In which I may be done with MMOs

Games
1

A point of background: I’ve been playing MMOs since EQ in 2000. I’ve played WoW since launch, other than a few months here and there. I may not have played WoW a lot, but I kept the sub active. For a number of years I was the MMO guy for PC Gamer magazine, which was a great gig.

WoW is starting to get old. I actually like Legion a lot, but the end-game slog is setting in. I’ve thought about leveling my alts, but said “fuck it.” I then figured I’d dust off one of the other MMOs, like LOTRO. LoTRO’s “kill 10 bears” bother me in a way that WoW’s “kill 10 bears” doesn’t. But, of course, killing 10 bears is what’s stopping me from leveling my alts.

I’ll play TESO, but it’s too much unlike WoW for me to like it. Talk about doomed: if the game is like WoW, I don’t like it. If it’s not like wow, I don’t like it. Some of TESO is the Bethesda-ness of it. Guild Wars 2 I found interesting, and is one I might keep plunking away at it.

I blame my PS4. Working through Uncharted and The Last of Us have introduced me to some wonderful characters, and dammit, story is starting to matter more. Which is why I liked the SWTOR expansions. They played like a good single-player campaign and I’d let the sub run out after I finished the story.

A lot of it’s just being busy with grad school. The thing I like about MMOs is I rarely get stuck on a quest like I do in a fight on a single-player game. I’m not playing WoW enough to justify the sub fee. I’m really enjoying playing games sitting on my couch downstairs watching TV. I might screw around with Neverwinter on the PS4 since it doesn’t require a PS Plus sub to play.

EDIT: I’m Mac-only now, and running games like SWTOR in an emulator is pain. I always feel like I’m one patch away from the whole thing breaking.

2

People still play those?

3

Guild Wars 2 and The Elder Scrolls Online are the only ones I dip into every now and then.

I’m not subbed, so I don’t feel any pressure to play, and the game’s are viable solo, so I don’t have to play on anyone else’s schedule.

4

Guild Wars 2 was certainly fun for a while. It just seems like whenever I find a group of people I like hanging out with, something implodes with the group structure. And there’s only so much fun to be had as a solo player.

5

Once in a blue moon I dink around with ESO mainly for its production qualities. I think I’m pretty much done with MMOs, though. I’ll never forget the time I spent playing WoW, but I’m glad I don’t do that anymore.

6

The Secret World is worth a romp through, if you haven’t already. The writing and voicing in that game is the best there is in my opinion. Very do-able as a single player RPG kind of experience.

7

Yeah, I have it running through Crossover on my Mac, but it gets sluggish. If there was a native macOS client I’d play it more.

With the small SSD drives, running Bootcamp isn’t as effective as just slamming a big drive in my laptop.

8

I say this thread title to myself often, and to other people often. It always fails to hold.

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I’ve taken to playing MMOs like single player RPGs. I get into the game, go through the main storyline a time or two on a couple of characters, and then move on. Nothing since City of Heroes has held my attention long enough to do otherwise. Having said that, I will say that I come back more than once to some MMOs since they change so much. Path of Exile is the obvious example, especially when they add new story content.

10

Welcome to the rest of your life!

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@Mark_Crump, coming from a former MMO junkie, the swing back to single player and story driven gaming is very, very common. In some cases, the newfound freedom from the grind/planning/organization can be very liberating. There are still titles that I hold dear, EQ, WoW, EveO, etc. But I grew very tired of missing so, so many games on my backlog. And paired with the fact that life took over and my gaming time fell to the wayside, MMO’s as my go-to for entertainment just weren’t a sustainable option.

Don’t think of this as being done with MMOs. You’re looking at it as a net loss. Look at this as, “I may be experiencing a new genre of games,” those which don’t follow the MMO model. Enjoy it. Play through some AAAs, then an indie or two. Enjoy yourself. Don’t mourn the loss of a genre on its decline (and I do think it is on the decline.) Hell, many of us here reminisce about old text based adventures. But we don’t pine to play them anymore.

You’re free. Enjoy your freedom.

12

I had so very much fun diving back into Civ and playing through things like Witcher and whatnot when I finally dropped WoW.

