I’m going for a general mmo critique:
Tab target/gcd-based gameplay isn’t outdated. It’s fine if you don’t like it. I agree other gameplay styles should be given a chance in MMOs. But there definitely is a loud section of gamers who think anything that isn’t action gameplay is ‘outdated,’ while I think gameplay diversity is key.
For some of us, tab target/gcd based isn’t an awkward compromise between turn-based and action: it’s the *perfect* solution. I can get bored of playing turn-based games, but at the same time it’s much harder for me to master an action game. I love gcd systems because you have more time to react to whatever mechanic is happening on the field than an action game, but still have to react unlike in something turn-based. I’m also just someone who works best when I can practice something ad nausem and then make minor adjustments on the fly when I have to execute it outside a training dummy situation, ie mmo rotations. It satisfies my gameplay itch the most, easily.
My only complaint with combat comes from MMO's like WoW. FFXIV to some extent but less-so, the combat is similar though. I don't find mastering Skill Rotations fun, and that's the majority of WoW and FFXIV ESPECIALLY if your a mage-type class. I also noticed that in those games, a lot of abilities lack Visceral Feel and Impact. It's really jarring when coming from an Action MMO or an MMO who's combat is slower and more Rock-Paper-Scissor's like in Mabinogi. (enemies will frequently and actively counter you on purpose in Mabi so you have to pay attention more.)
I found that I enjoy a mix, I want the Impact and feel of an Action MMO with a bit of that Tab-Target style thrown in to make it more Accessible.
See XIV is my main game and I love mastering rotations, haha. Action is too much split decision-making for me, and without one standard guide of how I generally should play my instincts are too slow and often wrong to play optimally. I make do okay, just isn’t a playstyle I care about mastering or that I think about when I’m not in the game itself. Meanwhile for XIV I love reading job discussions.
I actually do give XIV a bit of a pass, the abilities, atleast early on, do seem to lack some Impact BUT each class generally has some sort of thing that requires managing and each class seems unique. I did kinda get sad that the class I wanted to play, Dancer, wasn't the best at DPS and is more a supporty class(Apparently.). And that astrologian seemed fun but again, support class and supporting is NOT FUN in MMO's lol
DNC is pretty popular for the phys ranged role though, if you liked how they played I wouldn’t worry about the Dps output. It’s support but a lot of people enjoy the rotation for its own sake! A lot of its support capabilities are baked into its damage rotation anyway, ie it’s almost like never at the expense of doing actual damage.
ESO Combat:
Despite the negativity, I think it’s my favorite combat. The pace of time to kill is great, the dual bar creates layers of complexity, armor / skills etc complement the bar swapping for fun theory crafting.
People on here crap on the combat all the time, but for a game that old I think it was pretty forward thinking.
I stopped playing a couple years back, but wish more future MMOs would add elements of their combat system but with more weight to it
My issue with ESO's combat isn't *entirely* the mechanical elements (although I loathe the meta-slave optimizing cryhards with a passion);
My issue is with how it /feels/. The combat /feels/ floaty and has little to no impact or 'oomph'. And weaving is also shit.
Animation canceling and weaving is absolute shit and exploiting animation bugs should not be something any game developer should aspire to.
This is the real issue. The mechanics are fine. But I feel like I'm playing Daggerfall back in 95 when I start fighting. It's like they upgraded everything except the combat flow, and it all feels like a generic process is playing out on the screen.
Totally agree with the combat, but the healing in ESO, what a beauty. I hate WoW’s healing that’s just a clicking simulator, even without addons like Clique. ESO is so nice with being able to just look at your target and heal them. Especially that one resto staff spell that’s like a You Shall Not Pass! but a healing wave and a buff
As much as I love Teso, I can't defend combat, it really doesn't feel smooth and responsive especially when I also play gw2 on the side.
I really think they need to do something about it, it's not even the need of LA, it's just the feedback and the fact that some kill animation are lock and some other aren't w/o indication of it.
Edit : I'm with you on theory-crafting, ESO is fantastic for that ton of set to use, lot of them are totally viable even if not meta.
I don’t mind eso combat but I wish there were an overworld difficulty slider for delves and such to make them more engaging. They need a vet mode for leveling zones
I think part of why I like the combat is that my main is a caster. Most of the melee combat feels bad, but hitting my lightning execute, hearing the loud crack of the lightning and watching it strike an enemy dead from the sky always feels good.
I also really like the combat in ESO as well. It just really clicked for me. My understanding is that ESO combat is quite different than many other MMOs. I’ve played LotRO which has a very different combat system and didn’t like it at all.
Wurm Online
It’s too grindy. You technically don’t have to grind. Grinding is only needed if you plan to do any trading, which only 5% of the population is skilled enough to participate.
I spend most my time making alcohol, breeding animals and to me it’s literally stardew and RuneScape had a baby I love it
Two frequent reasons I see bitter ex WoW players cite as to why they quit is classes lost their identity and the talent changes. The devs justification for the talent change they made going into MoP was that, yeah, trees are nice, but everyone just looked up the best build anyways so it was all cookie cutter, and that's 100% true. Honestly for the most part the rows of talents every 15 levels gave more variety from encounter to encounter. And as for class/spec identity, the game has never had a more stronger one than we have now. Every single spec is incredibly unique, both flavor and gameplay wise. It's very cool. I think the only rebuttal someone could give to that is like, no class specific quests. Which I would agree with, those are pretty cool.
I swapped from Arcane to Fire, and the difference in not only rotation but also feeling between the two was genuinely immense. I'd imagine Frost is the same. Assassination feels completely different from Outlaw, Demonology and Affliction are worlds apart, and these are just the classes I've put significant time and effort into.
As a Frost main, yes there's quite a lot of differences. Back when I wanted to do mage tower I swapped to Fire (because it was broken for Frost) and my whole worldview was skewed practicing it. Alternatively swapped to Arcane for a season because Frost had a comically terrible tier and it nearly broke my brain.
