You can play with friends, but not just matmchmake with randos when your friends are not online or not playing the game at all (or not having friends). You miss the organic moments when you are having a fight in open world, you are loosing and suddenly some dude charges in and saves the day. You can’t join guilds (promissed feature) and engage in a community, potentially make new friends to do the aforementioned activities with so you don’t have to play with randos. You miss the feeling of being a part of greater world, when you just see someone else in the game. Or the ability to ask for help in map chat. Also ongoing support and updates.
Funny you should mention V Rising too because while I’d probably play solo, I’m more likely to find a server to play on along side others than just playing on my own server alone or offline (not sure how this works therr tbh).
Simply put, I’d miss those things you experience in MMOs. Wayfinder was fun when populated. Much less so when there was nobody to play with.
I was promissed an MMO lite that would become an MMO through thr development, but getting a single player game instead. I wish the game and the devs all the luck but I can’t help but feel betrayed - much like majority of gamers who expect single player game but get live service one.
You are asking if it could be same experience as an MMO-lite without being online. Think about it.
Core gameplay will stay, yes. And sounds like they changed quite a bit. But if you were promissed an MMO-lite and are getting a single player game…
I hope that it is notnthe exact same game but offline, because it will not hold up. There are different expectations from a MMO and single player game.
It was popular because it was big MMO launch bu cit was a mess that was best enjoyed from afar. Year after (when I started playing) it got better and I quite enjoyed it. It does some things extremely right (combat is fun, gathering is satisfying, it’s super pretty) but some aspects like questing is medicore.
I also feel like they still don’t really know what they are doing with it, it lacks vision from where I’m standing. I still hope it will somehow thrive though.