Are MMOs actually good games?

Does the fact that Bradygames puts out guides invalidate the design of a Zelda boss? The puzzles in a Portal game? Fog of war in Advance Wars/Fire Emblem/etc.?

That the strategies behind WoW's bosses can be accessed so easily and assisted in execution by addons to a point where their challenge is highly reduced does not discredit the presence of actual encounter design in the first place no more than the existence of Gamefaqs and Gamesharks discredits all strategy in all games ever. It is true that the moment to moment demand on any single player might not be as challenging or tactical as I'd like, but that is unfortunately one of the shortcomings of a genre where design is cognizant of the fact that success is dependent on so many people and the actual execution demands are spread accordingly. (It's also one of the reasons I'd love to see the genre's design ape'd in a good single player game as I think one player managing a large party through MMO raid like encounters would be constantly demanding and tactically rewarding in a way that multiplayer encounters haven't been willing to do)

jerd21 said:
Would you have preferred "Is MMO a good genre"? Because you can imagine it like that if you wish, I just thought it sounded strange.

This is a question about the genre as a whole, so I think that the question in the title is valid, as is the one in your post. From what I see, they build off of one another mechanically, and there do tend to be inherent "MMO mechanics", so the question is do these mechanics make up a fun game?

For those answering for me specifically, I probably won't be playing with anyone but my brother. Can two people get far/have fun with it?
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The content I refer to in my post above would only be accessible to parties of 10 or more so no for that particular example or type of content. Additionally, I'll add that I think the minimum player requirement is actually a positive as the coordination of these strategies amongst a fairly large party is part of the challenge and fun that stems from executing your strategy to handle it correctly. Whether you enjoy the content accessible to 2 is a different matter and I'll leave that explanation to someone else as it's not really my cup of tea.
 
MMO's is not a mythical genre. WoW is an action RPG with a heavy emphasis on loot and multiplayer. Nothing else. As a whole the genre tends to reward community and social interaction.

I never got the whole "I hate MMOs because..." since that just seems like a teenage knee jerk "I hate whatever is popular and/or not in line with my comfort zone".
 
jerd21 said:
For those answering for me specifically, I probably won't be playing with anyone but my brother. Can two people get far/have fun in WoW?
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Yes, especially if you two play together.

But it'll also depend on your expectations and what you want to get out of it. It can take a long time to reach max level on your first character, especially if you don't play "efficiently". Without joining a guild or organized raiding, you won't scratch the very depths of the gameplay, but a lot of people enjoy simply pubbing or doing Raid Finder (or, god forbid, dailies). There's also plenty of PvP.

For me, I had to stop playing because I simply could not afford the time investment anymore, but that doesn't mean I don't recognize the brilliance of the encounters and class mechanics. Maybe you have time to kill, or don't care for hardcore challenges that necessitate organizing a group of competent players.

It's all up to what you value and what you can afford. If you can justify it, I say go for it!
 
A video-game absolutely requiring the presence of other people to support its every mechanic usually comes at the expense of neutering every reason I actually play video-games (music, atmosphere, suspension of disbelief, a single-player experience not tethered to unstable factors like time and what kind of friends you have, etc.), so they're definitely not anything I'd ever want to go near.
 
I used to love them - crave them - so much amazing wonder in sort of building up this character and finding items and being part of a world.

Something about modern MMOs, WOW after years of it -- Sorta beat that beast within me to death, and I don't think the beast is ever goign to revive. I no longer see a world when I log into an MMO, I see the matrix.
 
Do people find them fun or otherwise worthwhile? Then yes.
 
RawkHawk2010 said:
A video-game absolutely requiring the presence of other people to support its every mechanic usually comes at the expense of neutering every reason I actually play video-games (music, atmosphere, suspension of disbelief, a single-player experience not tethered to unstable factors like time and what kind of friends you have, etc.), so they're definitely not anything I'd ever want to go near.
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RawkHawk2010
Allergic to Miyamoto's toxic gameplay-first philosophies
(Today, 12:31 AM)

Sorry I had to. XD

But yeah, OP, if you relate to what RawkHawk said, you'd be better off with something like Skyrim. (Personally, I'm usually a gameplay-first kinda guy, so...)
 