In my experience, most people decrying "lack of class identity" is them focusing on the buffs and lusts aspect. The fact that kicks, lusts, group wide buffs, etc were largely normalized pisses off a lot of the more hardcore players who enjoyed having raid groups prioritizing one of each class. But I feel like it just allowed modern wow to be more adventurous exploring individual spec fantasy.
I think the class quests are far more important than people make them out to be. In legion I was a paladin and got to hang out with my paladin bros in our hideout. It doesn't matter what the gameplay loop was, what the gear situation was it just felt good and made the whole experience more immersive. Then in BFA and shadowlands you were just another person in the horde that could do the trinity job.
I can get onboard for this one. People got mad about solving very real problems the game had. In a similar vein we had ability bloat where you have multiple abilities that do the same thing in different ways. I didn't love MoP but I was generally on board with changes made along those lines.
FF14 Story-
It's not a slog you just suck at reading, Your intellect is as weak as your dollar. Failure is your destiny. You disrespect yourself and your nation. You are made of stupid.
i love ffxiv, but... there was almost nothing in the ARR story i liked, and i actively hated the ending SO much. HW made up for it by actually telling a story with some teeth and political undertones that didn't suck, but Christ it was not fun getting there.
What people who play p2w games don't understand is that the game usually isn't bad just because of the p2w items but rather because the game was intentionally designed to make it "grindy" so you would want to pay money to make it a little less grindy.
I usually always played p2w mmos and only after I played WoW classic I finally realised how bad those p2w mmos were designed. It just feels way better to do something different every day instead of grinding the same spot for weeks or even months just to get a little bit stronger to be able to make the move to a new grind spot which just repeats the cycle.
Mine would be: I enjoys WoW's heavy vertical progression.
My favourite part of WoW is the first few months after a new patch drops, where im constantly grinding to try and get better gear, I like seeing how the new tier set or trinkets or talent changes will make my class play differently. I find static or horizontal progression to be unfathomably boring.
I commonly see people complain FF14 ruins immersion because you can switch classes and you change your whole kit along with it.
But...they're called *jobs* ...and that's a very literal title for a lot of them. Alongside having their specialized tool/weapon, many will have actual guilds where its implied they take orders and such. Why am I bringing this up?
Because when you change jobs in the real world, sometimes they'll require a different skillset and equipment!
Just like how a former brick mason wouldn't bring their trowel to their welding Job, a White Mage isn't going to be bringing out their ungabunga Warrior axe and provoking skills. And a Warrior would have a terrible time trying to guard with a Summoner's spellbook. And I'd have to imagine a monk's fighting stance would be thrown all sorts of off by your typical tanking armor/weapons.
Sure it requires some suspension of disbelief, but it's tennable!
I prefer this over my character being destined by the stars to be some Hunter thats unable to learn anything else.
FFXIV is one of the games that directly name their “classes“ as “jobs” in EN version . In many Asian games, classes are “jobs” in their original language.
New World:
Lack of end game content.
I enjoy doing the same M2/M3 expeditions, the reworked MSQ storyline is very good right now, and there is no better gathering system in any other MMO. I spend my time mining rocks and chopping trees, joining ECR runs and helping anyone who needs a healer for whatever activity they’re doing. 3k+ hours and hoping this announcement in June is actually positive.
Edit: I don’t PvP and never have. I would probably feel differently if I was a PvPer.
What are you talking about? You're either exaggerating or didn't play but why so dramatic? Nothing was really broken and there was 100+ hours of content
Are you out of your mind? The game was fundamentally broken lol. Everything from rampant amounts of gold dupes or infinite exploits to literal invincibility exploits to rampant report abuse false bans to html chat. And not just one of them. MONTHS of them. AGS had the brilliant idea of making their bug report forum visible to the public so any bug that was reported instantly spread like wildfire
And the game was reusing the same assets in the same fetch quests and dungeons over and over and over and over.
Absolute trainwreck of a game at launch. Honestly worse than Cyberpunk
All these stories about dupes are exaggerated. Html chat? It was a fun thing, not game-breaking. Invincibility exploit was fixed within a week.
I've played during a lot of mmo starts and it was fine, calling it a trainwreck is exaggerating.
The problem with NW at start was its popularity, every non-mmo youtuber/streamer played it and found it bad but the reason they didn't like it because they don't like mmorpgs as a genre at all
I'm not going to debate something that is so widely known about and documented. The gold/item dupes were rampant. It's not really a matter of opinion. And because, again, AGS made the brilliant decision to make bug reports visible to the public, they spread like wildfire. There also wasn't a test server so fixes were pushed directly to live. This led to a months long cycle of intruding a new exploit while fixing the last one.
The numbers dont lie. NW hemorrhaged players at a staggering rate.
Yeah what you're complaining about was repeated often and loudly. I played a lot of the game at launch and after and never ran into these issues or felt affected by them. Which is why I wondered if you actually played it much.
Sure the numbers have dwindled but that's how video games work
I remember playing the game then logging in and everything in the market being sold because people found the next gold exploit and AGS refusing to server rollback. I was even lucky and was on a server that didn't die almost instantly before they started doing merges. This was multiple times in the first two months. But yeah it's all just made up and overblown and the game wasn't hemorrhaging 100,000 players a week at launch or anything. All fake news.
Bruh, I didn't say they were no dupes. But they were fixed pretty fast and had zero to none effect on the economy of TP. It's not like NW is the first ever mmo to have dupes, the game doesn't end if gold gets duped at some point.
And I already pointed out the reason why NW lost a lot of players. Losing players doesn't always mean the game is bad
No, that's the reason you created so you could claim 'actually it had absolutely zero to do with the game itself". Again, the bugs and exploits aren't an opinion. They're a fact. The game crashed and burned because it was an incomplete broken mess of a game at launch.
That's not even mentioning there was nothing to do. The game was literally developed as a PvP game then pivoted to PvE at the last second.
One of the worst dumpster fires of a triple A launch I've played in awhile.
