Why has no MMO been able to recreate the soulfulness and atmosphere of vanilla WoW?
Why has no MMO been able to recreate the soulfulness and atmosphere of vanilla WoW?
Why has no MMO been able to recreate the soulfulness and atmosphere of vanilla WoW?
FFXI, EQ, UO all did it better (and earlier)
Never played them but why has nothing that's come out after WoW been able to do this?
because they all copied wow
But WoW still had soul for its first 4 years.
anon, copies can't have soul, so it doesn't matter how early in wow's life they tried to copy it.
WoW never did it. WoW was the monstrosity that killed MMOs. that last good MMO was classic EQ. Even WoW managed to ruin that eventually as the devs realized they needed to "cater to the casual audience".
EQ tards are what killed wow with their raid obsession
> Why has no MMO been able to recreate the soulfulness and atmosphere of vanilla WoW?
Because WoW existed at a time when the internet was fundamentally different and a different (and better) group of people were using it. It's why, as said, its only competitors in terms of soul are games from before it. That era of the internet is gone forever now, and it is never coming back. I always laugh at modern MMO debates because, on the current internet, nothing will ever be as good as those old MMOs ever again.
they just dumped camps of monsters in fields, WoW was the first mmo with actual world design
Even BRD doesn't hold a candle to Lower Guk or Old Sebilis.
Ultima Online is still the best MMO ever made
>EQ
lmao no it was janky shit
>FFXI
yes, but only for its time. Classic has it's timeless for vanilla WoW
>UO
meh.
only game that reached the same level of soul was 2D spritework runescape back in the day
fpbp. Don't forget Asheron's Call, Dark Age of Camelot, Star Wars Galaxy, Anarchy Online ect...
All these MMOs tried to do their own thing and had something unique to their style of game. Once WoW came out, every MMO tried to be WoW down to its mechanics, artstyle, UI and people got sick and tired of it thus killing the genre.
It's funny when a zoomer looks back at WoW fondly and acts like it was somehow not watered down mush made for casuals, and then when someone comes in to correct them, they freak out in a meltdown.
none of them have been trying to capture the magic and atmosphere of dungeons and dragons, they've been blindly copying WoW instead
Because your definition of "soulfulness" is just whatever you enjoyed growing up
Nah I first played WoW when classic came out in 2019 and I was already in my 30s.
that doesn't preclude someone from replicating it
Runes of Magic is sovlful, but absolutely outdated looking.
they keep trying, but they keep failing
They never tried. FFXIV is the most generic formulaic garbage ever made.
FFXIV could've been good if they kept refining the 'let's make a modern FFXI' formula they had in 1.0
sadly Yoshida is a moron and thought it was unsalvageable
You say this but it just kept dropping in population. Meanwhile they got loads of subs with ARR and beyond. I too enjoy'd FFXI's world but its obvious that it wasn't what brought people in to play MMOs. Ease of play (streamlining) is king.They want money, and they got it.
Ease of play and "quality of life" is what destroyed MMO's and video games in general. Games aren't supposed to be some kind of productivity software where the goal is to make it as easy and braindead as possible for the user to use. They're supposed to be obtuse and a big part of the fun is learning how their complex difficult to understand systems work. This is why 90s games will always be better than any of the zoomershit people play today.
I loved Lineage (1) and Ragnarok Online.
While I agree that difficulty is fun, the majority don't enjoy that. And so if they made what you wanted they'd be making no money. $$$ > Your idea of what makes a great game. See what happened to Wildstar, SWG, CoH, Warhammer MMO, etc. etc. etc.
Usually my only complaints after a game being woke are a lack of quality of life and artificial difficulty. Maybe we have different definitions of these terms though.
>lack of quality of life
Poor design that takes up time pointlessly (sometimes done on purpose to timeshare you) or is physically exerting like way too much clicking
>artificial difficulty
Unconquerable challenges meant to be avoided that seriously impact gameplay (a lot of games rely entirely on artificial difficulty though and should be treated differently) and game mechanics otherwise taken out of the players control (dice rolls)
By lack of quality of life I mean not designing your systems and UI so that the dumbest mouthbreathing morons and women who have never played a video game in their life can understand it. These things should be designed for a decently high level of intelligence and learning the systems themselves should be part of the challenge of the game. No modern game does this anymore. Game designers today have the same sensibility as the people designing modern websites and mobile apps and that's a big part of why they suck so much.
