/vr/ - Retro Games

>>8679685
No. And that’s a good thing. MMOs are expensive and studios want to please shareholders so they will never go back to taking risks or forcing cooperation.

>>8679685
In a way, probably, but MMOs themselves have been destroyed and shall not return in thier purest form unless there comes a way to produce them cheaply enough that they can be sustained by the niche audience that enjoys the trials and hardhips they offer in exchange for the glories and long-term experiences.

>>8679698
Pantheon rise of the fallen is the last hope

You know what would make this gay-ass generic fantasy RPG so much better? Playing it with thousands of other greasy neckbeard nerds just like me!

cash shops ruined all hope for the genre

there, I said it

>>8679685
The next revolutionary MMO will be played at once-dead arcades. It will use specifically designed cabinets with player authentication held on a physical HID-like card and there will be no home based version of the game. Players will be forced to arrive at the arcade together to play together, groups will be formed between arcade players, and MMOs will achieve a level of interaction between players not seen since arcades were in full swing, as players will be forced to associate with one another in person.

This will play out in one of two ways. Either real life social mores will take over and the local communities will wind up quite pleasant to be around, or the communities will devolve into the most insular cliques with ostracization of each other not seen since high school. Either way, it will be an incredible social experiment. Imagine being branded as a "bad" player IRL and never getting a competent group for any real content.

>>8679740
>or the communities will devolve into the most insular cliques with ostracization of each other not seen since high school
It'll be this one. It won't even take long. Literally the first week the game comes out you'll get this.

>>8679712
Last time I logged into EverQuest they had a cash shop and were selling gay, trans, and nonbinary rabbit pets. I wish I was joking. I hate this timeline.

>>8679685
hopefully not because mmorpgs are a shit genre
i know it's supposed to be for meeting friends and the like which is fair but the genre itself is just grindy and lame
play jrpgs instead

>>8679764
who hurt you

>>8679787
a guy in anarchy online called me a n00b for playing a nanomage martial artist
i hated mmorpgs ever since

No, social media killed MMOs

EQ was good because of the kind of people who used the internet back then. It's like why web 1.0 and MUDs were good. The internet going mainstream ruined everything nice forever.

>>8679695
>MMOs are expensive
not really anymore expensive than any other game these days, and games are only expensive because they all think they need hyper realistic assets where the simplest model takes a team of 12 pros a week to produce

original EQ style models with modern lighting and materials are all you need

>>8679685
is all the same shit

i miss it so much, bros...

>>8679816
In that regards, it's less a problem of the given game and more a problem with the existing audience.

>>8679685
Get with the times, gramps.

Is there any version of Ultima Online that's decent? I watched a few videos on it and it seemed cool.

>>8679880
>what are server farms?

>>8679749
fwiw the timeline hates us too.

>>8679685

I'm just glad to be free from this genre. Since everything original is shit these days I hope more get the DQX treatment instead of years of top developer content being lost to the abyss. No reason to waste a bunch of high quality OSTs behind a genre that gets muted anyways so you can listen to your buddies get serious.

>>8680060
sad seeing how much art has regressed

>>8680067
>every mmo has millions of subscribers
most mmos are hosted by 3rd parties

>>8679685
Yes, as soon as AI assistance advances to the point that you can just tell it what you want in plain ebonics and it makes it for you

>>8679695
This, and also the only studios with enough money and resources to even attempt a modern MMO have no fucking clue how to make a good one (see: New World).

>>8679808
Nah, social media is just the MMORPG for normies, who grind internet points for a better virtual life. It doesn't affect the classic players.

>>8680060
>>8680092
It's not that people don't know how to draw, it's that they don't know *what* to draw. Their references are generic as fuck. Might as well train an AI to make all that and save the effort.

I do, yes. I think the return of MMOs is the natural progression for Genshin Impact-style games, once phones are able to handle it.

wish the everquest name would get bought up by someone who actually wants to do something with it instead of getting traded around by venture capitalists who want to milk the cash shop

The golden age of mmos from roughly 1999-2007ish is something that will never be replicated in the age of social media, data mining, and microtransactions. Too much autistic minmaxing and efficiency slaves (not that this wasn't always there, but seems like it was much more fringe) and not enough focus on exploration, experimentation, and actually socializing. Maybe it's just me being a salty boomer but seems like people are more jaded nowadays and the novelty of being able to play this huge fantasy game with people all over the world just isn't there anymore like it was 20 years ago. I'm not sure what it would take to capture that magic again

>>8679880
Yeah, it's kind of sad, you can't experiment when you're dumping $300,000,000+ USD on assets alone. You're forced to play it safe. Games from that era didn't have to worry about selling 10 million+ copies just to break even.

