought needing to watch performers to recover your life/stamina/mind bar maximums was a brilliant design in respect to social engagement) were thrown out the window once players focused on power gain. Then they leaned even harder into the power chase with their combat redesign and just outright died as a result.
I have more thoughts, but that's all I can do right now.
I saw your community post about this video, but the video itself wasn't recommended to me at all. Commenting to boost it in the algorithm!
I know someone who spoke of Ragnarok Online and their experience with the game fondly, each time the topic of social games come up. Consistent with that experience, I have also played my own share of variably social games, because the concept of teams and guilds are so readily shoehorned into modern games that are designed to reward players for playing alone, and they leave me wondering why should play those games when I can enjoy myself similarly playing a more asocial game like Persona 5.
The commentary and critique you posed here helped me to understand both my friend's and my experience much better on a fundamental level, and while it is a change of pace from your previous pieces, it uses the same manner of organization and rational progression that I believe helps to enhance the final product so I'm one among the crowd that hopes to see more like this.
Hey Moony! Thanks for another thought provoking piece! I strongly agree with the sentiment that the problem of "pursuit of pure power" can and should be addressed through game design choices. I want a video game culture that embraces more varied play priorities, where players with differing priorities can still share compelling gaming experiences without being pitted against one-another by the design of the game.
Something I have been trying to emphasize in my own fantasy gaming (mostly TTRPG) is that everyone has the potential to make an impact, and that the scale of the impact is a matter of perspective. "Scale" is a word that, for me, is closely tied to the idea of MMORPGs. Things are BIG in these games. There's a whole world out there for the player to strike out into and explore, experience, and conquer. I wonder if games that focus on the pursuit of pure power often neglect the small scale?
Organic, emergent, social experiences are not usually focused on pure power, but I think (and it sounds like you think) those experiences are what make a game's world come to life, and what inspire wonder in players. I like "Sable," which is a game where there are no enemies to fight, no builds to spec, and where the only progression system is one that increases your stamina bar (as you find collectibles scattered through the world). Sable is totally open-ended, and in the absolute bottom left corner of the RPG chart. Interestingly, I feel that certain design choices brought the game's scope to this beautiful place; I could spend 40 minutes climbing to the top of an abandoned ruin, catching a few beetles, and watching the sun rise, and that's super grounding and compelling to me.
Obviously, that alone is a little lacking in the "action" department, but I think the ideal MMORPG would encourage players to get out exploring; I think that's a great context for emergent social moments in a game. Some of the things that make exploration work in Sable - but could also be put in an MMORPG - are a good photo mode, beautifully stylized lighting and landscapes, and lots of topographical high points that are interesting and rewarding to climb up to. Cosmetic customization such as dye ingredients could serve as a reward for exploration, but also enhance the experience for the sightseers and virtual photographers among us. Having rare/randomized tough enemies to fight out in the field could encourage players to team up organically (especially if the problems of level scaling were addressed/removed).
I can’t disagree more re: the soulbound thing. You might as well make achievements tradable. These cosmetics are interesting because you had to do something to get them , and having them is proof that you did the thing (this doesn’t have to be hardcore raiding stuff, it could be something like “oh a mini game they released two years ago had a cool hat”).
Agreed that everyone should be able to look cool doing their bit of the game, whether that’s raiding or PvP or tracking down lore entries or doing side quests, or even just focusing on fashion. (“I found this cool hat from a random vendor off the beaten path in the first expansion” is also a story about skill leading to acquisition!)
I greatly enjoy this new style of video you've attempted. I never found any part of the video to be overbearing, and I was very interested throughout the entire video while never having indulged myself in the MMORPG scene before.
Thank you for another amazing video, Moony. Finally there's a channel that covers my favorite games and my favorite genre of games.
May the algorithm blesses you fine sir.
Stumbled by chance on your channel today and have been binge watching.
Great content and very well articulated opinions.
