Why does nobody make difficult MMORPG's anymore?

monopolies are a boogeyman. If a better game is developed, people will play it. It's as simple as that.

I'm just waiting for the day it's announced FFXI is shutting down for good. Seems like it will never come though, the game seems to keep making money for SE for minimum upkeep, and as long as it's doing that they will keep it alive.
Will be a sad day for me when they finally shut it down though. I spent so many YEARS of my life playing this game in the 2000s and 2010s. It was practically my entire adolescence.

the demand is there yes, but the supply isn't (good modern RPGs)

MMO genre is dead, anon.
Last and first good MMO was TERA.
Simply because it had actual gameplay. None of the other MMOs have any gameplay, just tab-target mindless tapping for autists.

This. Both WoW and FF XIV still have a lot of players and can make money, while being 10+ old years games both. I think that if some new big and good MMORPG released today it could be a big thing.

I had an okay time and liked the atmosphere but having just gone in for the story scenarios and finished RoV a while ago, ever since whenever I see these I think "maybe I want to check back in and do more stuff in it" but never really do so.
Honestly, I only really know the modern Trust Fantasy experience but I'm not quite sure I would have been into prime XI.
People give FFXIV shit for not being a real MMO, but perhaps that's why it's the only one I ever really cared for (but it being a mainline FF definitely helps).

offline singleplayer XI with trusts would be kinda neat
but idk how you'd handle the AH

I'm sure there already exist ways to mod the game offline, I mean private servers already exist so the game will still exist in some form even after SE ends support.
If only to preserve all the story content and whatnot, you can already play the game almost entirely single player with trusts, I did just that back in 2015 or so with a new character.

Modern MMORPGs are many hundreds of times more difficult than their predecessors when it comes to execution. However, they are also bad MMORPGs. What is truly missing from modern games is not difficulty, it is mystery. The wikification of the internet and the incentives to instantly spoil everything for ad revenue or reddit upvotes has taken away the currency of old games, which was knowledge. MMORPGs were at their peak when a few sober teenagers could lead a group of drunk gamer dads through endgame content. If a new MMORPG truly wants to recapture the old school feeling it needs to be fairly easy to play but with a lot of character/equipment building depth and arcane knowledge checks. This also requires some anti-wiki and anti-reddit technology (randomization, anti-datamining measures, etc). Also, bots and gold buyers are a HUGE problem that need to be aggressively tackled.
The deemphasis of the social aspects of MMORPGs is another big problem but that's harder to fix.

bots and gold buyers are a HUGE problem

it is a real plague in mmos, how to destroy them and make sure they never come back? any mmos who won against bots and buyers? and sellers?

but I'm not quite sure I would have been into prime XI.

It was definitely an experience that was slow paced as fuck and heavily social driven, but there was nothing quite like golden-era XI, and still isn't.

FFXI required you to party with people just to be able to explore the world because some zones were so dangerous you were guaranteed to die if you tried walking through alone. That's the kind of thing modern MMO's are lacking. The actual WORLD needs to be the challenge, not just the dungeon instances that you can teleport to while idling in a city.

I agree with this. DAOC had similar zones and they definitely had a mystique to them that just isn't captured by today's go-anywhere designs.

I played it from 2005 to 2009 and it was quite a ride as the expansions game out. I think I quit sometime after ToAU and I never completed the story for that.
The game was hard as FUCK back then, especially the story missions and battlefields. Man those CoP missions were so fucking challenging, the amount of times I got a party together and we got wiped over and over again doing some of those missions... That airship battle with ultima / omega for example, holy shit that one was hard as fuck

the lvl 75 cap era was such a different game to what it is now. You had to cooperate to get anything done, and it took a while to get a party together just for simple missions and tasks, but everything needed a party even basic story missions you needed help to complete.