>>8679685
you can still play FFXI after all this time so it doesn't matter. no other MMO matters

>>8679709
All different kinds of people played EQ back in the day. Memes like you didn't exist yet.

And that's the main reason it can't be replicated. It is not possible to simultaneously appeal to such a wide range of players anymore, because there are so many other options. Instead of having 20 different player mindsets you'll have 3.

>>8680325
ffxi classic progression server when

>>8680329
Never. There are incompatibilities between the modern backend and the snapshots of the various expansions.

Hasn't DAoC been promising an official classic server for like 10 years now?

whatever happened to asheron's call?

>>8680329
they had no version control, so they have no data to use to help them do it

with their existing small team, it just seems like it will never happen

MUDs are the answer, the barrier to entry is low, no graphics and minimal coding is needed with open codebases such as diku. A small studio of mostly writers can make a large world.

MMORPGs are literally real-time MUDs, down to being operable from command line. I want more multiplayer action RPGs like PSO2.

>>8679816
Web 2.0 was pushed by internet companies to justify charging by the MB

>>8680414
Um, I can guarantee you they have database snapshots from every period. And considering that all content that ever was in the game still is in the game and works, I have no idea wtf >>8680338 is talking about. Even if we pretend that they lost all those snapshots in a godzilla attack, how much effort would it really be to have one guy manually tag content with their era? A couple weeks of work?

The reason you'll never see a FFXI progression server is because SE is ashamed of the game and is hoping it'll just die off quietly.

>>8681739
>a company kept old database schemas for a cloud-based product
Tell me you're not a software dev without telling me.

>>8681821
you're just using words without understanding what they mean, anon

>>8681826
ok buddy

>>8679685
Probably not. No one plays them but Koreans and other people that have played them for years and years (which isn't a lot in terms of the gaming market) and they are very expensive to make and host (especially in the long term), especially with the eternal BUT MUH REALISTIC GRAPHICS plague. Unless it's some weird decentralized MMORPG or a MUD, that genre is pretty much dead.

>>8680073
>Damn, that white girl got some big titties. That ass is nice too.

>>8681862
>very expensive to host
There are private servers with hundreds, even thousands of concurrent players being hosted on $15/month servers

>>8681870
This. If DDO players are willing to put up with ssg’s budget Indian servers, then an equally niche game would be fine with them too.
>DDO servers
They really are terrible, though.

>>8681870
The issue is less the cost of servers than maintenance and customer support.

>>8679685
it died in like 2011 time to grind in the gym bucko

>>8681967
...which is paid for by subscription fees

also these days CS is usually outsourced fyi

MMOs literally peaked with Ultima Online and EverQuest.

WoW was just a derivative of both. It replaced camping and fighting mobs over and over with running and killing mobs and collecting X and Y.

Video killed the radio star
Live service killed the MMO star

>>8681978
Most people in mainland China and Hong Kong don't know a lot of English, or for that matter, any related tongue, if at all.

>>8682013
But MMO’s are live services by definition and pioneered the model. So they killed themselves?

>>8680308
The only place you find these qualities anymore is Souls games, and they do this by intentionally obfuscating the social component, which seems counterintuitive at first but it works to dampen some of the mass autism of youtuber build minmaxing. Maybe the WoW classic numbers will inspire someone to put out a product with some actual care again, because Blizzard's effort was the laziest shit imaginable, and they still raked in the money.

>>8682141
Yes, raid finder was its death knell. A race to the bottom that killed the genre.

>>8680060
The art became more WoW-like

>>8679703
not only is pantheon vaporware, every time they talk about new features the game sounds less like a retro mmo and more like modern game-y artificial trash

and why would a small team go for realism? it massively inflates the cost and development time and it's still going to look like shit compared to AAA studios investing hundreds of millions in their games

this isn't rocket science, if you don't have the talent and money to compete in realism you go for an artistic style

>>8679685
Nope, from now on all you'll get are WoW clones and asian cash shop lobbies.