Sure.

Not as fun single player, but even if you're doing the more monotonous content, you can chat it up with guildmates.

I've been a MMO vet for years and have always enjoyed them, but when I got a couple of RL friends to play with me, they got even better. We have a core MMO team now, and have a pretty good time.
 
MMOs are often mediocre games that are held together by the fact that the underlying concept of an MMORPG is a fantastic one. Note that I do not include games like Diablo 2 and PSO in my definition of an MMO as they don't really function in a cohesive world. You could make more of an argument for PSO 2 but the fact is that the "game" part of the world is still limited to four (well, technically sixteen, but really four) people. If they were included, they would be at the top of the pile in terms of gameplay quality by a wide margin.

I love the concept of MMOs. I have probably played around a hundred of them. I am playing one of them right now (Ragnarok Online). I have waded through Korean signup sheets, endured hundreds of hours worth of lag, and downloaded gigabytes of clients at 10KB/s in search of finding a decent MMO. I have subsequently sunk tonnes of time into them. Literally every one that I've played has been a weak or inconsistent game held together by brief moments of glory and/or the virtual world they create. Among the many MMOs I have played, the two I've played the most are probably Ragnarok Online and World of Warcraft.

Ragnarok Online is a game that originated somewhere around the year 2000 (it was released much later than that but I was pretty sure I was playing the alpha around then). It is sort of like a less responsive Diablo in that it is an isometric game where you level up by clicking lots of times and that you advance through the game by filtering through massive piles of loot for a slotted pair of tights. The game world is very varied but ultimately rather boring due to 90 percent of the game's areas being simply plains/trains/deserts/forests/volcanoes/caves/etc. filled with a certain number of monsters distributed randomly around the map. The quests are extremely obtuse and can be ignored, so most of your time spent playing the game will be on grinding. This is really dull, even more so because the game is simply not as responsive or as varied as a proper action RPG. However, the game manages to score aces in the longevity department because every once in awhile, you and 10 000 of your closest friends will participate in a PvP smorgasboard known as the War of Emperium. It's tense and a lot of fun and it makes you forget about the eight billion hours you wasted to get there; in addition, because it is player-driven and involves such a massive amount of people, there is really nothing like it. Because it's so determined by the playerbase, the game invariably becomes an extremely social one and there's a legendary sense of camaraderie and rivalry associated with it. In essence, Ragnarok Online is a dull game/chatroom 99 percent of the time that is wholly redeemed by the one percent of the time where all of the players actually do something together.

World of Warcraft has changed a lot since I started (and subsequently stopped) playing it, enough so that I consider pre-WotLK WoW and current WoW to be distinct games for the purpose of this thread. Pre-WoTLK WoW was a weird MMORPG that eschewed the more abstract social aspects of its predecessors (such as the total group reliance of games like FFXI and EQ or the straight up Nihilism of UO) in favor of streamlining and NPC-driven quests. It was also supported by basically the best world of any MMO ever and probably the only one worth exploring simply because the landscape was so breathtaking and rewarding to look at. However, like most other MMOs, the game itself was pretty dull as the combat was essentially just mashing out some numbers periodically. Position and dexterity basically mean nothing in WoW and there's no skill to get better at, making the single-player experience very weak. However, when you get into a group, you get to see why the combat works the way it does and there's a lot of potential for fun and development there, especially when that combat involves a lot of people, either through raiding or through large PvP encounters. My experiences with large group play in WoW remain some of the best experiences I've had in gaming altogether due to the sheer level of planning, co-ordination and attention that they demanded. The thing is, WoW offered players a lot of opportunities to isolate themselves and the developers never particularly concerned themselves with spontaneous events past the first couple of years or so, so you were always aware of how artificial the virtual world was and that heavily limited the game. As the game went on, this just got a whole lot worse, and now the game is essentially just an extremely dull grind up to 90 followed by brief moments of clarity and exuberance through raiding and large-scale PvP.

Post-WotLK is barely an MMORPG. The social experience is nearly gone and Blizzard has long since stopped trying to make players interact in a fun and spontaneous way. I would avoid it if you're at all interested in the "MMO" side of things.