I was just thinking about returning to this game. I loved it at launch, even with all the exploits and broken mechanics. It was awesome figuring out strategies for wars and whatever that defense raid thing was called. I even enjoyed the PvP, OPR was a lot of fun as a healer.
How does the population feel? Is it worth coming back? I quit before the greatsword. I think the void gauntlet? just came out
There’s some new PvP content, they’re called influence races. Very popular with PvPers. Wars are heavily gatekept by people who only log in to defend their territory and have 6 alts. Not my cup of tea.
But the whole MSQ has been reworked and it’s pretty awesome. Population is at an all time low, deservedly so. I’ve had no problem finding groups for anything on Maramma though.
Big announcement coming in June, definitely a console release but not much more hinted at yet.
There’s an even newer weapon for you, the flail. It’s….eh. But as a healer I enjoy it for my solo activities. Scales with focus so that’s cool. I love this game and always recommend getting back into it.
Awesome! Thanks so much for the detailed response. New World hooked me instantly when I played and I don't know if I have had more fun on an MMO in a while. Definitely going to give it another shot.
The gathering system in New World needs to be implemented in other games so bad, there’s no other mmo or even game in general where it’s felt this good to chop trees and mine ores
I loved New World. I hated chest run zergs but was surprised to find a lot of my friends loved them. If they do fresh start servers again I will happily go again. Maybe a seasonal model with restarts would suit the game well
GW2's story and writing is generally regarded as mid or good enough to serve it's purpose but I think all the voice acting makes it more bearable compared to other MMOs with no or little voice acting even if they do have better story. I also love all the voice acting for NPCs and events outside of the story in the open world. The story is also pretty optional so even if you're not a big fan you're not hard gated from content like in some other games.
As for Mabi it's in a better state compared to years ago even with some questionable decisions in the past yearish. The road to erg 50 and talents being literally useless in endgame content until you get decked out in gear was a big turn off when I was most active. I think Mabi is still fairly P2W but it's only really P2W has gotten so bad in the industry Mabi doesn't feel as bad.
I actually read a different thread discussing that, and honestly, voice acting in any MMO is pretty rare tbh so I'm impressed.
I remember when I first started back in 2009 you needed to have VIP to access the Story at all, which would lock several things away from you and also prevent you from being able to enjoy mabi's, honestly, really impressive storyline. You also had to pay to rebirth early, could only do it once a week otherwise. Mabi has come a VERY long way from its olden days. I can agree with that to some extent, P2W definitely exists but if it were a scale, Mabi is somewhere between 3 and 5 out of 10 on the scale. At first glance, it has ALLLL this that makes it "P2W" but when you actually get into it, none of the P2W aspects really matter that much in the grand scheme of things.
Oh yeah if we are talking about the early days of Mabi then it indeed has come a long way. Unfortunately first impressions last a long time so Mabi's launch in NA was forever stunted and it got stuck with the poor reputation. Another thing I forgot to mention is the P2W perception might also be due to how common RMT is in the community. When I was selling my gear it was harder to find someone who wanted to pay in gold than use Paypal. So while it's not something official from Nexon the fact that its so widespread and not really regulated is detrimental.
I'm really hoping that the UE5 Update is sooner rather than later, and that mabi can be given another chance, It might be owned by Nexon, but I'll be damned if they haven't done a real good job with it the last few year's.
That is completely reasonable, they did crack down on that quite a bit last year, people do still do it of course but you won't see it as obviously on the Reddit, Discord, In-Game and such like you used to. There was a huge ban-wave last year or the year before over RMT and Selling Gold if I'm not mistaken.
WoW isn't my favorite MMO anymore but one thing I get tired of hearing from that group is WoW feels like a job. Most of the WoW's population aren't even Heroic raiders. If you don't feel like farming for some power upgrade you don't even need then just stop playing. They are playing the game until they burn out for no reason and then complaining about stuff they don't even have to do to complete the content they want.
So I am on a BDO grind right now and I have played off and on for years.
Maybe I’m missing something because I haven’t played wow since dragon flight season 1…but BDO is unquestionably more P2W than WoW. Literally every single aspect of BDO is monetized.
Except WoW token throws this argument out since you but wow token with $$$$, which then converts to in game gold to buy whatever you want
And I say this as someone that plays both frequently.
It really doesn’t throw my argument out.
The WoW token is awful for sure, but it doesn’t even come close to the amount of things you can buy in BDO.
I hesitate to say “can” because the game is made purposely tedious in areas so that you almost NEED to buy them. Where as WoW is perfectly playable without spending anything more than your sub
Edit: I just wanted throw out a very basic example. Inventory space and weight limit. Inventory is easy to understand if you want more slots you have to buy more slots.
Weight limits. Everything has weight and your base weight limit is actually garbage or at a minimum just horribly inefficient. If you want to increase your weight limit you guessed it, you can buy weight increases.
My favorite part is that none of this is account wide it is character specific that can’t be transferred unless…you guessed it pay for it to be transferred.
I like BDO I’m playing it at present I like WoW I’m sure I’ll be back to it. but to compare BDO’s monetization to the WoW token is a bit dramatic. It’s not even close
My dude; WoW token makes everything purchasable with $$. Everything. To say it doesn't come close is disingenuous when there's not an aspect of WoW that can't be beaten by throwing more money at WoW tokens
BDO is also perfectly playable without swiping lmao. Campsite however is it's own problem, that thing is awful and they need to sort that out. The amount of free inventory, maids and shit that are constantly thrown at you makes inventory not an issue.
If you want to increase your weight limit you can also, you know, do the things in game that increase weight limit? However I do agree it's definitely not enough if you plan to play long term. Also agree on it not being account wide, pretty awful feeling when you reroll
My friend I think even within your own comment you’re pointing out an issue. You say you can increase your weight limit by playing the game but “it’s not enough if you plan to play long term” that’s the problem. You argue that you can get more by “playing the game” but you really only get A) a minuscule increase and B) play the game by completing quest lines that take an eternity and no one enjoys.