Great video! I also have seen a change in MMOs where all player abilites are now only for combat. Older MMOs had less fast travel, but had classes who could make portals to help other classes travel the world or something like invisibility to help newbs run through dangerous areas to get to their friend's zone in one piece. Class and world design both informed and encouraged socializing so that people with different builds/classes could help eachother outside of just combat. When I hear socializing in MMOs, these are the kinds of things i miss the most. That kind of emergent gameplay you discuss in the video is hard to find now
This video reminded me of a mechanic in the fairly old now mmo The Secret World : Lairs. Those were areas scattered across all the open world maps, in which the mobs were highly overpowered for the map, aimed at higher players. If, as a new player, you wandered in those areas, it was pretty much a death sentence. The notable thing, tho, is that those areas where not separated from the rest of the map, and it was not immediately apparent that you were about to enter one if you didn't open the map to see the burnt-looking edges of the lair. I found it a very good way to encourage players to come back later; and a very fun way to suddenly get jumped on by a monster and destroyed because you didn't pay attention.
MMORPGs suffer universally from a key problem: They're afraid to let go of players. There's a stigma that if I ever stop playing an MMO, no matter how long I played it, it failed. I "got bored/had nothing to do." Maybe it's linked to ARPG-inspired focus, because power creep fetishization is the easiest way to keep players preoccupied rather than making socially-inclined designs, which are esoteric and hard to steer by comparison.
I think it happens because of aggressive monetization. Player who stopped playing won't bring money to game owners.
Players who stop playing are indeed an inevitability. There's nothing that can stop that. But when I get burnt out on the power grind, and if that's all there is, I'm probably never going to play again when I put it down. But games with good social environments and accessible content, I'm much more likely to come back. For instance, I still play GW2 now and then even though it has no real power treadmill. It's comfortable being able to take long hiatuses from it, and I feel like I can always jump back into it if I want.
Its sort of a versus between "Maintain retention at all costs, including driving our conclusive relationship with the player into the ground" and "Always keep the door open for the player so they can play on their own terms, if they choose to return at all."
All the Path of Exile talk while I'm here blastin maps on Impending Doom is really hittin right for a background watch
Just found your channel-- adore it. Love it!!
The last time I had fun in WoW was WotLK... as many others... but the reason was that my social died and my action became more important... also I got a job so I had less time for hanging around with the guild all day... but...
When WotLK started, we were a small guild of friends and wanted to give raiding a shot... we slowly made our way through nax... learning all the bosses together, discussing tactics on teamspeak, helping each other to get better... and the first time we killed Kel'Thuzad with only me as the tank barely surviving and everyone sacrificing themselves so we get the kill... that was a moment that will stick with me, and prolly the others, forever... not cause it was a "power" moment, but because it was a bonding moment...
But... more and more raids started coming, and it was turning more into "ok, do your homework before the raid so everyone knows what to do" and not "ok, let's learn this together"... and that's where stuff started falling apart... It shifted from a fun thing to do 1-2 times a week... to a thing that was about power... And I think that's where everything started dying...
Sorry for the long rant... I wanted to share :)
Great video as always!
It reminded me how much I miss the social aspects of games in general, let alone MMOs.
In fact my, favourite MMO ever would have to be Tibia, a grindy, unbalanced mess of an early-2000s free-to-play game, that was brutal for non-paying customers. And yet I loved not playing it, or optimizing my gear, but sitting in towns and interacting with other players. The way NPCs and "depo" (i.e. item deposit box) were realized, basically forced you to queue-up and interact with other players. Together with other small things, (like the fact the you could drop gold/loot on the ground for anyone to interact with) made for an amazing experience and led to countless fun interactions.
However, I feel like this is a double-sided coin. Whilst I miss those days, I also feel like nowadays, even if all of those archaic systems were brought back, I still wouldn't be able to enjoy it. Part of the issue, is the fact that nowadays we have so many games and other easily available media to enjoy, that games (especially those that are multiplayer) became something you want to "optimize". You aim to squeeze as much enjoyment out of it as possible, because you don't want to feel like you're wasting time. After all, the second you feel like you're wasting time you immediately think of other things you could be doing right now, lest you miss out on some great new game/movie/tv series etc.