In conclusion, I would have to say that MMOs are tough to define by the conventional metrics of good and bad games. They aren't enjoyed in the same way that other genres are, but they are certainly enjoyable. I would say, however, that if the current trend of WoW cloning continues, people coming into the genre have largely missed the boat on what makes the genre so compelling in the first place.
 
traveler said:
Absolutely. WoW, in fact, put me off most traditional RPGs after playing a substantial amount of it. Having gone from a game where the fights was actually challenging, my build mattered to the point that I needed to read up on it and understand the mechanics behind it, and, most importantly, encounters actually had some design and strategy to them to games where I could literally follow a flowchart to success in pretty much every encounter and my builds never matter felt like a huge downgrade. There is a ton of filler in the way, of course, to that hardcore raiding endgame experience and most guilds unfortunately look up the strats beforehand (this is the equivalent of reading a guide to every Zelda dungeon and boss before playing in my mind) so it's easy to miss the true quality of the game amidst the crap that people associate with the genre, but that potential is there and I don't feel like most single player RPGs can ever match the best content I've played in WoW, social aspect aside or not.

Edit: This thread is a perfect example. Every time the topic comes up, people talk about progression, the rewards, the social element, the sense of exploration, blah blah blah. No one ever talks about the real, true game underneath it all that gives all those elements a purpose because, to be fair, very few ever get to even see it. WoW makes you run through a super shallow RPG experience in the leveling to endgame run. Then you get a taste of that real encounter design in instances. Then, if you've stuck with it long enough, you might join a guild and see the real fights- the content that makes the game worth playing in the first place. (I'll note that all of this is based on my WoW experience, which ended after WotLK. I have no idea how the game is now.)

Boss Fight in WoW, for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZEJA52NrgI Contrast this with the encounter design of, say, an FF or DQ. Even EO, which I like, and the older PC classics don't approach this level of almost puzzle like unique tactics.

I'm still waiting for the game that offers a single player WoW experience minus all the filler progression BS. Do it with a Baldur's Gate style perspective and control scheme, (real time management of a large party with a pause feature) simplify any one character's rotations to account for the fact that your player is now playing and coordinating all team members instead of just playing one, and structure it like Shadow of the Colossus, with unique boss encounter after unique boss encounter, no filler in between. Make respeccing both available and expected so as to be able to require different builds for each fight and encourage players to experiment. Hell, if Dota 2 ever gets substantial modding support, I might just try to make it myself as its perspective and heroes would be a decent foundation for this idea. (The Halloween Roshan boss even resembled the sorts of encounters I had envisioned, albeit at a extremely simplistic level.)
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I could not agree with this more. I question if WoW's level up content can even be called a game anymore with the chance of death/losing being so minimal. However, the heroic raid content is one of the few places where you still see incredibly inventive, fun, and intense boss fights in modern day gaming.
 
its good to enter an MMO when its starting out either that or research about it as it gets ready to launch... therefore you understand the basics of the game and its vision without having to enter an MMO at a time of complexity... building up your foundation is critical, a lot of people turn away from certain MMO becomes a majority of the community is already heavily invested into the game and hence may prove as a barrier of complexity for the newcomer since everyone is already doing crazy things and you need to read and learn a pile of stuff just to catch up and enjoy the full experience

look up the new MMO coming up and decide to follow one as it progress before its launch
 
You start out playing an MMO for its premise and features. You stick with one for its community. At the end of the day, the game itself is just a shell for you and other members of this community to interact and 'live' second lives, as warriors or merchants or whatever you want to be within the parameters the game's design allows. It's an escape from reality that goes a step further from the usual role playing in RPGs. If that sounds appealing to you, then you'll enjoy your time playing MMOs.
 
I tried Tera Online and Rift recently. Played both for few hours and i found them very boring. MMORPG`s are not for me that`s for sure.
 
my only MMO experiences were FFXI and Lineage 2. FFXI was one of the funnest experiences i've had, though some players were so downright dumb i had to quit (and, well, i was addicted and failing school because of it, heheh). Lineage could've been great if not for the korean farmers

but to the point, MMOs are basically chatrooms with a battle system, when you whittle it all down. if that floats your boat, nothing wrong with it
 
MMO's are like any other games in that some are good and others are bad. If you like RPG's then chances are you'll enjoy MMO's from a gameplay perspective.

