What went wrong? Is it the game or the grenre?

[Tupsi]

It's the genre and game - They took the "safe route" which has been done to death and back and quite frankly..leaves much to be desired. MMOs and gaming in general have stagnated because if a developer tries anything out of the box or unique the game fails because it's not "the same crap as every other game". For example people would refuse ARR if it wasn't a generic Quest Grind and nothing but Dungeon Instances type of MMO because that's "industry standard" now.

Of course you'll have people state the game is highly successful and the most popular MMO to ever exist and there's absolutely no problems with it, but those people tend to be the ones who love this style of MMO to begin with.

[Ruethryl]

It's the genre and game - They took the "safe route" which has been done to death and back and quite frankly..leaves much to be desired. MMOs and gaming in general have stagnated because if a developer tries anything out of the box or unique the game fails because it's not "the same crap as every other game". For example people would refuse ARR if it wasn't a generic Quest Grind and nothing but Dungeon Instances type of MMO because that's "industry standard" now.

Of course you'll have people state the game is highly successful and the most popular MMO to ever exist and there's absolutely no problems with it, but those people tend to be the ones who love this style of MMO to begin with.

Funny thing about that and the history of video games... something like that happened early on (think Atari).. the game market crashed until something new and innovative came along to revive it.. it'd take something similar to shift the MMO market at this point.

[Dreamer]

It's the genre and game - They took the "safe route" which has been done to death and back and quite frankly..leaves much to be desired. MMOs and gaming in general have stagnated because if a developer tries anything out of the box or unique the game fails because it's not "the same crap as every other game". For example people would refuse ARR if it wasn't a generic Quest Grind and nothing but Dungeon Instances type of MMO because that's "industry standard" now.

Of course you'll have people state the game is highly successful and the most popular MMO to ever exist and there's absolutely no problems with it, but those people tend to be the ones who love this style of MMO to begin with.

This x100. It costs so much to make a MMORPG that has any chance of making a dent in the currently oversaturated market that publishers are scared witless to do anything outside the tried and true Everquest/Warcraft formula. Even with the popularity of Eve Online, Star Citizen still had to be crowdfunded.

Players who have been playing this genre for several years now are utterly sick of this formula, hence the the high turnover rates you see in pretty much every MMORPG released in the past 5-6 years.

[Jarlax]

The communities have driven these games so that all of the content created from level 1-50 "or whatever the cap is" pretty much worthless, and takes only a few days or weeks to complete. A byproduct of this is the max-level grind currency from x-event/group content to be rewarded with items, and we all know how monotonous this can be. Communities and the majority of the players don't like it when it takes months to achieve max level; because, the perception is "that's when the game starts".Developers want to make successful games so they try to cater to the playerbase or what they "think" they want in the game.

This is the problem with the newer MMO's in that tremendous resources are put into creating "trivial" content that will be skipped, ignored, exploited, "whatever"; because, the way the game is set up it makes this content trivial after you outlevel it.

EQNext I believe has the solution and will be a genre changer just like it was when it was first released in 1999. I say this because I have literally watched in the last 15 or so years how the communities have driven a lot of the so called "grindy" stuff out of the games and we have this grind-to-win currency systems now otherwise the games would be completed by players in a week.

What makes it so hard to create a game like this? It's simple people don't like to level up, but they do like to get new gear and progress their characters that way. We have the crowd that scours every instance for exploits and calls them "fair gameplay". The crowd that says "I don't have time" and actually want the currency grind with "speed run" type gameplay. We have the ones that think things should be earned over longer peroids , and by only completing top end content. Then we have the PvP crowd that wants their own gear, but they shouldn't have to participate in any other content in the game to be "on par" with everyone else that does. Then we have the "nerf that class" PvPer who thinks everyone is OP but them and demands nerfs to other classes until their class is like playing "god of war".

The way they are changing this is simple, and brilliant, no more levels. So why didn't a lot of us run dungeons when this game released? You didn't need the items because they would be outleveled fast, and in this case fates were faster, in other games the community finds the weakest content with best reward and grinds that until they complete whatever goal is in mind. So what will no levels do?

It turns the game into a gear grind only.

So you cant grind mobs to max level; because there is no max level, and you cant outlevel items.

No static content, so you can't "grind" the same spawns over and over, or camp that boss, all mobs have dynamic AI and they will move around the entire world, so no more "dungeon grind for currency"

Sense there are no levels your going to WANT to find that nice piece of gear hidden down in the bottom of that dungeon, and not skip it; because, there wont be a point your not going to "outlevel the content"

Action style combat, no more "click that guy and mash buttons" and 44 different classes with a max of 8 ability slots, and the ability to cross class abilities.

This will be a game you log into and meet with friends to go "adventure around" not max your comms for the week; because, mobs wont ever be in the same place, they will move to different areas of the world if they don't like that spot for one reason or another, and getting camped and killed over and over is one of them. So YOU may have found that uber mob that dropped that awesome sword, but when you bring your friends to show them where he was........he probably wont be there anymore.

I can't wait for this to finally be released, SoE have scrapped this project 3 or 4 times in the last 8 or so years and started over until finally they have something that is NOT going to be the same crap we have been playing for 15 years now that started with EQ1.

[Doo]

For example people would refuse ARR if it wasn't a generic Quest Grind and nothing but Dungeon Instances type of MMO because that's "industry standard" now.

Of course you'll have people state the game is highly successful and the most popular MMO to ever exist and there's absolutely no problems with it, but those people tend to be the ones who love this style of MMO to begin with.

Sad but true.