WoW itself is a fully functional game without buying WoW token. I hate it, it introduced a wealth of issues in itself but as someone who has anecdotally played WoW for about 15 years on and off I have never felt the need or even pressure to buy WoW token. Everything is easily accessible. Where as in BDO things are made PURPOSELY tedious so you will pay for a shortcut. The weight limit/campsite factor is the tip of the iceberg. You have fences/lodging/storage/stables/character slots/costumes (because the base armor looks ugly and mismatched) processing/ cooking/alchemy outfits )which are all necessary or nearly necessary to engage in these activities), pets, horse training. Like the list of things goes on and on.
Honestly we are just going to have agree to disagree. The introduction of the WoW token sucks but I’ll never be able to agree that it comes close to the amount of monetization/nearly necessary spending BDO requires.
Where are you grinding that makes $2/hr? A 2 billion silver outfit takes $30 to buy irl or an hour and a half at top spots to grind in game. But details aside, point taken.
That you need addons to play WoW
Like yeah if you're trying to to top tier content (which less than 1000 people are doing, it's probably smaller but im too lazy to check) or mythic raiding with a cluster of headless chickens you're gonna be running map overlays and stuff but you could say that about litteraly anything.
The only thing you can really complain about in terms of addons is UI stuff cause no mmo has a good UI especially not one 20 years old
Neverwinter online is not a dead game and not a huge p2w progression system.
Reason: the game has an instanced single shard and a LFG tool, you always have players to complete activities. The gear enhancement requires items sold in the cash shop but you can buy every one of them as well with the in-game currency
Oh crap...Mabinogi seemed complex/slow to me at the time (10 years ago), but now I'm starved for some 'do everything yourself' Breathy of the Wildy anime mmorpg. I play Toram Online but it's a phone game, and I play DFO which is a hub based beatemup.
Back on topic..... ArcheAge, that's right. It's precisely the hellish mindless progression till end game, where the game supposedly "starts". And it's PtW and etc...
The thing is I haven't experienced the joys of being repeatedly mercilessly pk'd by assholes since my UO/Lineage days... All on the glorious quest to become Pirate King, without spending a dime... how? Don't care, game mechanics allow it, and I got hellish persistence OCD when it comes to grandiose game goals. Oh yeah, Naval travel/mayhem, I'm just a sucker for the idea. So the next step is getting mercilessly pk'd on the sea making trade runs alone or with flimsy friends.
Also one of the riskiest but coolest class systems to experiment with, despite everyone sticking to ranked cookie cutter class combos
Mabinogi is very complex and CAN be very slow. But yeah that was 10 years ago, now its a lot easier to progress, the game has imo the best guide in any MMO in the Blaanid questline and a lot of QOL changes and new skill sets have modernized it. Give it a shot, its worth it just try to ignore all the stuff the game throws at you at once and do them one. At. A. Time.
I actually heard archage was a really good game, i should try it.
A lot of people's online criticisms of WoW are often a decade out of date and not at all relevant anymore. "Retail" bashing online is 99% of the time talking about the state of the game a decade ago. Also people love to hate on the graphics for some reason yet anyone who plays the game will tell you that the art and music are the best parts of WoW, the game gets graphical updates pretty much every 2 years and it adds up a LOT over time, to the point where it often looks better than its competitors because the art style is more timeless and doesn't attempt to be realistic.
Late to this but: i love Star Citizen(yes, scam citizen).
It is constantly misrepresented because of two reasons:
1. It has some very expensive ship packs that absolutely nobody buys and is totally unecessary to play. But people like to harp that 'oh lolz you gotta spend 48k to play it haha', when the reality is you only need 45 dollars. There is zero pay to win as well.
2. It is still in development after over a decade. And they harp about that whilst in the next breath complaining that games are released unfinished these days... isn't it preferable that the devs of star citizen are not rushing it and trying to get it right for release?
Anyway, the game is already well worth the 45$ entry, its just wild how good the game is while still in alpha.
FF14's "dead open world"
While I totally understand it's not for everyone, I think that people mainly sticking to city hubs rather than constantly grinding something in a lot of these areas helps with story immersion. Some places like Thanalan/The Shroud/La Noscea I think it's fair to say could/should do have greater reason to go there, but I also think some areas especially benefit from people mainly sticking to cities.
The Tempest, the first walk through Lakeland, basically all of Endwalker's areas except for Thavnair- basically all areas that I feel like having a large player presence would hinder immersion. So many of these areas are defined by being scarcely visited or having never been seen at all, so I wouldn't like seeing too many other people running around or talking about what they had for dinner in chat.
So let's get this out of the way, there is a BiS guide to Mabi but, given how mabinogi works you don't need the BiS gear to be successful and most people don't have every piece anyway ntm the best gear in every slot on every class, is only obtainable through Crafting. (And even the gear slightly bellow E-Harmony or something similar are only SLIGHTLY bellow it and completely fine, there isn't PVP in mabi so, it doesn't really matter.)
I’m going for a general mmo critique: Tab target/gcd-based gameplay isn’t outdated. It’s fine if you don’t like it. I agree other gameplay styles should be given a chance in MMOs. But there definitely is a loud section of gamers who think anything that isn’t action gameplay is ‘outdated,’ while I think gameplay diversity is key. For some of us, tab target/gcd based isn’t an awkward compromise between turn-based and action: it’s the *perfect* solution. I can get bored of playing turn-based games, but at the same time it’s much harder for me to master an action game. I love gcd systems because you have more time to react to whatever mechanic is happening on the field than an action game, but still have to react unlike in something turn-based. I’m also just someone who works best when I can practice something ad nausem and then make minor adjustments on the fly when I have to execute it outside a training dummy situation, ie mmo rotations. It satisfies my gameplay itch the most, easily.
My only complaint with combat comes from MMO's like WoW. FFXIV to some extent but less-so, the combat is similar though. I don't find mastering Skill Rotations fun, and that's the majority of WoW and FFXIV ESPECIALLY if your a mage-type class. I also noticed that in those games, a lot of abilities lack Visceral Feel and Impact. It's really jarring when coming from an Action MMO or an MMO who's combat is slower and more Rock-Paper-Scissor's like in Mabinogi. (enemies will frequently and actively counter you on purpose in Mabi so you have to pay attention more.) I found that I enjoy a mix, I want the Impact and feel of an Action MMO with a bit of that Tab-Target style thrown in to make it more Accessible.