All the criticisms, praising, and a hefty aspect of the experience comes directly from how the Community of each MMO acts within the mechanics of the game and between each other though, so if you play an MMO with a poor community, you can quickly find yourself not liking the game.

The biggest problem that most MMO's have at launch isn't actually bugs or repetitive gameplay or lack of content. It's roaming MMO Playing population that Beta Tests, buys and only plays for the first month. They'll complain, troll, grief, generally try to ruin the game within the first 30 days for no understandable reason. They are the biggest reason why people think most MMO's "die" so quickly when, in reality, a lot of them continue to exist for years with a steady population that enjoys the game.
 
I like the idea of MMOs (playing a game with a bunch of people), I just hate the idea that the game somehow has to keep going indefinitely. It's what people have come to expect from an MMO, that it must have some sort of endgame content that will keep you hooked forever until the next update comes out. Alas, it would be disingenuous to create a massively multiplayer experience that had a definite ending; it defeats the purpose of the genre and would be impossible to maintain a healthy community. It would also cost a ridiculous amount of time/money to the developers to justify an experience like that. I think they can be good games though, for only as long as you want them to be. Also imo the closed beta/first few months of release of any MMO is where you'll get the most enjoyment from them. I haven't played an MMO in a long ass time but I decided to jump in on FFXIV for the free month (and possibly one more month afterwards, depending on several factors)!
 
Nah, they're pretty much just glorified online chatrooms.

Seriously though, I played WoW for around two years (vanilla and BC for around 1.5 years, WotLK for half a year or so) and I did enjoy it, especially since I managed to get into a decent guild that did 40-player raids. Molten Core and Blackwing Lair were some of the most memorable experiences I've ever had in gaming. Unfortunately I had to stop raiding shortly after BC came out due to time constraints and subsequently quit altogether. Came back a few months after WotLK was released but I just couldn't get back into it anymore, even though I got back to the same guild and proceeded to try out some of the new raids. The magic was just gone.

Last year I tried out GW2 since everyone was touting it as some kind of revolution, but I quickly found out that it was basically the same game as WoW. Sure, it's prettier, the combat is a bit more dynamic, the quests offer a bit more freedom and the dynamic events are nice, but in the end I it's the same boring grind to level whatever as WoW was, except with a much weaker sense of progression.

Granted, those are the only two MMOs I've ever played. I have thought about giving EVE a go, but from what I hear the actual gameplay is boring as hell.
 
BigDug13 said:
If you weren't around for the Everquest 1 days, then no, they're not as good now. The sense of wonder and discovery in the first 3D MMORPG with sometimes brutal penalties for dying and full community without bullshit copouts like voice chat rooms and automated auction houses was like nothing else.

Getting into it now is just disappointment in comparison. The solo-optional MMO's of today with everyone off in their own voice chats with their friends are garbage.
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Couldn't agree more..I still remember the player made auction areas around the commons...corpse runs, camp checks and the actual thrill and fear of dying. Games like UO and EQ1 created the most amazing communities. Unfortunately it just does not work like that any more with the younger gamer generation. Growing up totally differently..
 
MMOs were to RPGs what Angry Birds is to puzzle games.

Enemy AI brain dead. Quests and characters flat and uninteresting. Combat, all about bigger numbers.

Whether you like MMO depends on if you like grinding and seeing other players in the game with you.
 
As long as you compare them as MMOs, some are.

You'll see some go "Y U NO PLAY LIKE ACTION GAEM" or "Y U TAKE LONGER THAN SINGEL PLAYER GAEM" which has in the last few years caused some MMO designers to jettison some of what makes MMOs work along with old clunk, negating any MMO design gains.
 
IMO the 'point and click' style MMOs (tab targeting? I don't know the term) have never been fun. PSO and PSO2 areat great though I guess those aren't "massively" multiplayer.
 
vio said:
I tried Tera Online and Rift recently. Played both for few hours and i found them very boring. MMORPG`s are not for me that`s for sure.
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Tera takes awhile to pick up; I think around the third area was when it clicked for me because I unlocked some pretty important skills.
 
