Final Fantasy XIV still has great numbers and people will flock back in 2024 when the new expansion rolls out. Their ongoing story that gets told through patch content between expansions keeps people playing and playing.
I don’t know if there will ever be a new subscription-based game like WoW that will sustain a large user-base. Players know these games and once they figure out the new wrinkles in a new game, they begin to tire of them. It doesn’t take long, just a few months.
Are there any MMOs that don’t have the tank/DPS/heals paradigm? I know some seem to combine them a bit, giving some characters the ability to switch between roles, but the roles are still there. MMOs that rely on players grouping inevitably lose subscribers because being able to group is a bit like adhering to a schedule when grouping is planned and many of us can’t do that.
I guess the challenge is that after I’ve figured out how the game works and now I’m staring at completing another 100+ quests and beating another 1000 monsters to get the endgame, how do you make that process interesting?
I wouldn’t exactly call Genshin an MMO in the classical WOW sense. It has a multiplayer component and from what I hear even a somewhat decent story, but there’s no group requirements, class/role trinity or organized raid mechanics.
While I admire the bravery, making a “WOW Killer” faces the same problem as all the other WOW Killers before:
The sheer inertia of the WOW playerbase. I’ve known people that stuck with that game despite hating every minute of a new expansion, through the shenanigans Activision pulled on their workers, the hamfisted reactions thereof, the monetization changes and the godawful grindy game design.
These people don’t play a game. For them, logging in is the equivalent of going to the old pub down the road, maybe play a game of darts and take part in the pub quiz. The only way to get them to change pubs/MMOs would be to burn the bloody thing down. And even then they’d wax nostalgic about the good old days.
Even though Barry (63) beats his wife (“Oi, she probably deserved it…”), drove one of their kids to suicide (“Shame that, tragic story…eh, life goes on.”), deals drugs on the side (“But it’s great community service! I can earn a pint for free by helping!”), the food is shit (“That’s, like, subjective, mate!”) and overpriced (“But think of what I save on groceries and preparation time! A steal, I say!”).
I’ll give them that the bathroom’s clean, though.
Even after trying the fancy sushi place 2 streets down (which actually kicks out rioting drunks) back when all hell froze over, most of them came crawling back.
Trying to pry players off THAT kind of sunk cost fallacy? You have my sympathy. And that’s about it.
At best, they can hope to reach a sustainable position, like ES:O or Guild Wars 2. Anyone who’s interested in trying something new or who was interested in proper socializing probably went off to the survival sandbox genre ages ago.
I’ll keep an eye out for this, though, I love seeing people burn money.
Guild Wars 2 moved away from tank/healer/dps, though (from what I’ve heard) they partially walked that back with some more focused class specializations.
I see the clarifications in this thread, but your statement is so true. That label gets tacked onto everything these days, including games that barely have multiplayer components.
Good example. I played Genshin with a friend and there were very few things you could actually do with a friend, and it was always awkward and had shortcomings. You could run a couple Domains (about 5 minutes) a day together but that was about it. Even exploring the world (the highlight of the game for me) was kneecapped by the fact that only the “host” could loot treasure chests or get anything valuable from it.
I felt like it barely had passable co-op, let alone be called something like a MMO.
I was so excited for GW2 getting away from the Holy Trinity, but they unfortunately didn’t replace it with anything good, at least from my perspective. I really thought the Trinity paradigm was stale, but I found the group content in GW2 (Fractals or whatever they were called?) to just be kind of mushy and classes lacking distinct or interesting roles.
I just don’t like how formulaic the MMO industry had become on every encounter requiring 1 tank, 1 healer, 3 (or maybe 2 depending on the game) DPS. Older titles like DAOC or EQ (less experience for me on the latter) had a more organic feel where a friend and I could do a fair amount of stuff alone and adding more people just allowed us to go deeper into dungeons, take on more difficult encounters, etc. Having a well-balanced group was definitely more efficient, but we could get by without the optimal setup. And I also felt like there additional kinds of support aside from Healer back in those days, classes that were specialized in crowd control or preventing adds or reducing downtime and that sort of thing. It was more than just staring your teammates healthbars and pushing buttons.