There wasn't any other game like it at the time, a game that required true cooperation, it built a special community that other MMOs didn't really have because in many of them like WoW, you didn't need to rely on other people to accomplish your goals, but in FFXI it was absolutely necessary. Even just leveling up needed a good solid coordinated party with different players playing different roles.

FFXI was a knowledge and gear barrier, not particularly difficult but absolutely rewarding. moron pt members made everything worse

whats your best memory of ffxi?

erping with hume females

back to back speed belt drop with my friend after doing it for weeks

you can hard block china, russia, and indonesia, but VPNs exist so that only helps a little bit when combatting sellers. The real solution is to target buyers. One thing that might work is GMs who aggressively target and permaban anyone who buys gold. You have to make people afraid of losing their character.
Sneak oil/prism powder trivialize most zones. While I agree that monsters and some zones were dangerous, actually tackling them with a party wasn't difficult to execute most of the time compared to modern WoW or even FFXIV. Most of the difficulty came from wrangling your retarded party members and making sure your healer wasn't AFK on yet another smoke break.
However, that's actually good for the genre. Most players shouldn't have to be superstars mechanically, and a team full of people who can actually execute a modern raid fight should have no problems dealing with 99% of fights as long as their characters and party are set up properly. Most of the time you're not supposed to have a full party of good players - these games should be made for PUGs.

I think I quit sometime after ToAU

WotG was definitely the beginning of the game's downfall. Rushed 'cheap' expansion release, followed by moving the update cycle to every three months so it took even longer for the main story to eventually resolve. Not to mention they were all hands on deck with making XIV1.0 at the time, which was rushed out well before it was ready.

People think time consuming=difficult

For me? Gotta be gilmage. It's also incredibly funny how many people played it suboptimally when the best set up was /blm or /rdm and wheel spamming rather than melee but I guess I can understand a part of that since it took until around mid to late late wings for them to finally get an omnitool iirc

Me and about 40 others spamming fireworks at Tiamat during CoP, when RMT botted the claim, until the BSTs arrived to throw sand-lions on them, back in the days when uncharmed mobs didn't just disappear, and would slowly walk back to their spawn point/aggro along the way.

Best memories were just the people I met while playing. I was pretty isolated in high school at the time, and FFXI was my escape from it. I didn't have friends IRL but I had friends in FFXI so every day when I got home and could log on and hang out with them it made everything better. I played on Fairy server too, it was a smaller server but it had such a great community of players, some really nice people always willing to help out. When I started playing FFXI again a decade ago I made a new character on Asura, one of the only populated servers left and it was like night and day difference, all the players were with high level characters and had been playing for so long, and no one really could be bothered to help with anything and the only shouts were groups selling monster drops and other shit like that. I did meet a few nice people but it was hard to find friends.

But memories, it was probably just one day when I was wandering south gustaberg going back to Bastok, and there were a bunch of chinese botters camping leaping lizzy, but he spawned as I was running back and I was able to grab him, and he dropped the fucking boots. This was back when you could still sell them too so it was millions of gil which was game changing for me.

Similar thing happened to me with Mee Deggi, I got his Ochimusha Kote one time just as I was doing some mission there and he spawned and I grabbed him before some campers were able too. God those times were satisfying, the campers were so fucking annoying back then and there were so many gilsellers. That said, I am guilty of buying gil from time to time back then too.

it had some pretty notorious raid bosses that were next to impossible to beat.
people fought pandemonium warden for 18 hours and didn't beat it. it had some ridiculously tight timings you had to hit or wipe. like a second for someone in the raid to use a skill with a 2 hour cd so just ping alone made them unbeatable for most

When I replayed FFXI a decade ago, doing all the WotG stuff kind of felt phoned in. The areas were really large, but somehow felt so empty compared to the other expansions, and it was doubly sad because by then (2014-15) the areas were all pretty much dead with no other players around at all.

That said, I still liked some of it, the music was pretty good. I spent a lot of time sitting around in west sarutabaruta (S) camping NMs for the weapon trials and that music really was quite comfy especially stargazing.