Honestly? No, I really want to like certain ones like Guild Wars 2. But I got so fucking bored playing it after a while. They're all repetitive and they all have shitty combat systems from what I've played.

TERA had a decent combat system and kept me involved but that game is terrible. After an hour it gets repetitive as hell.
 
i dont know if current MMO design necessitates as a "fun" game really.

there is certainly fun to be had, but its not like they can do anything ridiculous and crazy because they need to be more balanced and re-balanced if they want to keep all things civil.

its a mix of cooperation and competition and they need to be balanced.

people make the game fun, but they also ruin it for everyone else and the developer.


i always felt like its more of a thing to do socially, and that's the main point of it. if they wanted you to have fun they would involve a lot of single player aspects to the game.
 
I like some of them, not all of them though. Lots of them are terrible. Guild Wars is probably the best MMO series. really looking forward to Destiny as well (yes, its a MMO).
 
Tash said:
Couldn't agree more..I still remember the player made auction areas around the commons...corpse runs, camp checks and the actual thrill and fear of dying. Games like UO and EQ1 created the most amazing communities. Unfortunately it just does not work like that any more with the younger gamer generation. Growing up totally differently..
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This is why I play perma-death in an ARPG with no auction houses and face to face trading with MMO elements and shared instances. Most "MMOs" these days hold your hand til it falls off.

www.pathofexile.com
 
They are great if you are playing with real life friends, but if you are by yourself... less so. My first MMO was FFXI and I loved it. It was unlike anything I had ever played before, and I used to take my laptop over to my friend's apartment, and we'd play all night. Good times, good times. After playing that for several years, I moved on to WoW and played with the same rl friends who I played FFXI with - I even met someone from it who we had played with since FFXI. Was a really neat experience. There's nothing quite like it.

Unfortunately... I feel like that time of excitement has passed for me on MMOs. I keep looking to recapture that new feeling MMOs gave, but everything just feels the same. And my friends and I don't really have the time to play them like we used to either, so... :(
 
MMOs are definitely more than the sum of their parts. They have to make a lot of concessions to allow for the 'massive' part of the game. You have to think about how big the 'zone' is that you're in, how many other people are playing in it at the same time and all that. Obviously the combat isn't going to be as precise or involved as a some single-player RPGs that you play, but they do allow for lots of new experiences.
 
If you are new to MMO's you probably wana stay away from WoW as your first experience.

Maybe start a new upcoming MMO where the community is all starting out together.
 
MMOs are crazy addictive and it's the genre I've made most online friends in. Once I was playing this MMO then I got malaria for three weeks so I was confined in the hospital. Upon getting back, the doctors advised more rest as they should but I just couldn't help it. There was a feeling of hopping back online and catching up that no other genre matched. The last time I played an MMO seriously though was 5 years ago.
 
If you find some good people to play with, sure.

If you try it solo then even the best mmorpg pales to a mediocre single player game, in my opinion.
 
WoW was way better than any other MMO I'd played before. You need a group to play with or else it's not really worth it.
 
MMO's can be fantastic games in their own right but I think mists of panderia highlights how incredibly broken the MMO design can also be.

The first dungeon you will likely do is the stormstout brewery. The place is a disaster, there are all these right click mechanics that are barely explained and not very intuitive, as well as boss fights whose design philosophy is "well if we just keep throwing new mechanics at the player then maybe they'll die and think this is challenging". Well all I can say is fuck you blizzard not only was the dungeon a mess but it didn't even encourage learning it, all we had to do was deeps harder and everything died without really paying attention to most mechanics.

You know what, blizzard boss design post tier 11 which was the first raiding tier of cata can literally be summed up with the phrase above. They're all awful, and an embarrassment of actual design.

It really just is "Let me throw things at you till you can't juggle them anymore, having fun yet?!"
 
They're great if you enjoy the social aspect of them + have friends who play them. Any MMO is only as good as its community is, imo, so if you just play the MMO to level up your own character in isolation you'd have more fun playing a single player game (although more and more MMO's seem to be falling into more and more single player content and isolation unfortunately).
 
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