So, the article is about gacha MMOs, but then doesn’t list any? Of the games it references, Honkai Star Rail isn’t a MMO, and World of Warcraft isn’t a gacha game.
There’s almost no multiplayer in Honkai Star Rail, though, much less anything approaching what an MMO does. It has asynchronous character sharing and one-to-one chat. That’s literally all the player interaction there is in the core game. Every now and then there’s an event where you can go head-to-head in simple games like match 3.
In the US, if you're moved to another location for that amount of time involuntarily that's an arrest not a detention. Seems the French code gives more police powers than our constitution.
If you feel tempted to try Star Citizen, just go play Elite:Dangerous. You’ll have a much better experience for a fraction of the cost, and still get to do all the things you were hoping to do in SC.
Jesus Christ, he’s still alive?! I haven’t heard that name in years.
For those not blessed with the knowledge of our divine Lord and saviour Derek Smart, God’s gift to fame designers, oh boy, grab your popcorn, this is going to be good.
And by “good” I mean that whatever Derek has come up with will manage to be the most objectively terrible version of that thing possible, and he will aggressively defend it as the greatest thing that has ever happened in the history of everything, ever.
Yeah, I played it for a while between stopping EQ1 and starting WoW when that released. Fun game at the time, but the expansions took a lot away from the experience as they naturally muddled the idea behind it.
Still, an important stepping stone in the progression of MMORPGs, in particular to mass PvP.
And even today there are no other games that do PvP as well as DAoC did. I am playing guild wars 2 and that is as close an experience as I have found in any newer mmo.
My thoughts, exactly. I still have the original game in the box . World of WarCrack captured me for a few years. I still remember the beauty of the world as I ran or rode horse between cities. The pine forests with snow falling was amazing.
I lost interest because I’m a solitary gamer and you really need to be a guild member to enjoy it. That leads to mandatory raids at 2 am, etc., which I just can’t handle.
TL;DR: The game only has two developers, who are also married. Unfortunately, one of them has been diagnosed with cancer, and coupled with the usual 2020 struggles, they don’t have enough money left to pay for active developers.
From the story and their words, they seem really passionate about the project - they are former developers from another MMORPG game. It seems like they are putting the game on “life support”, hoping to see some improvements in the sales. If things don’t change, the project will ultimately be halted.
It makes me sad. I don’t have any interest in MMO games, but they seem genuinely good people who tried their best. And cancer sucks, and seems like it’s late stage too.
Great article. The entangling web of endless progression systems is one piece, but one thing they failed to mention is time gating and daily quests. It’s very important for these games to force you to play a little bit every day, instead of in large chunks all at once. This helps move the game subconsciously in your brain from “a game” to “a habit/a hobby”, and that makes your purchasing decisions very different.
China started drafting legislation cracking down on engagement bait daily tasks a few years ago and some games (like Genshin and other Hoyoverse titles) dropped daily check-in bonuses and made more things reset weekly in response. I think China later backtracked (IIRC the politician pushing the laws fell out of favor?), but not feeling forced to log in every day made those games so much less stressful.
I haven’t played anything in the genre in years, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that crap crept back in again.
I’ve played Genshin almost since the start (took a break for a while) and it’s had daily tasks the whole time. You earn gems and other in-game rewards every day for it. There’s also an additional web-based daily checkin as well.
I’m not sure what you mean. The in-game reward path still has a daily “check in” task for points. And the daily “do 4 tasks” thing is in there, though they’ve opened it up a lot, which I really appreciate. (You can now do quests, open chests, or anything that costs energy to complete them, as well as the standard 4 mini-quests.) And the web checkin is still daily, with only 3 days that you can reclaim by visiting certain pages.
It looks like the game that changed its dailies was Star Rail, not Genshin Impact. Which makes sense: I remember seeing the change in-game but I haven’t played Genshin since around the time of that event in Enk… whatever the underground area is called.
I’m trying to find good articles about it but internet search is abysmal these days, especially for news outside the anglosphere. I did find a forum thread about the Star Rail change as well as a Reddit comment translating and explaining the proposed law though.
The TL;DR of it all seems to be that some time around December 2023, new restrictions were proposed affecting gacha games to curb addicting behavior. The news caused stock prices for affected Chinese companies to plummet, and the person who proposed the law was quickly removed from his position and the proposal dropped.
Ah, yeah, I think I remember that. It was pretty obvious it would be brutal for a lot of gamedev companies there, and I wasn’t surprised at all that it didn’t end up going through.
Man I LOVED GW1. Never really had much chance to play the second, sadly. I still think about playing my Necro in PVP and doing crazy endgame runs. Long time ago…
Second had nice ideas too but very different, not a coorpg anymore and more an actually MMO. PvP was very disappointing, they didn’t keep anything from the 1, probably because it was too elitist. For me the massification made me feel like I was insignificant, I didn’t like it much, I did a bit of the campaign and that’s it.
Yeah it just seemed so different. I actually installed it recently and farted around for an hour or so (recently installed Linux on an old laptop and wanted to see how it’d do), I’m not really planning on going back. Think I already uninstalled. It seemed fun enough, I didn’t like hate it, but I’m not getting into an MMO right now.
Either way, I wanted GW1 and this was quite a departure. I really loved things like the low level cap that were out the window.
It’s definitely not Guild Wars 1, but it does still have a “low level cap” in the way that it’s extremely easy to get to max level doing a variety of content, then the vast majority of content is done at that level. You probably reach level 80 within completing not even 5%-10% of the total available content, so it’s just a number. The way you “advance” your character is through gear and cosmetics, and there’s an account leveling system called masteries you unlock at 80.
“Gaming journalism” did its best to not mention it every time something with kotick came up. Blizzard would release shit about games as a smokescreen. A scandal where Kotick groped a guy in front of an elevator? NEW OVERWATCH 2 DETAILS ANNOUNCED!
I would expect to see this kind of article in 2019 prior to the launch of WoW Classic, not now in October 2023. Classic has had the same mindset that’s pervasive in retail from the very beginning. Everyone rushed straight to 60 and promptly began raidlogging to preserve their precious world buffs. Parsing and speed running in raids was all anyone cared about.
You are right but classic WoW hardcore has really fixed most of those issues because if you rush things you will probably die. Anyway I really agree with this headline because I logged into retail WoW during a thunderstorm because if you DC while you are playing it's basically an automatic game over, anyway I was bored as hell immediately. Retail is all about doing raids and dungeons, which is fun if you like that but I actually enjoy simply leveling in classic hardcore way more, and the best part is I don't have to be logged in for hours at a time leveling unlike in raids.
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