Naoki Yoshida recent interview

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Originally Posted by Magis

I never played SWG but wasn't the "failure" due to Sony trying to make Jedi more accessible to casuals, and make "The New Experience" patch? Any old SWG players want to explain what happened there? Most people I heard who played it said the game died cause of that patch.

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The New Game Enhancement or NGE was essentially the final attempt to rebalance the game in a way that most MMO players would recognize and enjoy, which in turn was basically WoW with a Star Wars Face. All the skill trees, which were already a pale shadow of their former selves thanks to the Combat Upgrade, were removed in favor of the standard "Pick your class" screen. While before levels weren't really a thing (they kinda did with the CU by simply adding levels but the game barely acknowledged it in any competent way. For example, I could level an entertainer to "max level" and have no combat skills, but the game would tell me I can fight a rancor with no problem until I actually tried and it murdered me.) the game became centered around it. Leveling took on a more themepark approach and there was no real way to change your class once picked.

The biggest problem with the NGE was that it was released on November 15th. The most recent expansion, Trials of Obi-Wan was released November 1st with litterally no word that the NGE was even being worked on. As the game was completely changed with the NGE, players left in droves and as far as I can gather, SWG never recovered.

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Originally Posted by Akiza

The term MMO has no meaning now since they can be looked at as single player games with hubs where players can instance with other players.

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That's because that's the way the created this game. They could have just as easily made it a true multi player game where duties and leves could be completed in a group but chose not to.
There are some directions blizzard went that SE shouldn't follow.

Pretty easy to see that MMOs are in decline. Nearly every MMO follows the pattern of HUGE opening weekend filled with bugs, thousands of canceled subs by month 3, and moving to free to play around the 1 year mark or earlier. The one thing that is really sad is that game companies have no plan in place for archival of these games. When an MMO like City of Heroes is taken offline, it's just plain gone. Obviously the work it takes to convert an MMO to an offline game is substantial, but it sucks that as these games decline they just pretty much vanish entirely. There's the occasional fan-made private server mods, but these are rarely user friendly, and usually incomplete/buggy as hell.

My available time to play MMO's is in decline so win/win. ;)

The persistence and "play into perpetuity" aspects of the MMORPG have been co-opted into other genres, as folks have already pointed out in this thread. Call of Duty is probably the biggest MMO right now. There are various MOBA titles doing well on the markets. Casual games like Candy Crush have a social aspect too.

Right now the "RPG" part of "MMORPG" is in decline. Social characteristics are technically superior now but the RP parts are mechanically stalled. Sadly shareholders still get glassy eyed if you pitch anything that is not like WoW and people aren't going to flock to WoW clones. There is a WoW already.

I think the genre can come back, but in a different form. The formula we have now is close to 20 years old.

It's an industry where most development focuses on innovating slightly while ripping off your predecessors. To the point where if someone truly does have an innovative idea for an mmo it sounds like they've gone off their medication.This has created a pretty large bubble that is eventually gonna burst.

Video game industry in general is getting dull, welcome to a mature industry. If you want different and new you have to look at indy since blockbusters make more than enough money on rehashed content (like hollywood). Is it bad? Not really, just the way it is. There are very few industries that do not hit these dull what next time spans. Someone will come up with the new blockbuster game that is different the only question is when? Is MMO's dieing? maybe, might be that the old audience has less game time and MMO's are not appealing to the new youth or maybe it is just hitting a dull period until the next big thing happens. There are still many successful MMO's out, but yes they all are not that different in mechanics to each other. Is this a problem? IDK most cars are just slight variations on a theme, yet that industry still can afford to have multiple producers. Give it time guys, form what i have seen even platformers are far from dead and that is like the OG big game.

I'm glad the MMO market is in decline. I miss the old days when there were only a couple of games to choose from, like Ultima Online and Everquest. After WoW everyone and their momma was making an MMORPG, and now there are so many that it's just pointless. When you have too many of something it really feels like the value of it all is lowered. Personally I find it embarrassing how little the MMO has evolved since WoW. I wish more developers weren't afraid to take risks, though it's definitely understandable when you're dealing with hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars.