>>8679685
Was EQ actually good, though? Novel, sure. Even compared to UO it was a way more immersive experience. But good? The UI was extremely lacking, quite a few design choices were the definition of anti-fun fuck medding, you could waste *literal days* trying to find a group and an open camp just to exp, and the end game (if you ever got there) was just guilds getting babysat by GMs as they argued over who gets to engage the easily killable dragon.

>>8680329
I wish, recently did a full playthrough of the game's story but it just wasn't the same running around steamrolling everything with a group full of npcs... Had a lot of fun just exping with pugs back in the day but there's no way to do that on live servers, the few that still play as max everything and do nothing but ambuscade...

Even if they made a progression server it wouldn't be the same, there aren't any mysteries left in the game and most of the playerbase would be jaded faggots who have played for decades...

>>8679740
Already happened but you missed out. I still have my nesica card from Round1 from a few years ago when the servers were shut off

MMORPGs will never be good again, even if the devs / publisher was based the players would find a way to ruin it for everyone.

>>8680060
Wow, this left a bad taste
Why is modern fantasy so obsessed with making everything oc donut instead of classical but it all ends up looking like joe mad style but soulless, like warcraft or warhammer.
It's static, no storytelling, no depth, no weight in that image, just checkmarks on a list.

>>8683247
the original EQ team had a vision but they were all gone by GoD, they ended up with a team who couldn't give 2 shits about EQ and the game became a clusterfuck of conflicting narratives and art styles and mechanics and over the top bad writing and your character has to be the canonical hero saving the world from destruction and other """epic""" garbage

I'd say they forgot the D&D sprit that EQ was based on but the people who inherited the game never had that in the first place

>>8683308
It's easier to subvert than to create. That's the problem with all corporate owned IPs, they keep changing employees with every iteration and eventually you end up with sequels that would make the original developers puke.

>>8683329
Its not inherently the corporate part, its also an issue about who is calling the shots at the top.

>>8682604
>>8683247
The "WoWification" of fantasy art. For the lack of a better way to describe it.
Personally I like cartoony art styles, but something about WoW's insistence on, just as one example, big goofy ugly impractical armor, just always rubbed me the wrong way.
It feels so weird that the top pic is closer to the 80's fantasy look than it is to 2004.

>>8681826
> you're just using words without understanding what they mean, anon

no, anon. you are.

FFXI's would need server software, client software, and matching database information... none of which did they keep through version control.

>>8684468
no, anon, that original post was full of misused jargon

also your dumb, they already have a client and a server and all the information is already in the database, all they need to do is filter the database by era like literally every other progression server in MMOs does and yes, they have database snapshots for ever expansion to automate 99.9% of the process

>>8683149
>Was EQ actually good, though?
Yeah kinda.
Most of your criticism is accurate, and there's plenty more I could add (although I disagree with you on the nature of the end game. Maybe if you were fires of heaven or whatever but has a 2nd/3rd tier guild it did kind of suck to compete with other guilds but there was no GM babysitting and plenty of raids were exciting and challenging.

The combat was (and is) solid and robust. Aside from pathing issues (which are really terrible in the early areas), and general lack of sophistication-- emphasis on aggro-management and enchanter-driven crowd control over other forms of tactical gameplay, combat is great. The basic combat rules are very clear, with only a few gotchas that are easily-learned early on (like enemies walking through walls). The controls are solid. You can very reliably predict what your character will do based on your inputs, and enemy behavior is represented as clearly as you could expect from a server-based online game in 1999. The enemies hit hard. You're punished for mistakes and have to coordinate effectively together with other players to prevail.

I could go on for days shitting on various aspects of Everquest's designs, mechanics, and emergent problems but I won't honestly say it's a bad game. Part of the reason why I can shit on it so hard is that I know it so well because I liked playing it so much. I spent a lot of time playing and thinking about it.

>>8682604
For me it's not just the WoW influence. It's the lack of personality. In some cases I think the upper image looks a little awkward, but overall it's full of soul and detail, from the landscape itself to the pose and expression on each character. In the upper image, several characters have dramatic expressions that say something, maybe about the situation or their personality. In the lower image, every character wears a generic expression. The upper image depicts a harsh, sub-arctic boreal forest wilderness under a vividly clear blue sky in a proper realistic perspective. I don't know what that gnome shit is. The bottom image just looks like generic fantasy background filler around the edges complete with little wildflowers flowers in the grass, a twisty tree that looks like it belongs in an arid biome, with mountainous fantasy landscape and cumulus clouds. The combat looks more natural but less interesting and subtle. It has lots of colorful nice-looking detail but it's largely devoid of meaning or significance beyond some "cool looking depictions of characters from the game".

