People are more critical these days and often even over-critical and leave a new
MMO often after short time because in memory the old ones were sooo much
better, while infact nobody would play those old games with their mechanic
anymore.
While mostly true, its not the entire fault of the players either. We’re at a point a genre’s industry cycle where a lot of Clones are being produced in a very short period. Coupled with this is a higher expectation by players, and constant comparisons of huge, technically complex MMOs with smaller scale matched based or single player games.
Whats accelerating the burn out is a string of highly revolutionary game play being hampered by both the expectation, and rampant over-use, of reward schedules. We’ve made a ton of advances in game player in just the last 5-8 years, with most MMO titles moving towards more elaborate, action oriented combat, physics, as well as major expansions on the idea of build theory, role/team cohesion, and reinventing class archetypes for better dynamics. GW2 and Tera are actually are the same high level concept, but took different approaches to its application.
With the continuing merger of FPS games taking on classic RPG elements, and RPGs games adopting more real time combat mechanics, we can see the individual elements being innovated…. But what we’re not seeing are those innovations being used to their proper potential. RPGs are notorious for clinging to classic reward scheduling out of a fear that without it, the game can’t survive. Part of the issue is that this is absolutely true for the mass market. The WoW generation has been conditioned for continual rewards over time, and tend to get frustrated if they feel they aren’t making ample progress. This in itself can largely be attributed to the “gold star” approach commonly found in western based cultures; which have heavily adopted the idea metrics being the measure of success.
And you’ll see this eventually echo’d in every MMO since 2000…. End game, progression, and rewards are the focal topics as to why someone gets bored with a game. Even single player sand boxes have fallen into this trap, leaving this generation of Single player meta titles in one of the most confusing states I’ve ever seen games in my life. Multiplayer games excepted to have the fidelity and singular attention to players as single player games, where choices are supposed to critical; while Single player games have become expected to have endless re-playability and content output of a well established MMO. But when these opposing ideals collide, no ones expectations can be properly met. This is even harder with Sequels, as the popularity of the first game for many franchises tend to come on accident. This seems weird… but looking at Blizzard’s history as being an Inversion of this concept it’ll start to make sense.
Blizzard is good at one thing….. polishing another’s concept. What they can’t do is innovate. They have this ability to identify and distill the best elements of genre of games, and combine them into a well crafted game of a given scope. So why do their sequels suck? Its a combination of 2 things….
1. Most of their games so finely tuned, that innovating them essentially breaks them. Its a problem with every sequel they’ve had with the exception of Diablo 2 due its refocusing on Co-op play.
2. The Ladder community tends to destroy everything. They smash records at such a speed, with such precision, that Blizzard struggles to keep up with them. Its the fall out of their efforts to give a challenge to the Ladder/Competitive community that eventually throws the entire game out of balance. GW2 see this problem in the form PvP balance and End game crafting…. changes made for these things are so focused on stymieing the progress that Meta defining are capable of, usually end up hurting the game for the masses in some indirect form.
There is also the old story about the game’s AI being too smart during beta, causing them to change it thinking it would scare people away from the game. Now the complaint is a complete 180, as the player hit the wall for the single functional facet of combat that its managed to offer.
With so many things going on with this discussion, I’m not entire sure if Anet truly understands what direction they need to take. And with their history of abandoning a direction when the short term gains wavier, I’m very worried about how long HOT will actually stay interesting.