Raising your power by grinding and doing specific tasks set by the developers is something that can easily be designed and fine-tuned while human interactions are random and you never know who you're going to meet and what will your interaction entail.
I would love, love, love to go back to these simpler times where I was fully willing to spend hours, among hours, just sitting around and looking for other people to interact with, rather than focus on game I have to optimize. Unfortunately, it feels like this is not something that the general public could enjoy, or feel fulfilled with, and while you can find experiences like these in some independent products, "true" MMOs require too big of a financial undertaking to justify a risky design that would incorporate these more social-focused ideas.
I pretty much spent first few years on Securan Rookgaard, just helping new players reach Mainland, standing at the square/Tom's roof with at least 2 other guilds, chatting. I had Mainland character of my own, with which I attended weddings and other events. Took me 5 years to be even remotely interested in leveling up my Mainland one, probably because Rookgaard became emptier with time. :,)
I miss the times, I am not sure if such community could be replicated these days. We were lucky enough to have older and wiser players constantly trying to make the place welcoming and supportive, which made us younglings follow suit. Dealing with griefers of all sorts and helping each other was our driving force.
It feels like CIP has made the game easier and more action driven, which in turn drove away the community. One of my friends still plays and seems to be so deep in the grind that there is no time to chat. That's okay of course, I don't expect him to be at my whim, it's his free time, it just makes everything feel empty and sad nowadays.
This video manages to articulate the feelings I've had for years on this genre.
It's more than just that most games are pushing too hard into either social or power it's also that they keep trying to enforce some weird apartheid where everything that isn't an endgame raid is so low stakes and easy you're at risk of falling asleep while the raids themselves are a game of simon says where 1 person screwing up wipes the whole group. I am one of those people who is a little too old and casual to hang out with the sweat lords but still wants some game to actually be invested in because I'm also not very social. Yet there's just so little game outside of the new hardest thing because levelling, questing, dungeons, old zones, events all that jazz has so little challenge or gameplay that nowadays most people just pay to skip it. That used to be my portion of the game!
Yeah it was never very hard, not even in vanilla wow, or everquest, or XI. But it still required some effort and attentiveness and not a railroaded MSQ where you never see any challenge or another human soul because they're all idling at max.
34:58 God, I felt that so hard during Legion. Thankfully, there were a few mods that made it a little more tolerable, but when those mods stopped working in BFA, I was done with retail.
Some things I learned from City of Heroes, my first MMO:
1) Let players sync their levels in a group, and provide appropriate rewards based on each character's level.
2) Character customization fosters roleplay and socialization. Your job is to give them fun toys to play with, not gatekeep who can wear the prettiest helmet.
3) Let builds create unique experiences. Different people want different playstyles, so design for variety instead of parity.
4) Not everyone hits the level cap, so focus on the journey (leveling) and not the destination (endgame).
@14:57 For me, a major component that even allowed me to play the game into higher levels at that time was the All Chat/server chat/world chat (I forget what it was called) which was a channel that was always enabled by default and players could just talk to everybody in the game at the same time and coordinate raids, world pvp events, talk about movies/anime, etc. At a certain point, Blizzard shifted towards a queue system and removed all chat, and... it was just never the same any more. It hamstrung the social aspects of the game. I couldn't level up in certain areas because the community fragmented more into their own char servers and guilds, neither of which I had - there was no virtually no way for me to talk to people without already belonging to a group.
Honestly should have went with the "MINUS 50 DKP!" guy as an example instead of the "more dots!" guy.
A reoccurring theme in these videos that I love, and want to point out to others who do not see it. The root of this issue always comes down to wealthy old billionaire men and their corporations choking the life out of any creativity and fun, all to keep a few extra million $$$ in their pockets..
I never thought about that until you pointed that out, but you're right, and it's such a shame, All these rich people ruling everything is killing the joy and beauty of art in modern media as we know it.