(For the record, I don't mind WoW's art style at all, I like it for WoW and I am not going to blame WoW for some artist's poor imitation of the style. But it is annoying how everyone copies it, ESPECIALLY Everquest which was a direct competitor back in the day with a very different feel artistically. Though to be fair, I hated EQ2's look).

>>8683247
>It's static, no storytelling, no depth, no weight in that image, just checkmarks on a list.
Exactly.

>>8684880
>there was no GM babysitting and plenty of raids were exciting and challenging
lol yes there was on my server the gms forced all the raid guilds to agree on a raid calendar, you were literally just waiting weeks for your turn to kill the dragon

and raids weren't exciting and challenging, with very few exceptions the fight mechanics were limited to one or two AoEs, dispels, and DTs which was basically an admission of "we don't know how to make a fight legitimately challenging so lol tank dead"

>>8684976
I'm not saying they didn't exist at all, I'm just saying they didn't exist for me.
>>8684976
>and raids weren't exciting and challenging, with very few exceptions the fight mechanics were limited to one or two AoEs, dispels
Non sequitor. High DPS and a couple of AoEs is all it took for a fight to be exciting.

>>8684998
you have very low standards for exciting if doing an in/out ever 30 seconds gets you hard

>>8684509
dude, you have no idea of what you're talking about. they've literally stated they don't have the information anymore.

20-50% of older content has been changed in the interim. it would be a massive undertaking their skeleton crew simply cannot do.

>that guy who always shows up in old MMO threads claiming that he played "meridian 59 the first mmo" because he saw some youtube video on it but he's unable to answer even the most basic of questions that anyone who actually played it would know the answer to

>>8682536
WoW Classic showed you can bring back the old game and the way it feels, but you can't bring back the old playerbase.

>>8684914
I don't mind WoW's art because the fact of the matter is, no one copies it correctly. Only WoW (and obviously Warcraft 3) does the WoW look right.

>FFXI
>playing BST
>join pug
>NOOOO BST IS A SOLO CLASS WHY WOULD YOU INVITE ONE
>proceed to outdps the rest of the group combined

MMO players have always been autistic retards.

>>8685602
BST was secretly kino leveling job but underrated as fuck. Also if you ran a parser it was obvious that 9 out of 10 players in FFXI had no idea what the fuck they were doing, you're talking an order of magnitude difference between a good player and a bad player on the same job.

Just miss my Tibia bros from 20 years ago

>that autotraining minstrel in DAoC that tries to sneak into your exp group thinking you won't notice

how broken are most of these old games now that you can easily run multiple instances of the client and play 2+ characters at once?

You were supposed to evolve into a different direction, not just single player RPGs you could play with online friends, but, a dream, a dream you could find in certain novels or a TV show now and then, maybe an anime, something that would convey a story, and a world, and not just grinding or farming or whatever it is you spend time on, something besides that, but you never figured did you, all this time and you never came up with a single thing you could do besides killing monsters all day for gold and exp. There was a time once, when man could care for something else besides that. Those days are long since over.

>>8685602
>>8685613
beastmaster? more like basedmaster

>>8685645
Everquest was always more fun to play that way. There was an infamous retard who 6-boxed wizards and would brag about having the highest single target DPS server-wide on the foh forums.

>>8680062
UO is currently in a new golden age with UO outlands. It blows the official servers to shit as well as any freeshards since. I've been going hard on it since I feel like it will be the last hurrah for the greatest mmo of all time.

>>8685952
>wizard
>highest single target dps

lol maybe on ultra short duration fights

also he'd have way more dps dropping one for a bard

>>8685995
With 6 wizards most fights are short duration. During the brief period before the manaburn nerf, 6 wizards could instagank raid bosses.

>>8686020
hahaha, no, not even close anon, depending on the boss they'd be between 0% damage (shit ton of resistant raid bosses) and significantly below a geared melee dps with adps support

>>8685952
>>8686020
Here's the thing about EQ, anon. The vast majority of people didn't parse and they just assumed they were doing good damage because they saw a big number pop up now and then. Tryhard players were rare until the post-WoW era even in "top" raiding guilds, which weren't so much top because of player skill as they were player time invested.

