Death of the MMORPG?

[Confucius]

Preface: This is my application to the OwnedCore News team. As such it's an article and not a question, read it if you want to .

Death of the MMORPG?

I. The problem
II. The effect of Individualism
III. Profiteering
IV. Instant Satisfaction
V. The MMO
VI. The RPG
VII. The future?

I. There is little that new and veteran players of MMORPGs share these days but a few comparisons can be made. Both are expectant of a fun experience and have a certain eager energy that separates them from the rest of normal consumers of the video game market, an energy that drives them to play a game that requires hours and hours of watered down game play until they can experience the full value of their purchase. This watered down experience of leveling in MMORPGs is necessary for individuals to learn the game but creates a balance that becomes increasingly hard to maintain in a game market driven by instant satisfaction and quick death matches. MMORPG players expect a rich, infinite game with a strong sense of community, lore and story, that still maintains a strong sense of individual importance in a way that doesn't alienate players from each other. They want a game that will last forever and one that is as big as their imagination but with market shifts towards the trend of quick games, individualism, instant profits, and instant rewards MMORPGs are increasingly having to decide whether they want to be an MMO or an RPG in an attempt to placate players of either genre, rather than satisfy the desires of players of their own genre.

Games like Star Wars: The Old Republic have completely embraced the RPG and turned themselves into an online single player game with strong story telling and little to non emphasis on massive multiplayer interaction. Games like World of Warcraft have try to keep as many players as possible by keeping every feature of the past while embracing a newer, faster paced, game style that ends in the alienation of long term players, the confusion of new players, and a failure of a game. Guild Wars has sought to keep the massive part of massive multiplayer important and does so in such a way that makes the game feel superbly lonely. Some games like Wild Star really try to stay true to the name MMORPG while creating a new type of game but simply fail to find their place in the new instant gratification age of gaming.



II. One of the most important aspects of playing a game is the sense of importance the individual has in their own experience of the game. In MMORPGs this importance has always been shared with other players as group content dictated working together and guilds and raids encouraged weekly collaboration of forces in order to beat the best content of the game. However, with the advent of group finder and all the other finders since other players no longer matter. The recent years have shifted the importance of a person from a role in a group and community to themselves only. When the average player raids or does a dungeon in a game such as World of Warcraft or Star Wars: The Old Republic (the two largest games of the genre) they don't even have to communicate with another living person. Other players cease to matter when you can join and leave a group in a matter of minutes and the content has been dumbed down to a level of purposeful ignorance to the other players you play it with. Community no longer matters, friends are harder to find, the only thing that matters are points for your gear or achievements. The backbone of the MMORPG has always been shared importance but now, especially in the two leading games of the market, the importance is put on the individual, rather than community. In Star Wars: The Old Republic single player instance story telling is the majority of the story telling and in the latest expansion they do not even attempt to merge the main content of the game into interaction with other players. In World of Warcraft queues and garrisons leave players alone, both literally and figuratively, for the majority of their play time.




III. The simple truth of the gaming market of today is that it is driven by profits. In the past MMORPGs were content with their monthly subscription fees but with the advent of free to play and pay to win games the leaders of the industry have seen just how much money you can suck out of dedicated players. As the entire industry shifts more towards in-game purchases, quick revenue schemes, and required DLC the market of the MMORPG is no exception. Star Wars: The Old Republic has created a game that is free to play only if you don't want to play the whole game and created a very strong incentive for players to both subscribe and participate in their in game shop, at first things found only in free to play games, at the same time. The cosmetics of games have taken a large amount of importance in what developers focus on because it's something that can be profited from very easily. MMOs have become a beauty contest, from skins in MOBA and FPS games to only in store purchasable helmets of World of Warcraft. While a focus on aesthetics of a game is normally not a bad thing the focus of profiting from aesthetics creates a very dangerous slope in which players who don't pay money are left with an empty feeling. Most players feel betrayed by game developers that add new features, no matter how small, that are only obtainable by a purchase now. In-game stores hurt what used to be the primary money makers of MMORPGs, subscription numbers and expansions. The former by betraying those who feel they should be entitled to everything if they are already paying a monthly fee and the latter by spending development time on non-critical, non-game changing items that will only affect a very small percentage of players directly but manage to make the largest profits for the game themselves and sometimes completely dictate the ingame economy (see SWTOR). In World of Warcraft taking money in game is not enough, in an attempt to broaden the game's appeal and reap massive benefits from old and current players they have even created a movie.