1.0 failed exactly because it kept trying to be XI
Interviews with MMO producers and developers are entirely worthless. Doesn't matter what they say, or whether they mean it or not. Economical pressures to recoup development costs will always push MMOs in the same direction: Streamlined design, endgame focus and predatorial monetization.
Because a single whale is worth more than 1000 players with good taste.
Cause they can't really recreate the era and conditions of 1999-2004 when wow was created
Those conditions being you weren't forced to hire unqualified women.
because it wasn't the mmo that you enjoyed, it was the players. those players are now balding and sagging and you can't enjoy anything with them anymore except cringeworthy dad jokes.
play hardcore
its what classic should've been
>oh my le god so heckin' hardcore it's a totally difference way to play wow im so le glad i listened to my fav streamer and started playing. I love playing while watching his streams on my 2nd monitor
Hardcore is a zoomer concept. Nobody back then wanted to play a game that permanently made you start from the beginning if you died once. For some reason zoomers are obsessed with roguelikes which has always been a shit genre and is where that moronic concept originated from.
playing hardcore is the biggest sign of brain damage ever, the drama from deaths is cool though
It's fun
Impossible in today's internet. There was no pressure to perform back then. You could stay level 14 for a week and it didn't matter.
Why couldn't you do that today? Is someone forcing you to beat the game as fast as possible?
Vanilla was a hybrid between a themepark and a sandbox. Everyone decided to only copy the themepark, even WoW is guilty of this since every expansion lost a little bit of that sandbox element.
WoW was pure. It was clear the design team had a vision and the dev team to implement it. Everything since (except gw1&2), has heen designed by the boardroom and implemented by pajeet.
The journey began at level 1. I think some mmos in their early days kinda got that aspect right with trying to make you feel small in a big world, but a lot of them over time either left their low level zones completely barren and underdeveloped or they tried to streamline/skip you straight to endgame entirely. The map and quest design was pretty intuitive to guide you along leveling zones from 1 to around 30, before you started having more open-ended options and requirements to travel across the land and even across the ocean.
it had warcraft 3 behind it
an actual world, history, locations, characters
and now you were in it
everything newer is just artificial world, forced history, fake locations, all constructed for the mmo
make something real, then make the mmo
Is there even a game franchise today with lore and worldbuilding as expansive as Warcraft had in the 90s? Elder Scrolls maybe but it's pretty bland and generic compared to Warcraft.
an mmorpg would take a huge amount of work to develop compared to simpler game types. so it's a bigger risk to take on to develop if it ends up failing and no one plays.
The greater the risk the greater the reward. This is how it's always been. Why can't today's companies understand this?
Because they have yet to release a good MMO
Why would they try to recreate the soulfullness and atmosphere of vanilla WoW when they could try to recreate the superior soulfullness and atmosphere of FFXI?
And why choose either when they can make money instead?
It's true, MMOtards have the shittiest taste imaginable. Just look at what's popular right now.
Lineage was better and more successful
if you really think about it there's not a lot of classic high fantasy mmos. they are all either 2 centuries old or have some wacky gimmicks. even wow has, but it's the closest thing we have to just traditional fantasy setting
>ywn explore Elwyn forest again for the first time
It was such a magical thing
Lineage II and vanilla lotro were very soulful you just don't know.
GW2's exploration beat WoW's by a country mile back in the day. Investigating a random small cave that you spot in the distance while traveling and discovering that it leads to an open vale with a large hill in the middle and finding a fat chest atop the huge tree - that was fun.
Unfortunately there wasn't really more to it back then.
Different angles
Looks like satisfactory
>New MMOs aren't open world anymore
>The internet and discord like services have destroyed the atmosphere of mystery and ingame comradery
There will never be another soulful MMO experience so long as information is uploaded to databases and ingame chat is frowned upon. Wake me up when we get fulldive.
Because the old internet has been long dead. Just going online and playing with other people isn't novel anymore.
>Vanilla WoW
>Soul
One quest hub after another. Rather play Everquest
Why has Vanilla WoW never been able to recreate the atmosphere of Tibia PvP servers?
TIBIA?
Man I wanna play now.
Brazilians can't afford a WoW subscription
It is pretty easy to pay for your sub with the token despite xiv troony screeching, may as well be considered a free to play mmo
Unlike WoW there's a big death penalty in Tibia so the game culture have evolved around it accordingly
The shire from lotro takes a dump on wow its not even close
LOTRO was legitimately amazing. A true competitor to wow in a LOT of ways.
It's still fun to play and quest today.