We're All In This Together: the all-purpose MMO thread

I'm not sure many ILGers are playing MMOs. I'm not at the moment, but I like to keep an eye out, just in case anything comes along that looks like it might be a natural successor to Dark Age of Camelot.

Dark Age of Camelot offers arguably the most successful end-game model of any MMORPG to date, or at least it did early on before they jumped the shark and started adding PvE content that was a massive grindfest but had to be played through as it offered huge advantages for RvR play. Anyway.

Guild Wars 2 is looking the most promising currently, as it offers 3-realm oper world PvP, but beta players report disappointment regarding the depth of the gameplay.

Also up this week is Elder Scrolls Online. It's being developed by ZeniMax Online, who are headed up by one Matt Firor, late of DAoC developers, Mythic Entertainment.

Unfortunately Matt is probably responsible for ruining DAoC and this game looks like it will not please MMO fans or TES fans, as it is not a sandbox and it's not WoW. But it does have 3-faction PvP, so, eh. I'll keep an eye on it.

What MMOs are people playing, have played, are looking out for?

did anyone ever play the richard garriott mmo? tabula rasa not ultima online. was it terrible?

I played DC Online for a while. Fun, but a beat-em-up grind is just as bad as every other kind.

i still think about going back to Glitch, sometimes

I spent a day in Tabula Rasa. Unfortunately it was one of those that was pretty unforgiving for the friendless newb, and I spent a lot of my time dying horribly whilst emitting a string of curses at the interface design.

The art design was pretty good though, as I recall (it was a long time ago). It was quite convincingly alien & hostile.

I wanna play The Secret World rilllll bad; any of y'all participate in the beta weekend?

Yeah, there are a bunch that I am looking for when I get a spare month each (and they're cheap to buy and free to pay) - Secret World, SWTOR, Guild Wars 2 (and Guild Wars 1!). My heart though remains devoted to WoW - I can't really tell whether every other MMO I've tried (Anarchy Online, EVE*, DDO, er silkroad) actually has really terrible UI or whether I've just got WoW burned on my skin.

This year's big question (apart from "Who will go FTP / collapse entirely?") is probably whether Guild Wars 2 will conquer all. I don't really think that anything is going to conquer the amount of work WoW is putting into the new expansion, but Guild Wars 2 is doing some interesting stuff with (as I understand it) separating out the story that the are telling singleplayer from the multiplayer World Quests (The scalable ones, from "run off these bandits" to "Oh No THE DESTROYAR Is Come"). What's the complaints about the depth of gameplay?

*EVE doesn't really belong in any of these lists of course.

Complaints about the gameplay boil down to 'zergy carebear button mash fest'.

Some of the specifics are:

- Death penalties are not meaningful so less incentive to play skilfully
- Individual kill rewards are not really there, so less incentive to get into direct fights
- Maps are too cluttered (this is hotly contested by some people)
- Classes are all hybrids, have overpowered self-heals on too-short timers, making group optimisation less rewarding
- Group optimisation is less complex / strategic in general
- Combat techniques are too simplistic: ability selection, timing and positioning are not as critical as in DAoC
- No crowd control and no speed buffs makes opening and closing gaps as a group almost impossible (gaps can be opened and closed 1:1 however, leading me on to...)
- Group fights seem to drive you into a series of 1:1 encounters rather than applying whole-group tactics.

None of these things will stop you having fun if you enjoy zerging and button mashing, which I really do, every now and again. But the devs have talked about wanting this to be an eSport, so folks had got their hopes up about it being complex enough to really reward the dedicated teams.

Ahhhh, PVP, right.

Ah yeah, as I said in my OP, I'm really dreaming of a game that offers decent open-world PvP, not 2-sided, not instanced, and not controlled by giant groups of shitheads*.

*I got into EVE for a while.

It may just be me being team WoW, but I really can't handle what I've seen of FFXIV's last-game-on-the-PS2 looks compared to (more cartoony, even as the content is frequently pompously silly) WoW.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBEvWWdKOBA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixtWdYkJbdE

One thing of note is that I don't think I've heard much about WoW-killers for a while - even Stormblood, in the blogs I read, seems to be either "I was already playing FFXIV so I'm hyped" or "Welp, this will drag me away from WoW for a few weeks".

MMO graphics are generally capped at a generation+ behind because of their need for a critical mass of players - easier to hook in ppl without gaming rigs who don't have as many other options.

i haven't played any MMOs for years but i still enjoy seeing how new ones try to carve out their visual style despite that limitation