Hey remember that lowbie camp?

What if we just added an aggressive high-level NM there for no reason

I don't remember this guy, what is the lore behind him

The issue with most MMO games is they want to chase a larger audience than MMOs need or deserve. They should be aiming at covering running costs and maybe some profit, but they sacrifice what people love about their game for a larger audience alienating their core demographic and players eventually pushing them out to seek other games that maybe have that feel they loved. A fantastic example of this is WoW and it's using Classic to subsidize retail because retail is at best a rollercoaster on rails.

The issue is, people love their easy to play on rails rollercoaster meaning it makes plenty of money, so the integrity or vision of the team gets lost as they choose too or are forced to change ever more profits.

The last hopes of the MMO genre will be Dune or Ashes, if they fall, it's over for at least a generation.

What was his problem?

spawns as you're leveling up in a party, aggros you your party isn't ready, have to flee to the zone entrance with a train of robber crabs and aquarius in tow

they aggro some poor sods that are just sitting afk at the entrance

happened many times

I just want .hack//MMORPG in the 'The World' world

The difficulty is not the gameplay, it's effectively playing this game while having a job, a family and a something that resembles a social life outside of vidya.
This is the case for most old school mmo's, the content was generally easy, it was the absurd amount of time that the devs expected from the players (and the lack of wikis and the like contributed too I guess), there's way harder stuff mechanics wise in more modern games.

WotG was SE sunsetting FFXI to put development resources into 14, a terrible decision in hindsight and an undeserved fate for XI.

People already said this earlier in the thread, but accessibility was a lot of the magic of XI and even WoW. If you have classes/combat that's easy enough for a stay at home cat mom to perform, then there's never any dev caused division in the player-base and difficulty creep that causes them to make 10 different difficult levels. People won't accept easier classes now though, they've been brainwashed into thinking "but I theoretically CAN learn a harder high APM rotation, therefore I WANT it to have fun and there's no other way!!" It's hardcore raider/zoomer brainrot.

It's blue.

purple blue

ToAU's great but the missions were a letdown. It's really sad how few battlefields there actually are and they are all a complete joke except for the final boss where even phase I could wipe you

I never understood this, there's no lighting optical illusion like the meme dress picture, and I know people back then did the color picker to see what the pixel hex was, so why was this ever a debate?

neet-chads can't afford a monthly fee, that's why.

I wanted to play with friends but they were garbage at raids/end game content
I didn't really mesh well with raiders but we could get good gear pretty easy with minimal wipes
Being unable to bridge this gap, I dipped when an expansion gear reset/power creep happened. I did not go through all that effort for no reason when I could have played wand duels with my friends if I didn't want to win...
...but I would want to win those wand duels.
Anyway, I'm not going to pay money to gaff off my shitter friends.

the areas in TOAU were fine, but yeah the story I pretty much remember nothing about it. Honestly it added a lot of stuff that was a chore to do as well and still is today like all the NM farming for mythic weapons and all the nyzul isle shit.

Mechanically, modern WoW is about 10x more difficult than XI ever was.
What XI had, on the other hand (and what modern games are mostly missing) is a focus on community and long-term goals that cumulatively built up your character, as opposed to everything being either seasonal and transient or just a participation trophy.

It was only the areas unique to WotG that had any semblance of interest going on, but even a place as massive as Grauberg, or winding as Vunkerl, had little to fuck all to do in them until late in the expansion's life cycle.

I still want to know what the original plans for Walk of Echoes was supposed to be, since the zone dat was in there since the initial install. Same with ToA's Remnants zones, which got repurposed into Salvage. Didn't help that the whole Campaign setup of WotG fell flat on its face with little to no changes to the zones themselves other than where warp NPCs spawn.

Nvm the times where Campaign initiates in a zone and then you're twiddling your thumbs for 15 minutes waiting on the beastmen to arrive.....or not.