@@Skyblue_2049 You're not wrong at all, this is why I really don't like mainstream appeal most of the time, outside of rare instances like with Super Mario, but more often than not I think it stifles a franchise and often makes it drop in quality hard.
Yoyoyo that Prontera theme got me feelin all natsukashii.
Edit: I would have loved to see you talk about archeage. Rn it has a lot of the "too much focus on power" issues but at the start it was right up there in the perfect mmorpg corner. Super fun vid! I very much enjoyed it :D
I played WoW mostly during WotLK and Mist of Pandaria. During Mist I had a great mix of the social aspect and the "quest for power".
My own little group of Danish friends were too few to take on raid content, until we fused with a Dutch guild. We grew in power, by obtaining better gear, and by our improving our skills during raids, but our comradery grew as well. During and before the "Raid of Orgrimmar" patch we were raiding the newest content, and we were tackling heroic difficulty. We had only gathered enough players of sufficient skill and gear to take on 10-man raid. That suited me fine, since I think 25 is a bit to much to actually talk get familiar with the individual players.
I knew most of the Danish members IRL, but not the Dutch ones. By playing WoW together we grew to trust each other enough, that we visited each other in our respecting countries. We had fun chatting together ind and outside of raiding, and had fun socializing as well as getting excited when we took down a hard boss and a member got better gear. During Mist, both things come together almost perfectly for me.
I Have not played WoW for years, and I no longer talk with my Dutch friends, but I think back on those WoW days, playing solo quests, raiding and contributing with my (mostly) Danish and Dutch guild, very fondly.
I remember a very old MMORPG that I installed from a CD (guess how old it was). The one mechanic I remember was that enemies ignored you if your level was above theirs. You didn't aggro them except you attecked them first. They only were agressive at first sight if your level was low.
Its a good day when moon posts
As I imagined, you covered the topic really well Moony, I don't want to imagine how much research you had to go through and how many rewrites the script might have taken, but you you explained very well the divide for MMOs when it comes to player interaction and the approach towards content,and just as I imagined while I agree with you in concept, I mostly disagree with the approach for the solution, so let me explain my 2 points;
Point number one is that: While a good MMO should try and strike as good a balance between social features and action game features, to imagine that the game will "stay that way" feels like a pipe dream, as to retain audience the core design of the game will shine brighter as resources are allotted to what the dev team was aiming for, there's nothing wrong with having a more hybrid early to mid game but the more into what can be called late game is approached the more one or the other sides will break the balance;
Point number two is: emergent gameplay in an MMO doesn't have to appear from pure player interaction, but from opportunities presented from systems in game that allow for such, whether it's classes/features that allow for payers to help each other in parallel measures (like specific crafting systems or minigames), through allowing player expression with the game's mechanics, such as non-linear builds or in game challenges that position to the players that different methods are viable if unorthodox, and especially more interesting maps where there's more to see and do than just random mobs for farming XP and loot, be that through secrets or just interesting level design;
For that last detail I'll give 2 examples I had gone through:
Way back when I played Ragnarok online I wasn't particularly good with the combat but it didn't stop me in the slightest from going around and exploring a lot of the map, managing to find spots where very few players even cared to check, such as the top of a map near prontera (Mt. payon if I'm not mistaken) where there were beautiful giant flowers, it was slightly pointless to be there but it was just visually attractive and out of the way enough to feel special.
A different situation was when I played Tera, a fellow player I had managed to befriend for a short period was talking with me about the game itself and he brought up that there was a "forbidden zone" in the game very near to an early game dungeon where we had to do some janky wall jumps to essentially go out of the area's limits, and it wasn't even that difficult, we reached the area and it was incredibly bizarre and creepy because the music slowly faded out, everything turned gray-scale, almost like entering a dead zone (or flooded hyrule in zelda wind waker) that area according to my friend had been there for a long time with the devs not bothering to really do anything with it, and finding it felt incredible.