Then I had kids anyway, so the point became moot, heh.

13

I go through these phases too. It’s just simply MMO burnout. I consider myself a huge MMO junkie. Currently, I’m playing 3 regularly, (Black Desert, Tera, and Asta) and in a beta stage on a 4th (Albion). I’ll sustain this for a few months, and then get to a point where I don’t want to log in to any MMO for a while. That’s when I catch up on the really excellent other titles that have come out. Then, after a few weeks, I’m ready to head back into some MMO gaming.

My advice - take a few weeks off, catch up that backlog and then when there’s nothing else to play, try a few different MMOs. To jump directly from WoW into any other MMO will just lead to disappointment. I’ve been WoW-free for a couple of years now, and I don’t think I could go back.

14

Yeah, I was playing, actually playing, COH every day. These days I log into GW2 every day. Only for the daily gift. How long have I been doing it? I leveled a secondary character from 20 to 80 purely with free tomes of knowledge. And now I have about 65 tomes in my inventory. I should actually play the damn game.

15

Yeah, I expect I’ll still play them now and then. Guild Wars 2 being the likely one since there is no sub fee.

I get tempted to get PS Plus fro TESO and playing online D3.

What I do like about MMOs is the setting. Once I find a world I like, it’s easy to always have something to do.

16

Man, I wrapped up my time with MMO’s years ago and I’ve noticed a marked improvement in my real life ever since. MMO’s are just awful time sinks, imo.

17

My MMO awakening was with City of Heroes, which I was stone addicted to for about 2 years. But I never found the same buzz in any MMO since, although I’ve enjoyed whatever good qualities they’ve had (I’ve played WoW, LOTRO, EVE, TSW, DDO, TESO, GW2 for appreciable periods, and dipped into many others).

This isn’t just the “you can only be an MMO virgin once” problem (although obviously that does play some part in my disenchantment with MMOs).

The main problem for me is that I’ve never had the same “casual-social” experience in any other MMO, the only game I’ve had anything remotely like it has been in Warframe, which I only play sporadically, but which I always come back to as a “home” multiplayer game. CoX was “PUG heaven”. No other MMO since has managed to pull off that trick. The large number of multiplayer games where you can have a casual-social experience (like Warframe) capture the “PUG heaven” aspect, but they miss out on the persistent world aspect of the thing.

I think MMO design went dreadfully wrong when designers went down the “casual-solo” route (I think, in the hopes of capturing the vast market that WoW seemingly discovered) - they completely lost sight of the USP of MMOs IMHO, and that is:-

Social gameplay in a persistent world.

In the old skool way of doing things, that social gameplay was achieved by making the content hard enough so that you had to make friends, and the extension was tight guilds. EVE Online is the only big MMO nowadays that seems to still follow that (in a PvP context, ofc). But that was obviously unsuitable for the mass market. But instead of taking a lesson from CoX, and making casual-social gameplay attractive and moreish, designers seemed to go the opposite route, of making causal-solo gameplay super-attractive in a multiplayer game.

Even though CoX’s bread and butter was instanced team play (virtually identical, in essence, to multiplayer “lobby” games), it still had a very compelling persistent world as the backdrop of that, you could still wander around and feel immersed in a virtual world that was more than just a lobby for quick multiplayer play. Yes, lots of missions were instanced, but you gathered at the entrance of the mission out in the virtual world (you flew or superspeeded as a superhero through the city to get to the mission, for example), and when the mission was over, you went back out again to the shared virtual world.

It makes me sad that the casual-social route was never taken by MMO developers. I think the genre would be in a much better place if they had. They could have had the best of both worlds - captured a mass market, but retained that unique MMO feeling of playing with other people, day in and day out, in a persistent world.

18

Heard that. I can’t imagine any game with serious non-pausable time commitments anymore.

19

Blizz did put a lot of effort into easier PUGging in WoW but the upshot for me was a completely generic experience, like playing with bots. Nobody bothered to socialize and you never met the same pugger twice.

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It’s the reason why I never bought Overwatch or Destiny. I need to be able to pause, or walk away guilt-free at any point.