WotG stuff kind of felt phoned in

Man the Shadowreign northlands really highlight this shit Castle Z [S] has fuckall in it. I don't even think the entirety of it even has a single NM

I think people were still slightly hype with WoTG, but the add-on scenarios killed the game I feel. Now looking back and knowing adoulin released so late and knowing SE really did leave this game to die, it's pretty depressing. Still, I don't think WoTG being weak was the end of the world, BUT the way they milked it and dragged it on, feeling like we wouldn't get another expansion. They had main story content for YEARS and the nation-main quest switch off mean you wouldn't see another part of the story for half a year was really awful. Everyone could feel that nothing new for the game was coming.

The most difficult MMORPG you can play right now is having a FFXIV thread on Anon Babble that isn't being marauded by a lunatic spammer who just got banned for a year AND doesn't get removed by a mod or janitor that hates the game

WoW survives due to 2 decades of sunk cost, and FFXIV survives being Second Life for the Japanese and weebs

Every MMO is Second Life once it gets popular enough

WotG was SE sunsetting FFXI to put development resources into 14, a terrible decision in hindsight and an undeserved fate for XI.

I liked how one of the responses to XIV 1.0's failure was to conveniently announce a new XI expansion a year and a half later, realizing they might need to keep it alive for longer.

ultramarine

People who play MMORPGs don't wnat to play multiplayer anymore

I'll never understand why E.Bow was always so expensive. I get that it is strong and rare but by that level you aren't even using Bows anymore because Marksmanship was just outright better

WoW survives due to 2 decades of sunk cost

Sunk cost in terms of time or character? These days, I feel like most people just make new characters every other month because it's that easy to get caught up in level and gear.

Vrising is what modern MMORPGs should look like. Vaultbreakers also looks promising. Foxhole even.
Non-MMORPGs are often better MMORPGs than actual MMORPGs.

You can't define what a "MMORPG" is without making comparisons to WoW. It always boils down to how similar the game is to WoW.

The audience isn't there. A lot of former FFXI and EQ players I know have either moved on away from MMOs in general or moved on to newer ones and while they themselves look back fondly on it, they do not have the time or desire to go through that kind of game again.
The issue is that you can chart out the average age for the MMO player in a straight linear line going upwards. The zoomers/younger audience that would have time to sink into that kind of game aren't interested and the older audience don't have the time.

WoW made the genre more accessible to casual play. Lasting, meaningful consequences were taken away. When they found they could pump heroin into junkies who wouldn't fight back, the entire industry shifted towards completely rewarding players. The model would be, and is now: return for a reliable, constant drip. Dailies. Theme park queuing. Gear obsolescence. All industries gravitate towards efficiency. Efficiency has no soul.

at least they made Aldouin a pretty solid expansion.

One time my friend had been camping Kreutzet for days and when it was finally up I showed up with some of his friends to kill it, but they were all NINs and MNKs so they fed it so much TP it could spam its AOE nuke, and whenever Kreutzet does one nuke it does three in a row, so they all took a fuckton of damage super fast. I was RDM and spamming heals but it wasn't enough and they all died. I bound and poisoned it and, with very little HP or MP, rested. They were all panicking and trying to figure out what to do, but I told them to just wait. Over the next 10 minutes, I kited it while it slowly died to poison. It collapsed right in my face before it could attack. The Sirocco Kukri dropped and I raised everyone so my friend could lot on it. They thought I was the greatest RDM ever but I know good RDMs could do the same to much tougher mobs.

He paid me back, though. One day he was on RNG in sky and our LS made him wide scan for Zipacna while we, on the other side of the entire region, camped for Despot. It took so long for Despot to pop that half the alliance had fallen asleep and everyone got their asses kicked. Eventually Despot turned to me and it looked like no one could really fight him at the moment so I turned to run and thought, "Welp, I'm fucked." First hit tore through Stoneskin. Second hit did half my HP. I braced for a third hit - SHADOWBIND. I looked around and my friend was off in the distance. He heard Despot was up and ran all the way across the island to fight it, saw I was eating shit and saved me at the last second.