The big point I'm trying to make is that, by aiming towards players interacting less with numbers or just visuals but instead with the systems in novel ways it can help an MMOs longevity much more than any funny loot trade or sponge-y late game boss.
Thanks for covering several different MMOs in your post! Always nice to hear a more diverse opinion.
As for Ragnarok Online, Mt. Mjolnir is the mountain near Prontera. Lovely flowers. I love exploring more out-of-the-way areas in games that obviously received special attention from developers. There were/are actually some areas in Ragnarok Online 2 that sound similar to your TERA Online "forbidden zone" experience, where players could jump over out-of-bounds terrain and reach areas not normally accessible. Some had great views from very high up!
Similar out-of-bounds stuff in FFXIV, too. Interesting social interactions to be had learning and teaching such things with other players.
Thank you for reminding me of the name in Ragnarok@@SeiaiAnkoku it's been so long since last I played it, makes me miss the wonder of that world a little bit with how the dungeons and maps in general were designed to have slightly obscure details here and there (at least if you weren't using the teleport system all the time)
4:16 OMG ragnarok OST. Oh the nostalgia
About time a creator uses Overcooked music for a Factor (or similar service) ad. I always felt like it was low hanging fruit but it's always some stock music
Gosh, the discussion of an MMO designed with higher level challenges lurking around different areas made me think of Star Wars Galaxies. That game is gone now, but I still have a screenshot of my character cheering and proudly announcing “Pwned!” next to a giant dead bug that I’d managed to kill. It was merely a larger version of the bug enemies that were already there, but it easily wrecked me. I don’t remember how many times I died, but I remember how excited I was that I’d managed to kill such a tough enemy.
I know SWG was not perfect (hi, Jedi system), but my gosh it had so many things it did RIGHT. It had player-run cities that didn’t suck, it had awesome crafting systems (YES they were grindy, YES I sat around for hours grinding random crap and was so dang hyped when I finally created my first droid), it had fantastic social interaction… up until they wrecked it of course. I never even got off Tatooine (aside from when one player graciously flew me to another planet so I could have a chance at seeing General Grievous’s clone-I didn’t, of course, I died immediately), but I have so many great memories playing that game. I miss it so much.
i teared up a little when the theme of prontera started playing. man i miss old ragnarok.
I really loved playing FF14. Honestly the combat felt kind of superfluous at times...but it felt like a REALLY good Final Fantasy virtual theme park/chat room with a nice story attached. Optimizing FF14 feels like optimizing Habbo Hotel. It also felt like how it felt playing on Ragnarok Online servers back in the day.
I think what's really missing from modern mmorpgs is the fact that a lot of us thought we loved the concept of going on some grand adventure, when really the best parts a lot of the time was just sitting somewhere pretty in cool gear, and the new contenders don't really try on this aspect. Ragnarok Online, Runescape, WoW, etc, I mean, most of my time when I really liked those games was just using it as a chatroom.
I know the community kind of rags on how busy limsa lominsa usually is but I like how busy limsa, uldah, and gridania are
@@jeveritt8398Seriously, I could spend hours just looking at people standing around and dancing, looking at each other, and goofing around.
holy shit i think you did such a good job explaining this, and have put words to what I've been struggling to voice for years. As many have already voiced- maple story did a really good job at the best of both worlds in the beginning, and yeah have almost completely pivoted to action. I have a similar story of your WOW one in maple, had to have a higher level player escort me out of a area too high level for me. The beginning stuff of the game had a lot of focus on doing like mini games with others to gain levels, and of course the classic tackling quests in a party. But it never leaned into it hard enough, like the devs almost did- but then the huge update where the game was kinda restructured happened..and with it a lot of the social aspect in favor for more numbers game.