It’s a persistent shared world, yes? That qualifies in my book. Most people play MMOs solo these days, paradoxical as that sounds.
The diku holy trinity exists because it leads to compelling combat and so far nobody has come up with anything better.
Long discussion with Street.
Ah geez that fuckin’ guy.
Not really, no. It’s not shared.
Oh it’s all instanced like Diablo 3? Not a MMO to me then.
Asmongold is annoying on his livestream, but give him a chance here. He talks to Greg like a normal person.
He’s popular, makes sense to engage with him. I don’t need to enjoy everybody’s content.
Yeah, all of this is part of the landscape indeed. The solo bit isn’t that hard to understand of course, though it does seem on the surface to be a bit weird given that we are talking about games that were originally at least intended as group experiences, sometimes almost exclusively so (OG EverQuest, for instance). As the companies making MMOs found out, depending on a group of hard-core fans who would build their social lives around grouping in game kind of limited their appeal. People love being in a game world with other people. Sometimes they like actively collaborating with other people. But far fewer than perhaps the originators of the genre realized actually wanted to be forced to group up to do anything. So solo-friendly became a thing.
But solo-friendly is rather the antihesis of the trinity model. While the tank/healer/damage paradigm made grouping really solid, and made content like dungeons and raids nicely scalable, it also seriously undercut the core fantasy supporting these fantasy-based games. In traditional fantasy narratives, the hero is often self-sufficient, or nearly so. Even when they have pals or sidekicks, they are usually multi-dimensional. Even in some of the Ur-level influences like Tolkien you have Gandalf wielding a sword and being a melee bad-ass, and Gimli or Legolas could rip through most anything on their own.
In the classic MMO format, though, you were forced into one dimensionality. It made planning groups and dungeons/raids cool for guilds or permanent groups, sort of like chess, but for most players logging in to kill some stuff or explore or quest, it sucked hard. Anyone who ever tried soloing in EQ remembers how terrible it was for nearly everyone. Even later, in EQ II or DAOC, playing say a warrior archetype meant sure you looked like a walking death machine, but your DPS sucked and you needed a healer to last very long. It was very jarring.
But I agree with you about the paucity of alternatives, at least for group-oriented games. In games where you expect people to have to group, the trinity ensures you need to have balance, and prevents people from cheesing content too easily. But for any other format, any game that aims to support solo play, the trinity blows hard. But, making people too self sufficient trivializes content and makes grouping an afterthought unless you simply turn mobs into HP sponges.
This is almost completely a solved problem in FFXIV now. All of the critical path 4-man story content can be done with players or AI companions and they’re working through making the 8-man content compatible as well. Early on the AI are generic hired hands but are quickly replaced by your travel companions. Most of which have a specific role but with a few who can fill any role. Given that the player can be every job on a single character this isn’t out of place in the world.
FFXIV is probably the number 2 paid MMO right now, but from reading this thread it’s a blind spot for most of QT3.
Bingo.
The dungeons you mean??
I’m aware of FF14; I’ve actually bounced off it twice.
WoW just added NPC dungeons recently. They’re catching up.
Yes. All the 4-man dungeons have NPC as an option to play through them. You can essentially solo play most of FFXIV now and enjoy it’s superb story and characters.
When you do need to queue with random people for Raid content there are always plenty of people to play with, most are awesome, and it is an entirely satisfying experience. I’m working through Shadowbringers atm and I’ve enjoyed every step of the journey.
I stopped playing MMOs quite a while ago. I never warmed to the theming/look of the Final Fantasy stuff, or for that matter much of the anime-inspired/adjacent stuff overall. Lost Ark’s gameplay was pretty solid, as was Guild War’s, but neither stuck with me. ESO is probably the best example of conventional Western MMO operations, and it’s very well executed, but even that couldn’t make me commit the time and effort to really getting into it. I just can’t muster the enthusiasm for the underlying game loops of these things, any more.