[jmyeet]

I'm honestly stunned how often I see the pattern repeat of telling the users they are wrong [1], particularly in this MMO space that I'd dearly love to see more games in.

World of Warcraft ("WoW") is the elephant in the room. It killed the previous elephant (Everquest aka EQ) but has reigned supreme in a shrinking space for 18 years. It partially shrank because it used to have a social component that has mostly been replaced by social media but there are other factors too.

But what I scratch my head at is all the bad competitors that came afterwards and predictably failed because they made product decisions. The most common one is focusing on PvP. MMO is an interesting genre because only something like 10% of the population at best cares about PvP. So right off the bat you've reduced your potential market by 90% without doing a thing. But no, you get assured that "our PvP is so good, casuals will want to PvP".

There's another factor here too: in a persistent world where your power increases, PvP players fundamentally want an unfair fight. They want to be rewarded for various grinds. Contrast this with deathmatch and battle royale games where everyone is basically equal other than player skill.

Anyway, Star Citizen has now raised (and spent) over half a billion dollars on the same bad premise of PvP.

Server meshing aims to create a single persistent universe but PvP, which most will want to avoid, is fundamentally unfair because the people with the best ships, paid for with real money, will win. This is such a fundamentally bad and limiting design, it's hard to comprehend.

Imagine instead SC had defined a small core game loop and gone for a Sea of Thieves like world, both PvP and non-PvP. SoT has like 8-12 players on a server and they can PvP. Interestingly, a lot of players don't want this so they monopolize a server and agree not to PvP. Even in WoW, which has faction PvP, the players have basically voted out world PvP by concentrating a single faction on each server with very few exceptions.

But SC is doing things like server meshing when after a decade they still don't have a core game loop. I occasionally check in on the SC roadmap and progress. Not because I'm interested in playing but because I like watching a car wreck in super slow motion. Constant missed deadlines, new (incomplete) features being promised (and a few added), more promised features to fix the bad previous features and so on. It's a disaster.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMqZ2PPOLik

[usrusr]

Excellent observations, allow me to propose a semi-ironic counter position: at the time of its greatest success, SC had a very unique value proposition: instead of pay to win, it was pay to imagine winning. They were selling the daydream of getting one's entire attention and and ambition consumed in a game like a fourteen year old, to greying forty-years olds who grew up core gamers but who stopped a long time ago sinking quality hours into games. Now either hardly any hours at all, or just downwinding hours. The reality of PvP might be bleak, but an imagination of PvP is the best of all imagined gaming. Of course this form of virtual virtual entertainment can't go on forever because it's always been built on the promise of one day ditching one of the virtuals, but it's been quite a ride, one of its kind.

[kcb]

Only the biggest MMOs, really just WoW and FF14, can deliver PvE content at a pace even close to satisfying players. It's expensive to develop and players can only play the same content PvE for a limited amount of time. It's just not possible for anyone but the largest dev teams.

I would like to see an MMO that really focused on a wide range of gameplay systems rather than content. It's been attempted before, one example I think is Archeage, but unfortunately ruined by monetization.

[jmyeet]

I have a counterexample for you: Classic WoW.

For those unfamiliar, WoW came out in late 2004 and has had some ~8 expansions since. Each expansions adds new lands, new cosmetics, new dungeons, new raids and new systems. Additionally, these expansions changed existing systems. So much so that what is now refered to as "retail WoW" is considered too complex with too big of a barrier to entry by many. It's partially why the player base has shrunk as the game has increasingly catered to the top 1% to 5% ta the expense of the casual player base.

There has been a rich history of so-called private servers. These are privately run WoW servers that stick to older versions of the game, particularly the vanilla game and each of the first two expansions. These are illegal and never last long.

At Blizzard's annual conference, famously this came up when an audience member asked about it and the head of the game said "You think you do but you don't" [1]. This one guy probably did more to move this cause forward than anyone as it galvanized the community behind this idea.

Then 4-5 years ago Blizzard announced they were releasing "classic WoW". This is basically (but not entirely) the original game with some changes. Some were understandable, some less so. But it was basically the original game.

This has been massively popular and continues to be, so much so that Blizzard just released "hardcore classic WoW", servers where your character is over when you die. Lots of games have hardcore modes but it's interesting in WoW that it may takes ~6 days played to get to max level and a lot of people still want hardcore mode.

But my point is that this 18 year old game with about the same graphics continues to be massively in demand. You don't need to constantly churn out new content to a large scale like you suggest.

Also, SC has over a half a billion dollars and continues to somehow raise a lot through ship sales (which, to me, is bizarre). They very much could afford to continually pump out new content. But there's still only one system with the second years delayed.

Studios like PvP because it falls into user-generated content. The players entertain themselves and that costs almost nothing. But they fail to acknowledge that they're, at best, catering to 5-10% of the potential market.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Wrw3c2NjeE