And like that old stuff is still there, but if you follow the intended quest lines the game gives you on a new character, you bypass ALL of it, and can get to lv 100 in a day. It's really frustrating as I miss the older gameplay loop, even if the rates made grinding really bad- it encouraged players to look elsewhere instead of mindless grinding and right into the fun social stuff. Now you have to go to private servers for this experience, which you also don't get... since there's not enough players milling about or starting a new character. It needs the large ass player base for the whole thing to work. And I've never found another mmo that has done it. If i want an action game, I'll play a single player game that not only most likely has WAY better implemented/satisfying game mechanics, but better fulfillment of that pure power want.
There’s an MMO in minecraft run on the biggest server in the world called skyblock that kind of does soulbinding in the way you suggested. A very small amount of materials found in an endgame area are soul bound, but the items they craft into typically are not. You can also manually soulbind a ton of items voluntarily to put them in your museum, which gives you a ton of XP and unlocks for each item you soulbind.
To wedge some social critique into this: I think one reason MMOs gravitate towards the linear pursuit-of-power ARPG gameplay style is that it's very...consumerist, I guess? It's all about getting stuff for yourself, and getting more power and stuff than the other players. That model of engagement is a lot easier for acquisitive corporate manager types to understand (and measure!) than something social and non-linear. So it's easier to pitch to the money men, _and_ the money men will tend to push existing games in that direction if you let them.
If you replace the "action" on your chart with "gameplay" or "game mechanics," I agree with 99% of what you say. But I've been complaining for decades about one assumption that I feel is really holding back the genre: the idea that the core gameplay loop of an mmo-style game has to revolve around combat and the power fantasy.
My first experience with mmorpgs was hearing my brother tell me about Ultima Online. I had played Ultima games before, but what intrigued me about the game my brother described is that you didn't have to be the world-saving Avatar. You could be a blacksmith and make weapons. You could buy a boat and be a fisherman or look for treasure. You could build your own house, open your own shop.
That was what I wanted: a world where I could do anything and make my own story. Not a world where I was forced to kill monsters over and over for no reason except to get stronger and kill more monsters. MMOs lack the story that makes combat in single player games rewarding. I think we need more mmos that have a mix of mechanical and social gameplay like you said, where the mechanical gameplay isn't all combat. It could be based around crafting, building, exploring, caring, designing, any number of things.
Even if you do include combat in your game, you could at least experiment with the type of combat a bit. You could have combat be a turn-based tactics game, or a trading card game, or a puzzle-style game.
ANOTHER banger so quickly? Youre incredible! Just at the time Im about to have my lunch
I hope that the video will live up to your expectations, Ritz! It's a bit of an experiment for the channel, and thus a bit unlike the previous videos!
@@moon-channelJust finished it. Interestingly, I never knew Maplestory was more on the social side, and I played it a ton as a kid.
One of my fallen favorite MMOs was Wildstar. To me, it had a perfect blend of ARPG and SRPG, with its interesting and unusual worldbuilding and artstyle for the genre, and great rumor. It waa my WoW. However, to most it was lacking on the Action side, so it tanked at launch. Eventually it went F2P and gained more players, and as a response, pushed heavy to the endgame grindfest. This led to the result of all the Social players leaving (which is unfortunate, since it had a stupendous housing system), the population dropped and the game being shit down. I was there at the end.
Great video! But, how do think this videos difers to your others in format? I think it belongs nicely with them (nice use of the "belonging" at the end).
Also, where do you put ESO in your scale? It's my favorite MMO at the moment, but that's because I'm a TES fan, and it currently going the solo player route as well.
Newer viewer of the channel (got rec'd by the algorithm a while back, love your content!) and I've played Black Desert Online for years, off and on. Its got a lot of strengths - you can leave for a few years, come back, and you don't lose your progress in the hierarchical power systems, in 2020 they added stuff to boost players to the "average" (but still fairly hard to get to!) power level, and now that the devs are the only ones making calls on design, its gotten significantly more generous overall. I'm personally a fan of the grind when I'm in the mood but it very much is a Korean grinder. A big issue with BDO is its myriad of systems so fighting isnt the only progression path - trading, fishing, cooking, etc. which when you're hit with them all at once it's just overwhelming.
