I hinted yesterday about anticipation killing games. Â This idea about hype isn’t a new one. Â If you read MMO blogs, especially if you read this one six years ago, you know how bad hype can be when a game is built up and put up on a pedestal. Nothing can ever, ever, live up to the expectations we create in our heads.
I’m generalizing a lot and speaking for everyone here, so let me explain why I can’t personally let myself anticipate MMOs as much as I used to.
My imagination runs away
I had a decent imagination as a kid. Â I still do. Â When it comes to MMOs, however, my imagination is crazy. Â I envision worlds functioning almost like real life. I see people working together in ways that really aren’t probable. I start to see PvP like a real medieval battle. I see archers on battlements and rows of pikeman advancing. I see the battle of Helm’s Deep. I think about crafting like a blacksmith really owning a shop in Camelot. Â All of that is what I want and imagine, but never what translates into gameplay.
I already experienced what I want and love about MMOs
Three of my favorite MMOs are: (1) EverQuest, (2) Star Wars Galaxies, and (3) Dark Age of Camelot. Three very, very different games.  All three were (almost) perfect (for me) back in their day. Those games have never been recreated. I’ve gone back and played emulated versions of all of them.  I’ve sought out sequels, games created by the same devs, and never have I experienced them again.  I can’t figure out why, but I know that’s been a trigger for experiencing that feeling of falling flat on my face when I anticipate new MMOs too much.
MMOs have become too much about business
Whether or not anything has actually changed, I think of MMOs today as more of a business venture rather than a team getting together to build something special. MMOs cost more money so more funding is needed. When more funding is needed you have to worry about making it back and then some. This industry has gone through a phase or awful new business models trying to find itself. We’re just now, maybe, starting to come out of that.
I can sit back and say that no game will ever again be worth anticipating and that we shouldn’t ever get excited, but that’s going too far. I’ve written plenty in the past about the fact that you can still get excited, and should, but keep your excitement in check. Look at the facts. Â Consider 100% of the game rather than the 5% or 10% you like. If you’re like me and you know why you can’t anticipate games with such zeal, temper those expectations and look for other ways to get excited.
At this point, all I look for in MMOs is being able to set goals.
I will enjoy a game as long as I can set some sort of goal, whether it be easy or hard to attain. And then I go forth and accomplish my goal.
Reason I cant stand to play themepark games is twofold. 1) Easy goals are usually repetitive in nature. IE WoW PVP (If my goal is to gear out my char in pvp, only answer is to pvp for 2 weeks doing the same thing over and over.) 2) Hard goals are ALWAYS dependent on some sort of lockout/forced timeframe that usually forces you to rely on others.
Now I like the latter part of issue 2, but not when combined with the first part. I love grouping, its the best way to play an mmo, its what an mmo is. However being forced to do things at certain intervals while relying on others to also play at the same certain intervals takes away from it to me.
Give me a game like landmark, give me ffxi, give me P1999. Games where I can log in and say this is my goal for today. But at the same time I have a much larger goal in mind that I am constantly working towards by accomplishing my “daily goal”.
This is what keeps me playing mmo’s. This is no longer what mmo’s are about.
Old times you would log on to try and get another lvl or two. Why? Because you were trying to reach max lvl (which took months/years). Why? So that you could experience the end game content. Why? Because it made you stand out in the crowd, end game was for the hard working dedicated few.
As it stands now EVERYONE is at end game, end game is when the game starts. The journey is dead, and what journey is left is repetitive and loses its luster quickly.
I seem to remember that last time you posted something along these lines you got a lot of comments saying that mostly what’s changed is the you’ve grown older. That’s certainly a part of it. Is it only MMOs that make you feel this way? What about music? Movies? Novels?
It could really be that the new MMOs coming along just aren’t as good (for you) as the old ones were. THey are certainly quite different in many respects. Or it could be that what you really remember so fondly is that time of your life when every experience seemed new and fresh and possibilities seemed infinite.
For me, having started playing MMOs when I was 40 not 14, the new ones seem as fresh and thrilling as the old ones ever did – or at least the best of them do. I bet if I’d started playing EQ in 1999 aged 12 and was now in my late 20s I’d have a completely different take on that.
WAR cured me of getting excited about unreleased games.
Now, unreleased games are just sorted into “games I’m interested in” and “games I’m not (currently) interested in”.
Interestingly enough, the games that have delighted me since then have mostly been slow burn increases in enthusiasm after I started playing them.
Guild Wars 2 took a while to stick, the first few beta weekends I wasn’t really feeling it. It was probably a couple of months after launch that I reached the point of saying “OK, I really really like this game”.
Hearthstone I got into during closed beta, but it has probably only been the last few months that I’ve been playing regularly. Part of that is due to a guy I work with getting into it, so we play at lunchtime, but largely I think it’s just that I’ve enjoyed the game more and more the more I played it.
I think this feels healthier that being massively over-excited pre-launch, and never loving the game as much as you do on day 1.
@bhagpuss I don’t believe that age or “rose tinted glasses” are the culprit here. Games simply are not made or designed the way they used to be (on the whole).
A good example of this is Divinity: Original Sin. The game is amazing. It directly pulls from the roots of tabletop gaming (where things obviously started). And that makes it remarkable. Of course that is not an MMO example, so it isn’t a perfect comparison. But then again that is the point Keen is making. There are no MMO games worth getting excited about, because none of them really use the roots of what made games great.
We aren’t looking for an “Arcade” experience in MMOs. Sure, the newer generation may just be looking for exactly that. But we aren’t, We don’t want our MMOs to be a sit-down-spazz-around-log-off affair. And Arcade games are the only thing I can really compare to that style, so I use that term. We are looking for the virtual world, the choices that matter, the deep and exciting places to explore even if we weren’t really supposed to be there. The Tabletop RPG derivative that became the first MMOs.
Your last point is the most important one. MMOs became a business. When they became a business they started trying to attract ‘wider’ audiences and appeal to ‘wider’ player bases and they lost everything that made them fun.