2017: The Year of RIP for MMO Gaming; But All Hail the MMO Shooter/Survival Games!

Last year I reviewed the state of MMORPGs in 2016. This year I can safely state the 2017 brought about, if not a literal end to MMORPGs, it certainly carved up the tombstone and then riddled it with bullets.

MMOs have suffered greatly in recent years. I feel a compelling argument could be made that the legacy of Barrens Chat in WoW is the state of modern political commentary on Twitter, Reddit and other locations today....why play WoW to spam people with crazy when you can do it in real time, on the "real" world?

But that aside, the problem is that outside of Korea, no new MMORPGs appear to be in development, and certainly no new RPGs of the western variety that we expect....everything on the market is aging, and sustaining themselves on expansions, DLC and various freemium models which can be so ridiculously complex that the only way to enjoy the game is ultimately not to play.

That said, we did see a major new expansion (Morrowind) for The Elder Scrolls Online that was well worth playing, even if I did find myself running out of steam to enjoy TESO around the time it released. Guild Wars 2 also released a new expansion, and many other 2nd tier MMOs (Tera, Aion, Neverwinter Nights and others) all keep pumping out some sort of expansion content to garner renewed interest among fans. There's stuff going on here.....it's just not as exciting as it once was. Even the diehards of World of Warcraft find themselves having difficulty sustaining interest in the venerable king of the dogpile.

All of the excitement and interest in MMORPGs was instead replaced in 2017 by....the shooter. Specifically, shooters like Destiny 2 and Player Unknown Battlelegrounds, which both focus on a theme of large-scale multiplayer. Destiny 2 is a bit more clever trickery and illusion (the feel of an MMO without the actual result of such) but PUBG is a masterpiece of the modern era for those who love it, a battle royal simulator that has garnered impressive interest and effectively created its own genre, with a bunch of me-too games jumping on the bandwagon.

I played PUBG for a few hours, and felt like that was about all I needed to enjoy it....I can certainly see how the game might be compulsively interesting to some people, but honestly? This is not a genre for people who like more story or complexity. It is, however, a fantastic game for social gamers who only enjoy gaming with other players, and love the survival of the fittest thematics. I like the last part.....but after you've won a match, it's kind of like....."me'h, is this it?" for me at least.

Destiny 2 remains as fun to play as the original, but I haven't even tried engaging with it as anything more than a single player experience that happens to muddy the waters. The hardcore social MP gamers all seem to either love or hate it, or love to hate it, or loved it until their manic-obsessive constant effort to drain all life from a game through playing it to death caused them to start hating it after their 2,000 hour play through.

Remember when taking 50 hours to play Final Fantasy VII felt like a lot of time? Yeah me too.

Then there's Ark: Survival Evolved. I hate this game. It is a ruiner of lives, marriages and self respect. It is a beast and some people LOVE it. It may not be the be-all-and-end-all that WoW was, but it many ways it is the black tar heroin to WoW's simpler crack. The fact that the game can and will punish you for logging off is even more bizarre. But there are people who play this game to death. Probably literally.

So....in a world with Ark and PUBG, who the hell needs MMORPGs anymore? And for people like me, really, we should just stick to games that actually give us what we want, like Horizon: Zero Dawn, for example. Or Nier: Automata, or Prey. Good games, focused on one player, with decent stories.

So....yeah RIP MMORPGs in 2017. Maybe 2018 will bring us a new surprise?

Death Bat's Top Five Video Games for 2014

for 2014 we had lots of new video games, including a revival of isometric RPGs, an uptick in the "survival horror" subgenre that includes "little or no way to survive and fight back" as an important component, a flood of incomplete Early Access titles on Steam that are all simply amazing if you are good at using your imagination to pretend like the games are anywhere near completion, and the usual AAA console releases which invariably do something that give the necessary wedge for the press and gaming crowd to call for their heads (looking at you, Ubisoft).

But this is a list of the five games I enjoyed the most in 2014, and which also more or less came out this year. It is my list, and it's what most impressed me:

#5. Marvel Heroes 2015 (PC)
Discovering this literally days before the end of the year, Marvel Heroes moved from a "game I have deliberately avoided due to the premise not sounding like a good idea" to a game I have to play every night, as often as I can. It's Diablo, in the Marvel Universe....and it works. My wife is hooked now too.