Honestly, I have a million FFXI stories, but as time goes on I worry I'm forgetting all the good ones and still remember all the bad ones.

Pre-WoW MMORPGs really don't matter. Even the WoW playerbase is beginning to hit their 40s.

This nigger went full retard, lmao

implying people's age makes them not matter

One day, you will be old.

He's so close to right it makes you wonder if your mother dropped you on your head. WoW killed MMOs by changing them into something saccharin

modern audiences don't really want that sadly.
they just do not have the patience to spend time slogging their way up like the old days.

Old MMOs appealed to people who wanted to play a multiplayer game and go to an RP chat room at the same time, but nowadays you can chat with people while playing any game. It's not that the audience no longer exists, but it's been pilfered by other genres and an MMO can't succeed in living up to its appeal without eclipsing a certain number of players.

It also doesn't help that MMOs have gradually catered more and more to the minority of hardcore players who treat the genre like a single-player experience they can show off in. That wasn't the intention of original MMOs, they were meant to finally bring co-op and an immersive world to VRPGs, just like what exists in TTRPGs. I don't know what all this "raid boss" shit is.

I have tons of great memories of FFXI, but the top was getting to Sky for the first time, having only seen one very tiny picture on khazam of one part of genbu's platform. It really was incredible, the surprise and the scale of the zone really made it feel like an adventure.

A person related story: I had static with a THF in it, and I (a mnk) had gotten the ToD for western shadow, and the respawn would have been in the middle of the night, like 3 or 4 AM. So I login in the middle of the night, and THF was there waiting for me to help me kill it/treasure hunter. Cross counters dropped, and he insisted I keep them and use them instead of sell them and split the price (I think they were 2 million at the time) and I was blown away by his generosity and selflessness to wake up in the middle of the night for me.

This entire genre was never difficult. It was built from the ground up for casuals. I don't even know what "difficult" refers to. The combat is not execution heavy. The enemies stand in one fucking spot spamming the same attack animation over and over until they're dead. What the fuck are you talking about OPbwo?

Two biggest moments for me were making it to jeuno at level 20 (after dying once trying to make the trip the day before) and soloing sea horror as dragoon because of this fucking video:

youtu.be/VFDKMwb7Lug

Not only is that not how most mmo combat works, the combat is the easiest part. It's avoiding the combat or jumping through the hoops that boss battles presented. Basing your perception on tripping over a level 5 mob is fucking retarded.

just trudging around the world.
i've always really enjoyed seeing the areas and what they had in corners of the map.
the slow pace of everything was always very calming to me.
youtube.com/watch?v=P9C2FhoSEKo

The difficulty was the world itself and in the fact you could hardly get anything done without a party.

There is ZERO player skill in this games and you know it. But you'll keep your gymnastics going as an attempt but it'll only make you look more delusional

Fishermen apparently

Read I'm not the guy you're arguing with, but nobody actually gives a fuck about player rotations and DDR in MMO's, that's modern cancer. Newer MMO's are more "difficult" and they're worse for it, there's nothing to be proud of by playing a game that takes more "skill", you retarded troon.

never be proud of anything in your life, you might upset some fat faggot on the internet

I already am old and out of touch. There's nothing wrong about admitting that.

Because the audience for these now has a job, a family or just died

Because most succesful MMOs are either subscription based (Imagine losing days without being able to progress because your build isn't just right for a mandatory boss) or F2P/P2P (Same ass issue but now you feel like the devs want you to buy level skips)
You're kinda cucked to shove challenge to completely optional chunks of the game

choose to play a game

"um ackshually, you NEED to play a game where you click a button 90 times a second, because I, a 19 year old who thinks anyone cares, will call you unskilled if you don't"

Is there a private version of FFXI with all the expansions but none of the bullshit spirits you can summon?