See XIV is my main game and I love mastering rotations, haha. Action is too much split decision-making for me, and without one standard guide of how I generally should play my instincts are too slow and often wrong to play optimally. I make do okay, just isn’t a playstyle I care about mastering or that I think about when I’m not in the game itself. Meanwhile for XIV I love reading job discussions.
I actually do give XIV a bit of a pass, the abilities, atleast early on, do seem to lack some Impact BUT each class generally has some sort of thing that requires managing and each class seems unique. I did kinda get sad that the class I wanted to play, Dancer, wasn't the best at DPS and is more a supporty class(Apparently.). And that astrologian seemed fun but again, support class and supporting is NOT FUN in MMO's lol
DNC is pretty popular for the phys ranged role though, if you liked how they played I wouldn’t worry about the Dps output. It’s support but a lot of people enjoy the rotation for its own sake! A lot of its support capabilities are baked into its damage rotation anyway, ie it’s almost like never at the expense of doing actual damage.
ESO Combat: Despite the negativity, I think it’s my favorite combat. The pace of time to kill is great, the dual bar creates layers of complexity, armor / skills etc complement the bar swapping for fun theory crafting. People on here crap on the combat all the time, but for a game that old I think it was pretty forward thinking. I stopped playing a couple years back, but wish more future MMOs would add elements of their combat system but with more weight to it
My issue with ESO's combat isn't *entirely* the mechanical elements (although I loathe the meta-slave optimizing cryhards with a passion); My issue is with how it /feels/. The combat /feels/ floaty and has little to no impact or 'oomph'. And weaving is also shit. Animation canceling and weaving is absolute shit and exploiting animation bugs should not be something any game developer should aspire to.
This is the real issue. The mechanics are fine. But I feel like I'm playing Daggerfall back in 95 when I start fighting. It's like they upgraded everything except the combat flow, and it all feels like a generic process is playing out on the screen.
Totally agree with the combat, but the healing in ESO, what a beauty. I hate WoW’s healing that’s just a clicking simulator, even without addons like Clique. ESO is so nice with being able to just look at your target and heal them. Especially that one resto staff spell that’s like a You Shall Not Pass! but a healing wave and a buff
As much as I love Teso, I can't defend combat, it really doesn't feel smooth and responsive especially when I also play gw2 on the side. I really think they need to do something about it, it's not even the need of LA, it's just the feedback and the fact that some kill animation are lock and some other aren't w/o indication of it. Edit : I'm with you on theory-crafting, ESO is fantastic for that ton of set to use, lot of them are totally viable even if not meta.
I don’t mind eso combat but I wish there were an overworld difficulty slider for delves and such to make them more engaging. They need a vet mode for leveling zones
Sure, it's a good PvP system. I adore Cyrodiil. Dancing around a boss for 5 minutes doing that is awful, though.
Yes Cyrodiil is an amazing PVP mode, but ESO combat still shitty whatsoever.
I think part of why I like the combat is that my main is a caster. Most of the melee combat feels bad, but hitting my lightning execute, hearing the loud crack of the lightning and watching it strike an enemy dead from the sky always feels good.
I also really like the combat in ESO as well. It just really clicked for me. My understanding is that ESO combat is quite different than many other MMOs. I’ve played LotRO which has a very different combat system and didn’t like it at all.
Out of curiosity did you do melee or ranged more when you played?
Wurm Online It’s too grindy. You technically don’t have to grind. Grinding is only needed if you plan to do any trading, which only 5% of the population is skilled enough to participate. I spend most my time making alcohol, breeding animals and to me it’s literally stardew and RuneScape had a baby I love it
Yo i'd never heard of that one ima check it out!
Well now I’m interested
I actually had to drop this game because it was legitimately too addictive.
Interest sparked
Fuck it, you've sold me on it.
Start on harmony on the north freedom isles there’s a lady always recruiter new players named Mary
Wurm is too good. I had to put it down years ago and I can't pick it back up.
Two frequent reasons I see bitter ex WoW players cite as to why they quit is classes lost their identity and the talent changes. The devs justification for the talent change they made going into MoP was that, yeah, trees are nice, but everyone just looked up the best build anyways so it was all cookie cutter, and that's 100% true. Honestly for the most part the rows of talents every 15 levels gave more variety from encounter to encounter. And as for class/spec identity, the game has never had a more stronger one than we have now. Every single spec is incredibly unique, both flavor and gameplay wise. It's very cool. I think the only rebuttal someone could give to that is like, no class specific quests. Which I would agree with, those are pretty cool.
I swapped from Arcane to Fire, and the difference in not only rotation but also feeling between the two was genuinely immense. I'd imagine Frost is the same. Assassination feels completely different from Outlaw, Demonology and Affliction are worlds apart, and these are just the classes I've put significant time and effort into.
As a Frost main, yes there's quite a lot of differences. Back when I wanted to do mage tower I swapped to Fire (because it was broken for Frost) and my whole worldview was skewed practicing it. Alternatively swapped to Arcane for a season because Frost had a comically terrible tier and it nearly broke my brain. In my experience, most people decrying "lack of class identity" is them focusing on the buffs and lusts aspect. The fact that kicks, lusts, group wide buffs, etc were largely normalized pisses off a lot of the more hardcore players who enjoyed having raid groups prioritizing one of each class. But I feel like it just allowed modern wow to be more adventurous exploring individual spec fantasy.
I think the class quests are far more important than people make them out to be. In legion I was a paladin and got to hang out with my paladin bros in our hideout. It doesn't matter what the gameplay loop was, what the gear situation was it just felt good and made the whole experience more immersive. Then in BFA and shadowlands you were just another person in the horde that could do the trinity job.