If you actually looked at the parses, wizards were bad to mediocre dps on raids until, like, TSS. The only thing 6 wizards would be good for is ganking named mobs, and even then 1 wizard would be just as good since in the early days of EQ kill credit went to the group of the individual that did the most damage, not the group that did the most damage.

>>8685602
>>8685613
>>8685743
beastmaster? more like beastmaiter

thanks christ

>>8680067
Every game runs on server farms these days though. This is another complaint for a different thread, but no one can run their own server for CoD or whatever. It's all run by the company.

>>8686047
Sontalak specifically was a Velious raid mob that Manaburn wizards would gank, because you could gain faction to be not KOS. I don't remember exactly how many wizards it took, but they would all just go hang out under his belly and then hit manaburn simultaneously.
>>8686059
Raid parses almost always showed Wizards doing respectable damage, sometimes even taking the top spot (due to the importance of aggro management and positioning/timing for wizards, damage output on a raid boss was often strongly correlated with player skill). Of course it would depend on the exact raid target, some bosses were more vulnerable to nukes than others. And of course, melee gear mattered a lot.
>Tryhard players were rare
No, they were quite common. They were just far more ignorant. Tryhards would see a DPS parse for a melee then extrapolate that a "good group" (which was his group of course) would always have 100% uptime so the smart move is to avoid wizards because of meditation downtime. Retards would never think to actually measure the amount of uptime typical for a group and, more importantly, see if that correlated at all with kills per hour or any other specific objective accomplishment metric.

IOW a nuke-heavy group with 70% downtime vs a melee group with 30% downtime... tryhards at the time would assume the group with only 30% downtime between kills is a much better group. In fact, 30% downtime would feel like chain-pulling craziness. But, if you actually counted up the "you gained experience!" messages, you might find that both groups were about equally effective, killing about 1 mob every 2 minutes. Except that the first group was taking them out in 30 seconds on average while the other group was taking 80-90s on each one (putting more pressure on the healer).

>>8685965
I saw this one, my issue is that it doesn't seem to actually be UO, like the map isn't the same at all. I never played the original UO, is the official game really that bad now?

>>8686552
tl;dr tryhard players were barely a thing prior to WoW normalizing the behavior

>>8685424
Elysium had a pretty decent community, all things considered. Classic WoW's community is dogshit (even moreso considering that like 80% of the playerbase plays on a single megaserver).

>>8687386
>t. WoW zoomer

back in the day you never knew how the game was going to change with every update, you might play a shit class because there's a chance it'd be fixed one day

classic/progression servers can never have that, you know way in advance what the endgame situation is going to be and can min/max accordingly from the start, it reduces the game to a checklist simulator

>>8687403
as annoying as chinks and slavs could be, private servers were pretty good at unintentionally curating players. The tryhard faggot population of private servers is a fraction of what it is on classic thanks to how many people get turned off by being unofficial.

>>8686059
>Tryhard players were rare until the post-WoW era even in "top" raiding guilds, which weren't so much top because of player skill as they were player time invested
I'm in a TLP guild right now that has 8 ex-FoH members in it, they're fucking shit at the game and I doubt they were any better 20 years ago

Ultima Online was the golden age. Could spend the day mining, decorating house, hunting monsters, thieving, or making swastikas on the ground with cut cloth. Was fucking lit.

Anarchy
Online

>>8687152
>>8688354
One of the things that made classic uo so great was that it was pvp anywhere. You could and would be killed and lose eveything you had on you. EA changed this fairly early on when they introduced a pvm only mirror of the world where everyone migrated to. Then some more decisions that only made the game more "casual" and basically sucked the fun out of it. It's now pretty much a museum for oldfags who kept their houses up since '99.
Outlands is like an alternate universe where the game evolved in a way more inline with the spirit of the original. Full pvm, thieves as viable characters, and an excellent player driven economy. The map is completly new but it is excellent. I have a lot of nostalgia for the old map and spent countless hours exploring it but I think outlands is the better world. There is always around 2k players online so lots of interaction wherever you go. I know quite a few people who's first uo experience is on this shard and they love it. If you have even a passing interest I highly reccomend trying it out. The client is like 2gigs

>>8689932
Which client should I use? From my understanding there are a few options.

>>8690134
The outlands client comes with everything you need https://uooutlands.com/play/
There are lots of helpful people in the discord. This guy makes good videos about it https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1tMp6cTE-KE