Year in MMORPGs Reviewed

Grimwell.com has an excellent piece on the past year in the MMORPG scene. It highlights the best, worst, and in-between as regards Massively Multiplayer Online Games. From the article: "I have never played so many different MMORPGs in one year before. This is one of the defining features of 2004: an abundance of choice in the MMORPG market like never before. While a few games, like Earth and Beyond and minor independent ones, closed their servers, most games from previous years are still available."

Comments

Many new games, none of them really new.

[Golias]

I enjoyed City of Heroes for a while, because I liked the genre, but it still ended up being "Everquest in tights." One oddity of CoH was that, like most MMORPGs, it gave no experience or rewards for defeating low-level opponents with a high-level character, so you ended up having hundreds of "heroes" in mighty-looking capes casually jogging by as old ladies getting mugged were screaming for help.

I now play World of Warcraft for the simple reason that most of my friends who play such games are playing WoW, and I would rather game with them than a bunch of strangers. There seem to be a lot of nice evolutionary touches, but it's still really just a new skin on the same old Nethack.

I'm still waiting to see what the "next big thing" in MMORPGs will be. I don't see much evidence that the answer is coming in 2005.

Then again, I'm one of those jerks who sits down at just about every single mouse-controled FPS deathmatch game, frags a few people, and says "meh... I played this game already, back when it was called Quake."

Re:Something for the adults?

[Golias]

Half the point of the MMORPG is growing your character. That's half the point of any RP game.

All of the point in a RP game is RP. If you don't find joy in roleplaying, you're just a lab-rat pulling on the lever which randomly rewards you with pleasure pills.

Levelling is meaningless. You get bigger numbers on your character, and fight pictures of monsters which require bigger numbers to fight, with a net change in the challenge of zero.

Roleplay is a fun pastime in which you and others collectively tell a story for each others' amusement. Levelling for the sake of levelling is an addictive (or rather, obsessive/compulsive) behavior which offers little to nothing in the way of real-life rewards.