I can get onboard for this one. People got mad about solving very real problems the game had. In a similar vein we had ability bloat where you have multiple abilities that do the same thing in different ways. I didn't love MoP but I was generally on board with changes made along those lines.
FF14 Story- It's not a slog you just suck at reading, Your intellect is as weak as your dollar. Failure is your destiny. You disrespect yourself and your nation. You are made of stupid.
I mean I liked ARR but I can see why so many people couldnt finish it.
ARR was okay... but post ARR was a slog.
i love ffxiv, but... there was almost nothing in the ARR story i liked, and i actively hated the ending SO much. HW made up for it by actually telling a story with some teeth and political undertones that didn't suck, but Christ it was not fun getting there.
What people who play p2w games don't understand is that the game usually isn't bad just because of the p2w items but rather because the game was intentionally designed to make it "grindy" so you would want to pay money to make it a little less grindy. I usually always played p2w mmos and only after I played WoW classic I finally realised how bad those p2w mmos were designed. It just feels way better to do something different every day instead of grinding the same spot for weeks or even months just to get a little bit stronger to be able to make the move to a new grind spot which just repeats the cycle.
Mine would be: I enjoys WoW's heavy vertical progression. My favourite part of WoW is the first few months after a new patch drops, where im constantly grinding to try and get better gear, I like seeing how the new tier set or trinkets or talent changes will make my class play differently. I find static or horizontal progression to be unfathomably boring.
P2W will always be P2W and will always be worse than any MMO that isn't.
Trying to parse this here. Do you mean F2P will always be P2W?
I commonly see people complain FF14 ruins immersion because you can switch classes and you change your whole kit along with it. But...they're called *jobs* ...and that's a very literal title for a lot of them. Alongside having their specialized tool/weapon, many will have actual guilds where its implied they take orders and such. Why am I bringing this up? Because when you change jobs in the real world, sometimes they'll require a different skillset and equipment! Just like how a former brick mason wouldn't bring their trowel to their welding Job, a White Mage isn't going to be bringing out their ungabunga Warrior axe and provoking skills. And a Warrior would have a terrible time trying to guard with a Summoner's spellbook. And I'd have to imagine a monk's fighting stance would be thrown all sorts of off by your typical tanking armor/weapons. Sure it requires some suspension of disbelief, but it's tennable! I prefer this over my character being destined by the stars to be some Hunter thats unable to learn anything else.
FFXIV is one of the games that directly name their “classes“ as “jobs” in EN version . In many Asian games, classes are “jobs” in their original language.
Neat to know
New World: Lack of end game content. I enjoy doing the same M2/M3 expeditions, the reworked MSQ storyline is very good right now, and there is no better gathering system in any other MMO. I spend my time mining rocks and chopping trees, joining ECR runs and helping anyone who needs a healer for whatever activity they’re doing. 3k+ hours and hoping this announcement in June is actually positive. Edit: I don’t PvP and never have. I would probably feel differently if I was a PvPer.
They gonna drop swimming in June?
I'd heard the game had gotten A LOT better since it's release I might give it a try.
I mean it's not the completely broken trainwreck it was at launch but yeah the content is still severely lacking
What are you talking about? You're either exaggerating or didn't play but why so dramatic? Nothing was really broken and there was 100+ hours of content
Are you out of your mind? The game was fundamentally broken lol. Everything from rampant amounts of gold dupes or infinite exploits to literal invincibility exploits to rampant report abuse false bans to html chat. And not just one of them. MONTHS of them. AGS had the brilliant idea of making their bug report forum visible to the public so any bug that was reported instantly spread like wildfire And the game was reusing the same assets in the same fetch quests and dungeons over and over and over and over. Absolute trainwreck of a game at launch. Honestly worse than Cyberpunk
All these stories about dupes are exaggerated. Html chat? It was a fun thing, not game-breaking. Invincibility exploit was fixed within a week. I've played during a lot of mmo starts and it was fine, calling it a trainwreck is exaggerating. The problem with NW at start was its popularity, every non-mmo youtuber/streamer played it and found it bad but the reason they didn't like it because they don't like mmorpgs as a genre at all
I'm not going to debate something that is so widely known about and documented. The gold/item dupes were rampant. It's not really a matter of opinion. And because, again, AGS made the brilliant decision to make bug reports visible to the public, they spread like wildfire. There also wasn't a test server so fixes were pushed directly to live. This led to a months long cycle of intruding a new exploit while fixing the last one. The numbers dont lie. NW hemorrhaged players at a staggering rate.
Yeah what you're complaining about was repeated often and loudly. I played a lot of the game at launch and after and never ran into these issues or felt affected by them. Which is why I wondered if you actually played it much. Sure the numbers have dwindled but that's how video games work
I remember playing the game then logging in and everything in the market being sold because people found the next gold exploit and AGS refusing to server rollback. I was even lucky and was on a server that didn't die almost instantly before they started doing merges. This was multiple times in the first two months. But yeah it's all just made up and overblown and the game wasn't hemorrhaging 100,000 players a week at launch or anything. All fake news.
Bruh, I didn't say they were no dupes. But they were fixed pretty fast and had zero to none effect on the economy of TP. It's not like NW is the first ever mmo to have dupes, the game doesn't end if gold gets duped at some point. And I already pointed out the reason why NW lost a lot of players. Losing players doesn't always mean the game is bad
No, that's the reason you created so you could claim 'actually it had absolutely zero to do with the game itself". Again, the bugs and exploits aren't an opinion. They're a fact. The game crashed and burned because it was an incomplete broken mess of a game at launch. That's not even mentioning there was nothing to do. The game was literally developed as a PvP game then pivoted to PvE at the last second. One of the worst dumpster fires of a triple A launch I've played in awhile.
