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The Future of MMOs
IGN has some interesting coverage of a panel at GDC 2008 that featured some of the top names in the MMO world who got together to discuss the future of the genre. "On hand were Jack Emmert of Cryptic Studios, Mark Miller of NCSoft, Min Kim of Nexon and Rob Pardo of Blizzard Entertainment. MMO newbie Ray Muzyka was also on hand to share his thoughts as BioWare moves into the MMO arena. [...] The conversation got a lot more heated when the subject of micro-transactions was introduced. This is a popular revenue model in Asia, where the games themselves are free to play but charge a premium for a variety of premium extras, from vanity items to additional content or abilities. It's a model that's working well for Korean developer Nexon but hasn't been adopted by many American developers."
Cause they are all too similar. This wizardry medieval theme maybe is getting old.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Yeah, I played Everquest hardcore in college. And when I first got married I still played some. My wife was convinced she'd "fix me" ... but turns out I got her into EQ (I sat her down one night and made her make a character and just said "honey, just try and see what I see when I play the game, then tell me what you think" ... after the evening she was hooked). We played till our first kid was born then laid off it. Now our two kids are older, sleeping through the nights, we play again after the kids are in bed for a few hours (8pm-10pm). It's a fun outlet, and it's cheaper than dinner and a movie once a month (and the damn babysitter, they are so expensive nowadays). The other factor for me at least is I moved 1000 miles away to go to college, and it was a good way to keep in touch with friends. A few of which still play ...
Try some SciFi MMORPG for a change. There are really tons of them out there. Some with notable success, like Eve Online or Anarchy Online. About MMORPG sucking all your life: this is actually not news, everything you do in your entire life requires time management. That includes entertainment. If you fail to manage it, all sorts of really bad results can come, ofc. At the core, the question is: do you really need to be number one? If yes, expect a huge effort to be required if you want to succeed. Oh, unless you are still dreaming that you can reap big rewards with no or close to no efforts at all.
I think one of the fundamental problems with MMORPGs is that the world never changes. Cities are never overrun and burned to the ground, quest givers never die (or if they do, they respawn quickly), trees never grow, the seasons never change, even things like weather and time of day are mostly cosmetic and don't impact gameplay much if at all. Monsters always spawn in the same places and if you kill them all, they'll be back in ten minutes. The modern MMORPG, it would seem, was designed with Sisyphus as the target audience.
A related problem is that too much is abstracted away; players and NPCs don't need to eat, they don't need shelter, items spawn magically in the vendor's shop and money spent disappears into a black hole. Animals spawn, they aren't born in the natural way. Species can't become extinct by killing the last breeding pair. A town does not trade with the outside world, it does not suffer if it is besieged, and there are no famines if the year's harvest is poor. The terrain can't be altered.
Designing a mmorpg around a realistic world would be much harder than the current crop; it may be too much to ask for a MMORPG to be able to support any of the events of the preceding paragraph, but couldn't the world be at least slightly interactive? Like, maybe we could plant a tree every once in awhile and watch it grow, or maybe the grass could be worn down by the passage of many feet? I've played WOW and I'm currently playing Lord of the Rings Online, and I just don't feel like I'm part of the world. It feels more like an amusement park.
The questing/leveling/grinding rut is a big problem too, I'm not disagreeing with you there, but it would take a book for me to say what I want to say about that.