12-26-2011, 01:59 AM
Slamz Wrote:I also think there's a question of "disenfranchisement" -- are games meeting the desires of most human beings who would like to play games or have "MMORPG gamers" been culled into an audience of advancement whores with the other gamers simply being disenfranchised because there is no AAA MMOG game that meets their needs?
I doubt there is that much more of a huge MMO audience out there though, the games have gone super casual to appeal to the maximum amount of people - but how many more gamers are there out there that are the type willing to put long terms of time in on a game but simply arent playing because they haven't found "the perfect game". Most people who would play a great teamplayer game are the ones like a lot of purgies who don't really love these games but play them because thats whats on the table.
Quote:In fact, I think Rift shows the risks of trying to do the WOW cookie cutter. Nine months after launch and they have a need to merge servers. And all indications are they did everything "right" -- everything WOW-like, and more. Lots of new content, new bosses, new gear, more advancement, etc. I think something the executives are going to have to think about is whether the risk of doing the same thing is becoming greater than the risk of doing something new.
That might be just a symptom of MMO fatigue though, WOW still draws huge numbers because it was the first and people get attached to toons and normalty, and now old republic pops up to lots of sales... With other MMOs popping up between, its hard to keep subscribers - but there are, altogether, still many millions of subscribers for the latest carrot on a stick gear game.
I don't deny a team motivated gameplay would have some support, but compared to the mainstream not enough to sadly make a lot of the bigger companies with huge budgets give us a first class game in the genre. Look at the games Vllad mentioned, none of them were particularly large commercial successes.
The fact that the big FPS releases are making rank up character improvement awards seems to imply that they've found it keeps subscribers longer. And its logical - the keeping up with the joneses gameplay makes people keep coming back, whereas in planetside I can realize I could cancel for 3 months, come back when they offer the free month to get subscribers back and won't have missed out on anything. Its not good for the player but makes twisted sense for the developer.