I feel like incentivizing party play would help a lot. If I got an exp/loot boost in a party? Now socializing is part of the minmaxing. They cut exp (not by much, but certainly an amount) and loot gets split between the party, so it's less efficient outside of specific, party-oriented areas. But it speaks to that overpoweredness that games like these avoid, which we could just... Not. Grinding is mostly mindless anyway, why not make it more rewarding with friends?
One cute thing they did was allow for one class (a bard/lifeskill class) to play music created by the community. Met a guy who'd set up in town near the storage manager and jammed out. It was hilarious when I was menuing and thought, oh they added new tracks, neat, before the 1st level Mario song started playing. It was fun, and I stuck around chatting and listening for longer than I would have ever expected.
I feel like if I got into sailing/ocean fare it might be easier to interact. You get a team of people to man the cannons and fight ocean creatures while you steer. But exactly how to get into it is a bit... Difficult to figure out? I'd sooner have to google and read a guide than be able to find whatever quest taught you this on my own. As well as the fact that I'd be new to the lifeskill, and therefore quite possibly less helpful than someone with more levels in it.
If you ever have the time, they have a free trial period. I think it's a gorgeous game with a lot of depth and richness, but there's plenty to critique on its design choices. I would have loved (and view it very possible) if they did the big boss mob with fun loot in lower level areas, or did more cosmetic dropping in general. But, I do genuinely enjoy it - otherwise I wouldn't keep coming back.
Thanks Moonie for the content, sorry this comment is so long lmfao, see you in the next vid.
This video is the best summary of why I struggle so much finding a good online game to play. Folding Ideas digged into the topic with their WoW Video, too, but Moony here analyzed the problem way more generally. Every content of this channel I watched so far has been great, this is no exception.
This gives me some hope for the VR sphere of gaming. There are countless anime/manga titles that show off a game world where the possibilities are only limited by what you bring to the table. There is a portion of the audience that knows what MMOs are capable of in theory but turning it into a game limited by our technology is a tougher thing.
The largest problem however comes from a company's need to monetize. A one-time purchase, at like $60-70 USD, likely wouldn't be enough revenue to keep a game like that afloat and adding microtransactions would hurt it in the ways you mentioned. A subscription model is probably the only way a game like that could survive which is a tough pill to swallow for many people especially with everything else in the world having a subscription model these days.
Having only RuneScape under my MMO belt, the social aspect as well as the exploration is what kept me playing for so long. Even when there were internet resources back then that told me what something I found was or told me how to do this quest it was still fun to stumble into it. I have never been one for power for the sake of power so most of the time I just roamed around looking for interesting things or gathering materials to raise my non-combat skills.
I rarely engage with "endgame" content unless the game offers me something else that enhances the game itself. Nioh 2 is probably the only endgame I wholeheartedly engage with because of the open-endedness of it's combat and gear. The endgame gear lives on a scale ranging from combo heavy but lower damage to debuff spamming to weaken enemies for your singular strong attack. I personally lean more into the combo heavy side of things because it makes fights more interactive for me. Doing the same "macro" to every enemy takes away the aspect of Nioh 2 that I found most interesting. The enemies also get new strength not just in terms of stat increase but they get new attack patterns as well as new attacks that you have to learn anew. Even areas you completed from previous difficulties will have new enemy placements. Where there once was a simple first playthrough enemy is now replaced with a tougher DLC enemy. So in a way there was always something to discover either an unexpected enemy encounter or finding a new way to fight the same enemy.
Thanks a lot for this video Moony! It was very interesting !
Your first experience with WoW reminded me with my experience with TTRPGs and how much about what you talk could fit about different TTRPGs systems to a degree and how much MMORPGs pulled from TTRPGs and still there is things that MMORPGs could learn from them
This is exactly my thought. Early computer RPGs, and even WoW got big inspiration from TTRPGs. And I remember early WoW gave me that feeling that tabletops give me today. Like it's not all about the combat
this has become one of my favorite channels on youtube