#4. The Elder Scrolls Online (PC)
Will it go F2P? Who knows. Is it the best MMORPG out there? YMMV vary but for me it very much is. The game manages to take the MMO framework and drape the interesting story elements and a facade of the Elder Scrolls feel on to what could have otherwise been just another fantasy MMO. We have too many of these, but TESO proved to be the one that let me comfortably delete all the rest. Except Guild Wars 2, I swear I'll figure that one out some day.

#3. The Last of Us Remastered (PS4)
The PS3 remastering on the PS4 of what is easily the best survival horror zombie game out there. Coupled with Naughty Dog's ability to tell a story and gameplay that manages to emphasize the survival and storytelling, this is the sort of game I love.

#2. Shadow Returns and Dragonfall (Android)
Wha....and isometric top-down turn-based RPG on my list??? I have to include these. The versions I've thrown myself into are on Android, and the comfort of these games with a tablet touch screen is an excellent experience (but get a larger screen or you'll never read the text). Of all the recent isometric RPGs to resurface or appear in definitive revised forms, these two new entries deserve the most accolades, I feel, both for the smooth gameplay and comfortable experience. Plus, both of these titles have prompted me to sit up and take notice of Shadowrun 5th edition.

#1. Destiny (PS4)
Gabe from Penny Arcade expresses his love of Destiny as well as I could and hits all the important points. This is a game with an almost eerie mythic poetry of violence, mystery, haunting exploration and then more violence. For those who have been engulfed by this game such as myself Destiny is almost a sort of cathartic event, and much like Marvel Heroes and TESO I find myself needing to get a session in as often as I can (I tend to rotate between these three games right now, but Destiny almost always gets at least one mission in each evening). Who knew a shooter could feel so good and be simultaneously so relaxing and so exciting? I want Destiny to grow into something big.

Honorable Mention: I have three of them, actually:

Dragon Age: Inquisition (PS4) - I have been so busy playing other stuff that DA:I hasn't properly been given a chance to grab me. I can see it, I can tell its what I want, but it hasn't captured my focus yet. Not sure why, I expect it will in 2015. Could possibly tie into my general burnout on fantasy as a genre, maybe? That doesn't explain my TESO obsession, though.

Sunset Overdrive (XB1) - this game is amazingly fun in a Saint's Row meets landscape grinding sort of way. It has immense potential, and is eminently playable. SO 2 will be the one that really pushes it in newer directions, I suspect. It's a good for Xbox One to have this as an exclusive.

Halo Master Chief Collection (XB1) - hardly worthy of a 2014 game of the year notice even for a simple not-for-profit private blog, but worth mentioning because it's keeping more than a decade of amazing gaming alive and reinvigorating Master Chief's tale for the current generation, while adding tons of additional (free) content (Spartan Ops went live recently, and word is ODST will be a free add-on soon too).

The Elder Scrolls Online - Sinking its claws in deep after a second chance

So I've bounded back and forth a bit on Elder Scrolls Online.

First I decided pre-release that I wasn't going to get into it at all. Then I watched my wife playing in beta and decided it looked like it might be worth investigating, so I bought a copy on some credit a few weeks after release.

What I discovered initially was a lot of fun....and it felt very "Elder Scrolls" to me, having that "thing" that I can only define as what Bethesda --or in this case Zenimax-- can do to make an RPG fun.

Then I started to run into some problems. The first problem was ridiculously long load times. When a game takes 8 minutes from clicking on the shortcut to actually playing, and you only have 30 minutes to play that's a clear sign you need to play another game.

Then I would get in and find horrendous lag was leading to death constantly. Also, I was literally doing it wrong, I figured out later. I'd get in to TESO and forget this is a twitchy combat game, not one where you stand there trading blows.

I decided not to renew my sub at the end, but a few days later I recanted on this decision and decided instead to go back and try it another month. This was actually spurred on at least partially by my adoption of Wildstar, which had an open beta I could jump into. Wildstar is an interesting game and I think I will enjoy playing it, but in the course of messing around in the beta I realized that Wildstar had a lot of "MMOisms" that were actually styles of play I had really burned out on. Static storytelling....bubble balloon dialogue, cartoony WoWish graphics (I knew that in advance, it was not a selling point for me, but the look is actually very stylish and interesting), and a combat system that is a bit different but still much closer to its WoW DNA than...say....Elder Scrolls.

