I'd never heard of that either! It actually looks pretty interesting.

Too bad it has that mmorpg flaw of magical effects looking tiny and shit.

 

Their first game Mars: War Logs, was pretty unpolished, but it showed some really good potential. I'm not going to be preordering or anything, but I'm cautiously optimistic that once its out it might live up to that. Certainly what they've shown so far looks good.

 

These devs are the sort that gradually improve with every new game. Bound By Flame is one of my favorite underrated RPGs.

 

2K is really pissing me off with their bullshit, so even if BL3 weren't an Epic whore store exclusive for 6 months after release, I'm still not sure I'd get it.

I was really looking forward to Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, and then I find out Epic snapped up that game too, and it's exclusive FOR AN ENTIRE FUCKING YEAR. That is some ridiculous and inexcusable horse shit.

If Epic were just another online game store, selling stuff like everyone else, I'd shrug and move on, but this exclusivity shit has really infuriated me. It's enough to make me hope they overextend themselves throwing around all of this Fortnite money and end up having to scale back before they go bankrupt. Maybe if they had working shopping carts and didn't accidentally give user info away, they wouldn't need exclusives to get people's business.

They haven't made a decent UT game in ages, so who needs 'em. Fuck Epic and any publishers who whore their games to them.

 

All the hype some people have about WoW Classic is giving me the itch to find a new MMO.

Not WoW though, been there done that and lost interest in it.

Sadly, not seeing many MMO's really worth getting into though. Seems like it used to be new MMO's used to pop up a lot more often. I feel old.

 

I've heard great things about FFXIV, but never played it.

 

Yeah, people have realized that there'll never be a "wow killer" that gets them to steal those hundreds of millions in monthly revenue, so they've more-or-less given up. There's still a few new MMOs coming out from time to time, but most of them are dumpster fires and/or Korean imports like Bless, so it's not really worth diving into them.

If you want a non-WoW MMO to play though, I'd strongly recommend FF14. It's retained its focus on raiding and core content, with achievable goals to grind toward to entertain you, instead of WoW's current "you will spend every waking moment in this game grinding so that you can grind some more" scheme. It's also got the best MMO storyline out there.

It'll feel a little slow to start, since it's got a 2.5s GCD instead of WoW's 1.5s, but it's got a big focus on weaving off-gcd abilities in between the gcd ones and it gets a lot more frantic at high levels.

 

Mostly agree with this, but it should be stated clearly: if you despise WoW's recent in-game store shenanigans, they learnt it from 14 (and other Asian MMOs in general).

I've resigned myself to us never getting a next-gen MMO at this point. My last hope is that VR gets to a point (it has to) where people want actual worlds to live in and explore. Then we all willingly jack into the Matrix.

 

Honestly, games like destiny and anthem are the next gen MMO.

They suck, but they are massive multiplayer online games.

 

Nah, they're the natural evolution of Diablo-likes.

 

I agree with this. I look at Destiny and Anthem, and then I look at a game like Hellgate London, and what do those games bring online-wise that Hellgate London didn't? Honestly, not all that much, and no one ever called Hellgate London an MMO.

 

I don’t remember hellgate London having multiplayer.

The primary defining trait of an mmo is playing online with massive amounts of other players.

Destiny/anthem have taken the action oriented aspects of call of duty and increased the amount of players/added the rpg progression aspect of WoW.

They are the current mmos

 

I guess, if you define "MMO" as "multiplayer game with loot progression", but that doesn't sit right with me.

The problem is that Destiny et al are missing the "massive" portion of "massive multiplayer". Six is the highest number of players ever in a single place, and there's practically no way to interact with anyone not explicitly in your group.

Whereas actual MMOs see dozens of people running around a given place, and the whole game is about interacting with them in various ways.

 

eh, I have to disagree with you, you would have the need to play the old MMOs and even retail wow to experience the difference. There is nothing currently like that.

 

Ah I’ve only played bits and pieces of destiny watching friends. Thought there was a whole open world with people running around.

My bad.

I still define mmo though as massive multiplayer with loot progression though.

Whereas if we are speaking specifically to mmoRPGS that definition changes a bit. The line between rpg and action game though has become increasingly blurred.

 

I think the best bet for a more traditional MMO is an indie game supported by Patreon or something. One step above a roguelike, of which many are still running (?). Ultimately, most of the big studios and well-funded games are interested in a monetary return more than necessarily making a good game, and for traditional MMOs the two goals conflict a lot.

Incidentally, I'm making a hobbyist MMO in my free time, but I don't really expect it to ever release.

 

Speaking of modern multiplayer, the Apex Legends subreddit just had a meltdown because EA finally told Respawn to release the real MTX model they wanted to have in the game, players were like 'bruh', devs were like 'lol still got your money', and players are, amazingly, once again bamboozled that an EA game wants to milk them for all their money, as if EA hasn't been doing that for the last decade.

You have to choose to be this naive.

 

Only three months until the release of Fallen Order, though! All aboard the hype train!

Seriously though, I am utterly amazed at how anyone at EA with a brain could have let this happen.

They’re edging ever closer to the cliff, and it would appear that no one is even thinking about pumping the brakes.

 

Yep. Mhm.

The suits at EA are nothing but smart about this. After all, they have the data to prove that no matter how many times they do this, people are drawn to shinies.

Consider for example: X item costs 12 in-game currency. Bundle packs are either for 10 in-game currency or 20. So you can't just buy the amount of currency you want, you'll either have not enough to buy X, or you'll overspend and then not even have enough left to buy another X. Every freemium game does this.

The games industry has learned that, for some magical reason, people will pay $60 upfront for a full game, but if they don't have to pay upfront, they will then spend $50 on a character skin.

The brains at EA are working fine. It's the brains of gamers that are fucked.

You know, we've all been saying this for years, since at least Battlefront 2015--ooh, one day EA will alienate their customers, watch out! So they might turn people off one game. So then they just release another game and repeat the cycle and the money keeps flowing.

 

Eh... yes and no. The trick is that monetization is in all honesty irrelevant to whether or not people play a game. All that really matters is the quality of the game and how much fun people have playing it. If a game comes out that people like to play, you can put whatever monetization scheme on top of it you want and they're gonna keep playing it, and then giving you money through that scheme.

EA's thing is that they've mastered the art of delivering a game at the perfect quality level to balance development expense and audience satisfaction, so that folks will get into the game, and then just bitch and moan about the monetization scheme while still actively playing the game. They don't always get it right (see: Anthem and Battlefront 2), but they're consistently able to churn out 'good' games that people enjoy, and that's all that really matters to getting people to play, at the end of the day.