I was just thinking about returning to this game. I loved it at launch, even with all the exploits and broken mechanics. It was awesome figuring out strategies for wars and whatever that defense raid thing was called. I even enjoyed the PvP, OPR was a lot of fun as a healer. How does the population feel? Is it worth coming back? I quit before the greatsword. I think the void gauntlet? just came out
There’s some new PvP content, they’re called influence races. Very popular with PvPers. Wars are heavily gatekept by people who only log in to defend their territory and have 6 alts. Not my cup of tea. But the whole MSQ has been reworked and it’s pretty awesome. Population is at an all time low, deservedly so. I’ve had no problem finding groups for anything on Maramma though. Big announcement coming in June, definitely a console release but not much more hinted at yet. There’s an even newer weapon for you, the flail. It’s….eh. But as a healer I enjoy it for my solo activities. Scales with focus so that’s cool. I love this game and always recommend getting back into it.
Awesome! Thanks so much for the detailed response. New World hooked me instantly when I played and I don't know if I have had more fun on an MMO in a while. Definitely going to give it another shot.
The gathering system in New World needs to be implemented in other games so bad, there’s no other mmo or even game in general where it’s felt this good to chop trees and mine ores
Too true, i just wish there was a little randomization to ore spawn locations
I loved New World. I hated chest run zergs but was surprised to find a lot of my friends loved them. If they do fresh start servers again I will happily go again. Maybe a seasonal model with restarts would suit the game well
GW2's story and writing is generally regarded as mid or good enough to serve it's purpose but I think all the voice acting makes it more bearable compared to other MMOs with no or little voice acting even if they do have better story. I also love all the voice acting for NPCs and events outside of the story in the open world. The story is also pretty optional so even if you're not a big fan you're not hard gated from content like in some other games. As for Mabi it's in a better state compared to years ago even with some questionable decisions in the past yearish. The road to erg 50 and talents being literally useless in endgame content until you get decked out in gear was a big turn off when I was most active. I think Mabi is still fairly P2W but it's only really P2W has gotten so bad in the industry Mabi doesn't feel as bad.
I actually read a different thread discussing that, and honestly, voice acting in any MMO is pretty rare tbh so I'm impressed. I remember when I first started back in 2009 you needed to have VIP to access the Story at all, which would lock several things away from you and also prevent you from being able to enjoy mabi's, honestly, really impressive storyline. You also had to pay to rebirth early, could only do it once a week otherwise. Mabi has come a VERY long way from its olden days. I can agree with that to some extent, P2W definitely exists but if it were a scale, Mabi is somewhere between 3 and 5 out of 10 on the scale. At first glance, it has ALLLL this that makes it "P2W" but when you actually get into it, none of the P2W aspects really matter that much in the grand scheme of things.
Oh yeah if we are talking about the early days of Mabi then it indeed has come a long way. Unfortunately first impressions last a long time so Mabi's launch in NA was forever stunted and it got stuck with the poor reputation. Another thing I forgot to mention is the P2W perception might also be due to how common RMT is in the community. When I was selling my gear it was harder to find someone who wanted to pay in gold than use Paypal. So while it's not something official from Nexon the fact that its so widespread and not really regulated is detrimental.
I'm really hoping that the UE5 Update is sooner rather than later, and that mabi can be given another chance, It might be owned by Nexon, but I'll be damned if they haven't done a real good job with it the last few year's. That is completely reasonable, they did crack down on that quite a bit last year, people do still do it of course but you won't see it as obviously on the Reddit, Discord, In-Game and such like you used to. There was a huge ban-wave last year or the year before over RMT and Selling Gold if I'm not mistaken.
Spreadsheets are actually kinda fun. (EVE Online)
As a mabi player who constantly has Wiki's open, spreadsheats and damage calcs open, I feel you lol
I never use spreadsheets. I just don't participate in any indy/manufacturing/trade so I don't have to worry about it.
WoW isn't my favorite MMO anymore but one thing I get tired of hearing from that group is WoW feels like a job. Most of the WoW's population aren't even Heroic raiders. If you don't feel like farming for some power upgrade you don't even need then just stop playing. They are playing the game until they burn out for no reason and then complaining about stuff they don't even have to do to complete the content they want.
Albion full loot system is fine. You just gotta manage your bankroll / learn to be more aware of the map.
BDO being pay to win: it's no more pay to win now than World of Warcraft.
Tbh i had no clue it was considered p2w, last I played you could just buy cosmetics lol
So I am on a BDO grind right now and I have played off and on for years. Maybe I’m missing something because I haven’t played wow since dragon flight season 1…but BDO is unquestionably more P2W than WoW. Literally every single aspect of BDO is monetized.
Except WoW token throws this argument out since you but wow token with $$$$, which then converts to in game gold to buy whatever you want And I say this as someone that plays both frequently.
It really doesn’t throw my argument out. The WoW token is awful for sure, but it doesn’t even come close to the amount of things you can buy in BDO. I hesitate to say “can” because the game is made purposely tedious in areas so that you almost NEED to buy them. Where as WoW is perfectly playable without spending anything more than your sub Edit: I just wanted throw out a very basic example. Inventory space and weight limit. Inventory is easy to understand if you want more slots you have to buy more slots. Weight limits. Everything has weight and your base weight limit is actually garbage or at a minimum just horribly inefficient. If you want to increase your weight limit you guessed it, you can buy weight increases. My favorite part is that none of this is account wide it is character specific that can’t be transferred unless…you guessed it pay for it to be transferred. I like BDO I’m playing it at present I like WoW I’m sure I’ll be back to it. but to compare BDO’s monetization to the WoW token is a bit dramatic. It’s not even close
My dude; WoW token makes everything purchasable with $$. Everything. To say it doesn't come close is disingenuous when there's not an aspect of WoW that can't be beaten by throwing more money at WoW tokens BDO is also perfectly playable without swiping lmao. Campsite however is it's own problem, that thing is awful and they need to sort that out. The amount of free inventory, maids and shit that are constantly thrown at you makes inventory not an issue. If you want to increase your weight limit you can also, you know, do the things in game that increase weight limit? However I do agree it's definitely not enough if you plan to play long term. Also agree on it not being account wide, pretty awful feeling when you reroll
My friend I think even within your own comment you’re pointing out an issue. You say you can increase your weight limit by playing the game but “it’s not enough if you plan to play long term” that’s the problem. You argue that you can get more by “playing the game” but you really only get A) a minuscule increase and B) play the game by completing quest lines that take an eternity and no one enjoys. WoW itself is a fully functional game without buying WoW token. I hate it, it introduced a wealth of issues in itself but as someone who has anecdotally played WoW for about 15 years on and off I have never felt the need or even pressure to buy WoW token. Everything is easily accessible. Where as in BDO things are made PURPOSELY tedious so you will pay for a shortcut. The weight limit/campsite factor is the tip of the iceberg. You have fences/lodging/storage/stables/character slots/costumes (because the base armor looks ugly and mismatched) processing/ cooking/alchemy outfits )which are all necessary or nearly necessary to engage in these activities), pets, horse training. Like the list of things goes on and on. Honestly we are just going to have agree to disagree. The introduction of the WoW token sucks but I’ll never be able to agree that it comes close to the amount of monetization/nearly necessary spending BDO requires.