So after a bit of Wildstar I realized that I really ought to go give TESO a second chance. I did so, jumped back in, found some patches that seemed to dramatically improve lag issues (haven't had any lag problems in the last week of playing) and have been having a great time simultaneously leveling up three different characters. Hey, I also discovered that TESO lets you skip the intro sequence once you've done it. This has the unique effect of making TESO feel just like any other Elder Scrolls game where you're just another wanton criminal given an accidental reprieve.

At this point I've decided that for the foreseeable future I'm going to focus on TESO and will also give Wildstar a earnest chance. I'll continue to let Defiance and Guild Wars 2 linger as games I play when the mood strikes (and while it doesn't strike often I enjoy both a great deal when time and interest permit). I've deleted WoW and Rift completely now: I tried to level up in WoW in preparation for the next expansion, but I just can't muster the energy to care anymore. WoW, for me, is a fond memory of a great game from the old days, and the desire to stick with it is just gone. And as for Rift....I'll never reach level cap, and I don't quite know what went wrong with their 51-60 content that it's such a slog to get through, but I will always remember it fondly from the days before it went F2P. As F2P goes Rift is top notch, yes; but there are a lot things that become less important or even counter-productive to the design of a F2P MMO over a pay-to-play version. F2P for example benefits from slower advancement, and markets potions and perks you purchase to speed up experience gain; the older subscription model actively encouraged the designers to come up with bonus experience events for a contrast. The best time to play Rift was the eight weeks leading up to Storm Legion's release, when all sorts of craziness was going on and world events were popping everywhere that were designed to dump metric tons of XP on participants. The post F2P Rift is a painful slog that, if played the way it wants you to, will cost you more than $15 a month in purchases to stay relevant, and as always that means that the only people who benefit from F2P models are those who have no money at all but tons of time, or those with no time but tons of money (and no common sense).

Anyway....its now TESO and Wildstar for me until one or both go F2P!

The Elder Scrolls Online: Sitting in Troubletown?

If Elder Scrolls Online is going to have a hope and a prayer they need to get the following problems fixed:

1. periodic 6-8 minute loading screen wait periods need to stop. I can be playing WoW, Rift or GW2 in 30 seconds, but I'm lucky if I make it into TESO in 6 minutes.

2. The lag has got to go. The server instability has got to go. When 2 out of 3 times I try to log in and play but can't, or find that I get kicked and the server seems to have croaked....bad sign, Bethesda! I want to play your game, please let me?

3. This is more a pet peeve than anything, but lets get a little more color in the palette, for a change. The colorful environments of other MMOs stick out in sharp contrast to the perpetual drabness that is TESO. This could also be a side effect of being a spin-off of the decidedly prettier looking Skyrim, but bottom line is it needs something....some color, better modeling/textures...something.

4. This is more of a personal deal, but I do get worried that if I play TESO to the end all I'll encounter is an endless schedule of PvP focused content. I get nervous with any game that supports a ruling "king" of PvP and did not discover this was a big component of TESO until recently. Nothing wrong with PvP....but not really what I wanted out of an Elder Scrolls game, y'know?

As an aside, if PvP is a big component of the game, I can only imagine just how ticked off the PvPers must be with the sort of lag this game exhibits. Death by lag in PvE is infuriating enough....dying due to lag in PvP is dangerous for your blood pressure!

Other than that I do love this game, if only it would work right. But the technical issues are so bad I am thinking I'll cancel my sub before the free time is up next week and wait a couple months to see if they iron out their problems. Way back in the day I did something similar with Rift, which was technically flawed but interesting at the start....I came back a year later and it ended up being my main game for a good two years. With TESO, though, if I give it a year...odds are when I come back it'll be F2P anyway, I suspect....

The Elder Scrolls Online - I don't know why I ever doubted you, Bethesda

Maybe the whole Zenimax Studios thing made me nervous (but seeing my wife in the beta suggests otherwise)...maybe I've been on hiatus from MMORPGs long enough to have gotten away from the doldrums of playing this style of game (that's not it)...all I know is I had planned not to delve into The Elder Scrolls Online for a while, maybe wait until it went F2P or something (despite my dislike of the F2P model). Today I picked up a copy on a lark, and the desperate need for sleep is the only reason I pulled myself away long enough to make this comment and hit the sack.

Bottom Line first night review: it's got all the best stuff I like from a Bethesda RPG, wrapped up in an MMO veneer; I've been playing for several hours now, and it really feels like a Bethesda RPG. It's refreshingly good, and I am deleting all my other MMOs now on the PC except for Final Fantasy XIV (because I still have two more months on my sub there). I don't know why I would play any other MMO now that TESO is out.