IV. With the surge of mobile gaming the industry has seen how effective quick gaming sessions can be in keeping people coming back and profiting from them massively while only having to create a single piece of repetitive content and requiring the player to play for a little each day. While the mobile game market is obviously separate from the PC market the effects have bled into games of all genre. Quick session matches are now extremely popular and many games are able, if not meant, to be played for 30 minutes to an hour at a time and then put away. This creates a difficult situation for the MMORPG, a genre that has always relied on long player times and lots of grinding in order to deliver content. The response from companies have been different but the effect of the quick satisfaction and gaming sessions has seeped very deeply into World of Warcraft. Dalies are the most apparent aspect of this. There are lots of them and they could keep you playing for hours but the issue of having to do them each day creates a situation where it's most efficient for the developer to make them quick and easy. This is something that goes directly against the traditional gaming philosophy of the MMORPG and makes the game time gated in a way where it is not up to the player but up to the calendar when they can have fun and complete certain aspects of the game. The difference between relying on calendar time and player determination is a very important aspect for an online game as it directly dictates the type of player who will play your game. In World of Warcraft when you mix so many quick daily things with things that require a lot of time you get into a messy situation of confusion and anger.




V. The MMO is soaring to new heights and rewriting the word "massive" with genres such as MOBAs and even FPS games reaching broader and broader audiences. But somehow the MMORPG has not been able to find a way to take advantage of this new growth of online players. The primary reason seems to be their attempt to take game-play features from the larger genres in order to instantly gain more players away from other genres, rather than staying true to their own definition of gaming and drawing people to their genre. With the expansion of the internet and more people interested in online gaming the natural consequence is that MMORPGs should grow in size of their player-base, but somehow they have shrunk. They have created games where the target audience is the same of that as their biggest competitors rather than games with their own niche audience that can grow.





VI. The RPG has also seen a large growth of players, especially from the console side of gaming. Some games such as SWTOR, attempt to cash into this part of the MMORPG by completely getting rid of the MMO part of their game. This creates an odd situation where paying for a game, its expansions, and subscriptions doesn't make much sense compared to paying for a superior single player RPG. Perhaps the only reason that it manages to survive this decision is the name under which it operates and the dedication of fans to the Star Wars genre. Other games have increasingly leaned away from the RPG part of their namesake, allowing it in question but discouraging it at the end game. The reasons for this have been described in the previous section and so won't be discussed here again.




VII. The future of the MMORPG at this point seems very uncertain. There has not been massive amount of excitement for any new games in the genre and the consumer response to the announcement of World of Warcraft: Legion has failed to generate the fevour of previous announcements. There remains a class of disenfranchised players from the old age of MMORPGs looking for a new home, ready to be swept up by a game that rekindles their old love for gaming. As of right now that game seems elusive and the death of the MMORPG seems more and more imminent each day. The shying away from their own genres core-features and Blizzard's recent announcement of no longer releasing subscription numbers harbors stormy weather ahead for the genre. It seems that we are a long while away from the resettlement of the genre into the new decade and recent movements seen in the gaming industry. One thing is for certain though there will always be a place for the MMORPG in the atmosphere of gaming, we just need the proper game to fill that place.

What do you think the future has in store for us in the world of the MMORPG? Reply with your thoughts and comments below!

[Kenneth]

A lot of great points. Personally one point that I feel is very understated when it comes to the discussion of the collapse of the MMO-RPG empire is how far the internet has come. I feel like the internet being so empty and not at our finger tips actually made the worlds in these games feel more vast and mysterious. Sure we had sites like thottbot for WoW but even that was super ghetto and not that great for all pieces of information. Nowadays in 2015 you just google everything instead of actually discovering it through trial and error within the game which in turn made the game feel more realistic.

[Lysolfs]

I agree with Kenneth. Might've been also somewhat because I was just a kid when I started playing WoW, but for me it had something magical back then. It felt like there was so much to explore and all, I was actually reading all the quest texts. Now when I play games with quests I barely ever read anything of it. Especially since the rise of quest helper addons, and much more so the direct integration of quest pointers into the actual game, I just run there and finish it as quickly as possible. As mentioned in your article, regarding instances this is much worse. You don't even need to figure out any tactics that work for your group, you just have to do it the way the developers intended it. When I last played retail (which was at release of WoD) I had much less fun going to instances with all those random people and barely anyone talking than back when I was going with guild people that I actually played more often with.
Also (at least in WoW) support classes have become quite exchangable which I find sad. Every healer can do the same stuff. Remember when it was obviously an advantage when you took a priest to instances like stratholme?
Maybe part of it is just me getting old and feeling like I'm wasting too much time if not everything is rushed as fast as possible though... But it can't possible be the sole reason.

[DarkheartMMO]

I remember EverQuest being so "hard" in that there really wasn't anything out there to hold your hand. Nowadays, thanks to WoW and the instant gratification generation, we have waypoints and markers to guide players along in game. The "grind" which wasn't just a leveling term, was the "fun" behind EverQuest. I played for years and didn't make it past level 57 I believe (This was back during Velios/Kunark and I stopped playing around the Planes expansion).

[element19090]

That was a great read! Thanks for posting.