On the other hand, I firmly believe that emulated player run servers and "classic" servers will only grow in popularity. A lot of the older MMOs have huge emulator communities, and with the recent announcement that Daybreak Games (formerly Sony Online Entertainment) was fully acknowledging and accepting the player run classic Everquest server "Project 1999" as a fan service and would never seek to shut it down, I expect other companies to follow suit by either officially allowing the servers or running them themselves.

I'm still waiting on an ACCEPTABLE classic FFXI server.

Oh and the future of the MMO and gaming in general is absolutely based on headgear, like the Oculus Rift.

IDK about headgear... if it is then they are years away form it being viable (still have major problems and most people like me find it a gimmick). I also think more gear is not the way the industry wants to go (IE look at rockband or GH phase where the extra gear made more logistic problems then the companies could handle). Are headsets cool? Yes and will be a niche market. Classic servers are (and have been) run for a while now since people like them old game feelz. FFXI will not see a fan server until the game is not run by SE (not sure when they will shut that game down). MMO market at this point has stabilized at a decent size (not MMO rush era highs but good enough numbers for some developers to devolve).

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Originally Posted by ruskie

Yes please.

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That -IS- how NPC's worked in Ultima 7/7.5 and 8. If you stole something, your (NPC) party members would also just spontaneously leave you and you'd have to convince them to come back.

I've yet to see any CRPG or MMORPG ever do this since. Most NPC's are "nailed to the ground" because they are actually part of the game map, and not dynamicly placed by the server. FFXIV V1.0 's version of FATES(you manually had to join) and V2.0 's FATES were the only exception to this nailed to the ground issue. But they're not really what we're talking about.

Imagine this:
If you started a "new" game, and were just "dropped" into the world. All the Players and NPC's have the same color names so you can't tell them apart. There's no global chat, only /say and link-shell. The entire game requires you to have an 8-player party for all content. To dynamically create an 8-person party all you do is flip a switch and the 7 closest people/npc not in a party with a "auto-join" switch on will join and the content will commence. Your only ability to tell if a player is a computer controlled or not is by asking questions about the world outside the game. eg "How old are you? Where do you live?"

It is a great over-simplification, but this is part of the entire "dating game" genre, where you try to "win over" certain npc's by either being nice, or helping them, and in turn they will willingly help you. In this theoretical game, autonomous computer controlled characters keep schedules like real people, and are actually in demand. Most content could be cleared with an all NPC party, though coordination would be made easier with real people. There are entire games out there already that are basically "dating RPG"'s which western'ers tend to think are a joke. The entire point of that aspect is you don't get to be a jerk to -everyone- , you can completely ignore every npc character and play only with other real people that you met outside the game and likely get through the content much faster.

But I think we're a long way away from simulated worlds that actually have function. A lot of what existing MMO games do is setup goalposts for the ride, and you're just along to push the start button. There can be quite a massive improvement in how player-npc interaction works. There's just not much will to do it because we're still viewing MMO's as games that are full of throwaway props and dolls.

As for VR. I predict it will be even less popular than "3D" is. Sure there will be people who actually buy the entire getup of head, hands and legs. But for all practial purposes, go ask anyone who has ever bought gym equipment what they do with all that crap after a week. It collects dust. Nobody wants to bother "suiting up" to play a game. The proposed VR stuff just isn't going to happen unless they invent an entirely different kind of device that is contained in a helmet. Like think about how expensive a "SLI" setup is already, and now figure out how to stick that on someones head. You will not be buying a 300$ laptop and plugging an OcculusVR into it. You wll be required to buy two of the most expensive video cards available at 1000$/each just so that each eye sees 120fps and you don't get sick.

Gaming has phases.

Adventure games all had a massive die-off due to the internet making it easy to just goto gamefaq's and solve the game so what used to take 3 months to finish could now be finished in about 2 hours. They came back as FPS and Platformers with RPG mechanics thrown on top just to pad the time out, but mostly Adventure games exist as a facet of RPG's or as a narrative switch in other games. There's not much puzzle solving anymore because the puzzles can just be looked up online.

A lot of "edutainment" also had a massive die off, despite it should be massively more successful on mobile devices. The reason? back in the 90's you had to learn to read and type to even play these games. Now both of those issues don't exist on touch devices that can be narrated.

The vast majority of mobile shovelware exists because developers are trying to make a quick buck, and is due for an Atari Shovelware video game crash. Caught in the crosshairs of that will be every game that adopted the freemium business model.