/games/ - Games

>>42277
No

The original devs at blizzard left ages ago and a lot of the new recruits or even veterans are now having to work on what the old designers left behind with a fan base with needs and wants that these new devs don’t understand. It’s natural that the updates will play everything safe and try to avoid innovating or doing anything too risky given that wow could die in a single bad update. Literally.

>>42283
>>42277
Wow, major corporations seek attention and monetary gain from the largest player base they can muster instead of creating art? Wild. Who could have guessed.

players aren't the customers.
investors are.

>>42283
The updates aren't even playing it safe. They make radical changes to the Classic formula. Just radical changes very much in the spirit of Retail.

I prefer retail despite playing since vanilla.. Raid mechanics are more interesting. There are a lot more items/trinkets/toys/mounts/whatever to strive for and collect. Its easier than ever to play with virtually anyone, no matter their faction or server (a GOOD thing).
The issue with retail is that its gaudy and cringe with its stories, voice acting, combat being meaningless outside of the hardest difficulty (It feels literally impossible to die to anything outside a m+ or raid), dead world, etc. Its like when they put up those flaps at the bowling alley to stop gutter balls. You're not really playing the game unless you are doing endgame content, the only place where failure is possible.

>>42338
Retail isn't even really an MMO or an RPG. It is a bastardized abomination that has completely abandoned the MMORPG as a concept.

>>42277
Gaming isn't a niche nerd hobbie nowadays, so I guess there is more quantity rather than quality

>>42338
Yeah you would like it. Retail wow wasn’t made to attract casual gamers, but it was made to please veterans. That’s why so many of the updates are dedicated to endgame and postgame content

>>42339
or, more likely, you put mmorpg games on a holy pedestal built on nostalgia and public erotic roleplay and don't quite realize that world of warcraft, even in retail, quite perfectly fits as a definitive example of what an RPG is.

all those things you liked about vanilla WoW were completely optional and basically just icing on the cake. what youre doing is saying a cake isnt a cake because it doesnt have sprinkles.

>>42343
>it's just nostalgia gaslighting
Not gonna work this time.

The whole idea behind the MMORPG genre was singleplayer computer RPG developers imagining their RPG worlds as actual, living fantasy worlds populated by other players. It was originally more sandbox with the developers more oriented towards letting the players do basically everything, but then you had games like Everquest which re-focused the genre around being more like a big, living Dungeons & Dragons campaign with the players taking on the role of D&D adventures.

Retail WoW, and games inspired by it like FFXIV, have drifted so far from this original vision that I wouldn't call them MMORPGs anymore and, further, I would argue that their fanbases don't even like MMORPGs as a concept. I haven't found any modern MMO fan who doesn't sound like he or she wouldn't be far happier playing games like Darktide, Vermintide or 33 Immortals.

>>42344
you sound insane
nothing about WoW or FFXIV are straying away from being MMOs, and the games you mentioned have nothing in common with WoW or FFXIV

youre deluded, my guy. go spend some time reading what an mmo actually is and come back and tell me why im wrong using actual information and not your med-deprived cobweb you call an imagination.

>>42346
How many "MMOs" utilize some form of layering or sharding that prevents you from seeing all the other players on the same server?
How many "MMOs" now utilize some ubiquitous form of fast travel?
How many "MMOs" have flying mounts or flying mechanics in a game with zero verticality where the whole point of the flying mount and/or flying mechanic is to skip over the world?
How many "MMOs" revolve entirely around instanced content which isn't even established as a coherent part of the game world that you have to travel to, but instantly teleport into from an LFG tool like it's a game from ReBoot?
How many "MMOs" are filled to the brim with fucking singleplayer game bullshit like manditory "main story quests" and cutscenes?
How many "MMOs" treat your character as essentially the "main character" of the setting?

All those games I just mentioned? They're action-y cooperative multiplayer games. Which is all the modern "MMO" audience seems to want anyway.

>How many "MMOs" utilize some form of layering or sharding that prevents you from seeing all the other players on the same server?
quite a few! i know ffxiv and WoW both do this to prevent congestion because certain areas sometimes now have more players huddled together at one time than there used to be players online as a whole at one time in the past.
This is also a moot point, as having one single server that everyone played on was never a requirement. in the past you had a server assigned to you. in the present you have a layer assigned to you.
>How many "MMOs" now utilize some ubiquitous form of fast travel?
fast travel has been in WoW since vanilla, and "you have to walk everywhere" has never been a required trait of MMORPG games.
>How many "MMOs" have flying mounts or flying mechanics in a game with zero verticality where the whole point of the flying mount and/or flying mechanic is to skip over the world?
specifically WoW Mists of Pandaria, I believe. If memory serves correctly, flying mounts are usually awarded in games AFTER you have already explored the world, so it doesn't actually skip anything, only rewards you for already exploring everything.
>How many "MMOs" are filled to the brim with fucking singleplayer game bullshit like manditory "main story quests" and cutscenes?
if you can name an mmo, then i can name an mmo that has quests that can be done solo.
I rather distinctly remember doing much of the WoW questlines solo, and I am still a pretty avid player of FFXI, and that game as well has a strong "single player" story.
>How many "MMOs" treat your character as essentially the "main character" of the setting?
many of them. this is literally just a choice in narrative, and is not in any way required of an mmo.

none of these points you've made are required for an MMO to be an MMO.