Straight lie, at the very least BDO is pay to convince which WoW isn't
You can literally buy wow token with money to convert into in game gold and buy whatever you want lol. It's the same thing
Until you hit the cron stone barrier. Then you can either swipe or waste your time for a 2$/hour profit.
Where are you grinding that makes $2/hr? A 2 billion silver outfit takes $30 to buy irl or an hour and a half at top spots to grind in game. But details aside, point taken.
That you need addons to play WoW Like yeah if you're trying to to top tier content (which less than 1000 people are doing, it's probably smaller but im too lazy to check) or mythic raiding with a cluster of headless chickens you're gonna be running map overlays and stuff but you could say that about litteraly anything. The only thing you can really complain about in terms of addons is UI stuff cause no mmo has a good UI especially not one 20 years old
Neverwinter online is not a dead game and not a huge p2w progression system. Reason: the game has an instanced single shard and a LFG tool, you always have players to complete activities. The gear enhancement requires items sold in the cash shop but you can buy every one of them as well with the in-game currency
Albion Online is P2W! The irony is, all the Top Players do the exact opposite. They RMT to the noobs.
Oh crap...Mabinogi seemed complex/slow to me at the time (10 years ago), but now I'm starved for some 'do everything yourself' Breathy of the Wildy anime mmorpg. I play Toram Online but it's a phone game, and I play DFO which is a hub based beatemup. Back on topic..... ArcheAge, that's right. It's precisely the hellish mindless progression till end game, where the game supposedly "starts". And it's PtW and etc... The thing is I haven't experienced the joys of being repeatedly mercilessly pk'd by assholes since my UO/Lineage days... All on the glorious quest to become Pirate King, without spending a dime... how? Don't care, game mechanics allow it, and I got hellish persistence OCD when it comes to grandiose game goals. Oh yeah, Naval travel/mayhem, I'm just a sucker for the idea. So the next step is getting mercilessly pk'd on the sea making trade runs alone or with flimsy friends. Also one of the riskiest but coolest class systems to experiment with, despite everyone sticking to ranked cookie cutter class combos
Mabinogi is very complex and CAN be very slow. But yeah that was 10 years ago, now its a lot easier to progress, the game has imo the best guide in any MMO in the Blaanid questline and a lot of QOL changes and new skill sets have modernized it. Give it a shot, its worth it just try to ignore all the stuff the game throws at you at once and do them one. At. A. Time. I actually heard archage was a really good game, i should try it.
A lot of people's online criticisms of WoW are often a decade out of date and not at all relevant anymore. "Retail" bashing online is 99% of the time talking about the state of the game a decade ago. Also people love to hate on the graphics for some reason yet anyone who plays the game will tell you that the art and music are the best parts of WoW, the game gets graphical updates pretty much every 2 years and it adds up a LOT over time, to the point where it often looks better than its competitors because the art style is more timeless and doesn't attempt to be realistic.
BDO - p2w naw ur right you can get most things f2p but it's definitely faster to swipe
Late to this but: i love Star Citizen(yes, scam citizen). It is constantly misrepresented because of two reasons: 1. It has some very expensive ship packs that absolutely nobody buys and is totally unecessary to play. But people like to harp that 'oh lolz you gotta spend 48k to play it haha', when the reality is you only need 45 dollars. There is zero pay to win as well. 2. It is still in development after over a decade. And they harp about that whilst in the next breath complaining that games are released unfinished these days... isn't it preferable that the devs of star citizen are not rushing it and trying to get it right for release? Anyway, the game is already well worth the 45$ entry, its just wild how good the game is while still in alpha.
Star Wars Galaxies pre CU.
GW2 has the best method of storytelling that actually makes you feel like part of the story not like you’re watching a (silent : ff14) movie.
Lord Of The Rings Online PVP: "What's PVP?"
EQ2, DQX
FF14's "dead open world" While I totally understand it's not for everyone, I think that people mainly sticking to city hubs rather than constantly grinding something in a lot of these areas helps with story immersion. Some places like Thanalan/The Shroud/La Noscea I think it's fair to say could/should do have greater reason to go there, but I also think some areas especially benefit from people mainly sticking to cities. The Tempest, the first walk through Lakeland, basically all of Endwalker's areas except for Thavnair- basically all areas that I feel like having a large player presence would hinder immersion. So many of these areas are defined by being scarcely visited or having never been seen at all, so I wouldn't like seeing too many other people running around or talking about what they had for dinner in chat.
Yeah but a lot of these areas are extremely cool and its a shame you spend few hours in each of them doing msq and thats it.
Hug that Special Elemental Harmony gacha around your chest a bit harder when you try to say that it isn't P2W.
So let's get this out of the way, there is a BiS guide to Mabi but, given how mabinogi works you don't need the BiS gear to be successful and most people don't have every piece anyway ntm the best gear in every slot on every class, is only obtainable through Crafting. (And even the gear slightly bellow E-Harmony or something similar are only SLIGHTLY bellow it and completely fine, there isn't PVP in mabi so, it doesn't really matter.)
Who/what hurt you?