how long do you think 14 will last?

[KisaiTenshi]

From the looks of the genre atm... it will last awhile because most games are being made by Indy companys who have 1/100th the funding needed to make a good full featured mmo. Genre is dying, Yoshida is right. But it is not because players do not want mmo the devs of the mmos are feeding the genre poison and wondering why it is dying off slowly.

FFXIV, like FFXI has the staying power of a Final Fantasy game. No "Elder Scrolls", "Star Wars" or "Lord of the Rings" game has that.

The only thing that could turn MMO games on it's side is for a game to be a better EVE+UO+Minecraft as one coherent functioning game world, not a bunch of themepark rides. Whatever comes next will be "rendered at the server" so the fun is no longer strip-mined by RMT at launch.

The biggest obstacles to producing a new MMO can be seen in current freemium games:
- AI is dumb, very dumb, mobs exist as a resource to be monopolized.
- Free games only keep people playing by constantly offering them new cash shop outfits or "gachapon" items instead of earning them
- Actual game play once the storyline is completed is relegated to "dailies" (aka chores) in some blind hope that the next piece of content is actually worth doing with those rewards and not simply a gating tactic.

Like there's things we will never see in FFXIV mainly because there is not much breathing room left in new hardware. CPU power has been relatively flat since CPU's went multi-core. The most expensive CPU's cost nearly 5000$ and are not any more powerful per-thread than a CPU that costs one tenth of it. GPU power has a tiny bit of room left because most of them are still on 28nm process.

With proposed "VR" hardware needing 120fps "per eye" to not get motion sickness, this isn't even viable on the most high end current systems. Think about the network design that is required for 120fps. Current MMORPG's assume 60fps and thus send data every 16ms with latencies of between 40ms and 170ms. To do 120fps requires 8ms updates, and latency needs to stop being an issue otherwise even the "prettiest" VR game will be a nausea-joke when you "swing your sword" but the motions are delayed just enough to bring back motion sickness as the brain can't connect your action with the motion. I really do think what is going to happen is that the games will be rendered at the server end to get rid of the widely-deficient end-user hardware as a bottleneck, and instead a "VR" stream will be sent as a video stream.

Wildstar had the hardcore appeal but many people found the "only slightly better looking than WoW with an extra helping of cartoon" graphics to be a turn off (myself included. I liked my fat bunny girl but the world was so uninteresting after the first few days I just stopped caring.) Other games come out with what appears to be the polish necessary, but then you see actual gameplay and realize the press team glossed up the graphics and gameplay and didn't show you any of the ugly parts, which were 99% of the game. ESO didn't try to be pretty, but then it dropped the ball hard at endgame so people got bored.

Just looking at screenshots of Wildstar suggests it tried to copy WoW's look but the races are derived entirely from Guardians of the Galaxy. But samey-old biped "short cute thing, furry-thing, our-elves-are-different, our-giants-are-different, and boring old human" divisions with the models not being terribly different from each other.

I'll admit that I don't like the look of WoW, so had I even heard of this before Archeage I'd have likely not tried it either. The type of visual style I like is what is present in FFXIV, where it's highly detailed but not "gritty" or "boobs everywhere"

[Saziel]

snip.

LOTRO has been extremely successful since it went F2P many years ago. It is going very strongly. Otherwise, I agree.