>All those games I just mentioned? They're action-y cooperative multiplayer games. Which is all the modern "MMO" audience seems to want anyway.
i dont want "action-y cooporative multiplayer games"
i want to be trekking across the field doing my crafting dalies, see a swarm of 100+ players all spawn into a map at once, get on my own mount and follow them and be led to a world boss, then to join the herd and marathon the rest of the world bosses.
just because YOU grew out of it and stopped knowing how to find the fun you want doesn't mean everyone did.

you're an old bitch that got bitter because you outgrew your hobby. get over it and take up knitting.

>>42348
>This is also a moot point, as having one single server that everyone played on was never a requirement.
Yes, in fact, it is. The idea of a big, persistent, shared world where you see ALL of the other players ALL of the time was the whole selling point. If the map isn't big enough for all of the players, make the servers smaller, don't undermine the entire point of the MMO as a concept.

>fast travel has been in WoW since vanilla
Fast travel, to the extent that it even existed, was extremely limited, and was limited. A mage can fast travel, but only to major cities, and mage portals only work for characters in the mage's group. Druids can fast travel, but only to Moonglade. Warlocks have a fast travel for players in his or her party, but only to the location of the warlock and only if the warlock has two other players in his location that can do the summoning ritual. I guess you could call hearthstones fast travel, though you're fast traveling back home rather than to a location. This is different, you may note, than just having fucking fast travel all over the place. FFXIV might one-up Retail WoW by having fast travel over short distances. Literally every significant area of their cities has a stupid fast travel node attached to it!

>"you have to walk everywhere" has never been a required trait of MMORPG games.
It's a significant part of them since, you know, the whole "persistent living world" thing.
>specifically WoW Mists of Pandaria, I believe. If memory serves correctly, flying mounts are usually awarded in games AFTER you have already explored the world, so it doesn't actually skip anything, only rewards you for already exploring everything.
"You get to skip over the world after the pointless questing and leveling phase which we only make you do to invalidate the last expansion's content and then never expect you to interact in that open world area ever again" is not a point in Retail's favor.

>if you can name an mmo, then i can name an mmo that has quests that can be done solo.
There is a significant difference between allowing for solo questing and flagrant singleplayer game shit.

>many of them. this is literally just a choice in narrative, and is not in any way required of an mmo.
A part of the whole MMO thing is that you're supposed to just be another guy, not the chosen one hero who is the only one who can save the world from the darkness and is the personal friend of all the major lore characters (along with a literal million other "chosen one heroes")

It is, once again, flagrant singleplayer game shit.

>i want to be trekking across the field doing my crafting dalies
If you like skinner box checklist games, I know of a few games like that too. Mostly phone games, but it is what it is.

>see a swarm of 100+ players all spawn into a map at once, get on my own mount and follow them and be led to a world boss
lmao, and how many times does that happen? What if they're not on your fucking shard?

>>42352
>>42348
You guys do know that WOW has RP servers that explicitly get rid of the veteran features (shards, mounts, fast travel, quest finders, other helpers) so players interested in the actual gameplay can enjoy themselves right? Both the devs and the community run servers for that stuff and those servers are pretty popular too. If you don’t like the assistive features, you don’t have to play with them.

Oh, and WOW has addons that just allow you to remove all the features anyways—I used them during my first play through cuz I felt confident in myself.

>>42352
literally your entire thought process is "they dont do things exactly how they did them 25 years ago so its not valid anymore"

youre like a literal infant that hasnt figured out that putting on a hat doesn't make you an entirely different person

>>42356
thank you lmao

people really just ignore the options they have and then say they dont exist

>>42371
>more "it's just nostalgia" gaslighting
I've already explained what the whole concept behind the MMORPG is supposed to be and various ways in which the modern "MMORPG" undermines or even completely bastardizes this concept. I could go further, but I didn't want my post to seem too rant-y.

What is the core of a first person shooter? It's shooting dudes with your weapon from a first person perspective. If I were to claim that only Doom Clones counted as FPS, that would be the nostalgia talking because modern shooters are still very much about shooting dudes from a first person perspective, albeit in a different way. Contrariwise, if the FPS genre started de-emphasizing shooting dudes with your gun to the point where little to no actual shooting was taking place (and you could pay to skip the last remaining shooting segments at a cash shop), you could reasonably state that the "FPS genre" was no longer first-person shooter in any meaningful sense.

That's what I claim for MMORPGs. The core concept and the heart and soul of the genre is being an RPG set in this persistent, shared open world which is some kind of living fantasy world populated to some extent by other players. To the extent that the """MMORPG""" genre has continuously de-emphasized this aspect of their games and even allows you to skip over it means that they have largely stopped being MMORPGs in any meaningful sense.

There is no other option. General "follow the leader" bullshit within the industry has dictated that all modern MMOs are like this and the only exception are a small number of indie passion projects, none of which are even close to a full release.