Good Morning Folks. This weekend on the AggroChat podcast, Tam brought up a topic that sort of went in a bunch of different directions. The idea basically was a discussion around how he as a game designer, could build a communications system in an MMORPG that encouraged players to interact with each other. We know that forced voice chat does not work, and in the games that have open voice chat… the first thing I do is disable that option. We also know that pushing players of wildly different skill levels into the same content only leads to toxicity. We also know that across the board… MMORPGs are struggling. While Steam only represents a tiny slice of the FFXIV player base… it has seen a 78% drop in players since its all time peak in June of 2024. While again not representative of the totality of the player base… Steam does tend to allow for viewing trends and if it is happening there… it is usually also happening in the larger pool of stand alone client players.
I think one of the challenges of MMORPGs is that they are effectively being driven off a cliff by the most hardcore and as a result vocal player base. Here is a hard truth that we need to understand. If you use gaming forums, reddit, discord, or post about video games on social media… you are already among the most hardcore players in a given fandom. If you are regularly engaging in raid or other challenge content… you are further filtering your bias down to the needle point of the most serious of players, and they cannot survive with only your support. The challenge for developers is that as a whole, the feedback they have been getting is that the content needs to be harder in order to cater to the most dedicated players. However doing so… continues to push things out of bounds for the most casual players to a point where they feel like they can no longer justify that $15 per month in order to log in and do some busy work each day. When you lose casual players… you lose staff and money to make significant improvements to the game.
I think in part, Classic World of Warcraft has been so popular because it hearkens back to an earlier game design ethos. Molten Core and Blackwing Lair are masterpieces of zone design, and in both case… the fights were not actually that challenging. You needed 20%-30% of the raid that had a clue what was going on… and the rest could more or less be populated with warm bodies that were pushing buttons, and also getting to experience content they might not be able to otherwise. I started out as one of those warm bodies, and then eventually over the course of years of raiding developed the skills necessary to lead and function at a high enough level of get recruited into more hardcore groups. The thing is though… the golden age for me were those first raids. We had fun. It was a party atmosphere with comms filled with bad jokes and even worse stories… as we all fail-boated our way through the content to eventually get shiny loot. When these games got super serious focus time… they just stopped being all that enjoyable.
If a game exists in this mode, where it is being driven by the most dedicated players… eventually it starts to shrink in size and with it comes downsizing of the studios. You can look back at all of the games that I used to play fairly seriously… and eventually dipped out of because of cost cutting and lower frequency of content. I played the heck out of Destiny 1 and 2, and got frustrated when they started vaulting content… in part because they did not have the resources to keep updating it. I played the heck out of Rift but eventually bailed because it could not consistently keep a player base interested in the game in order to do much of anything. Wildstar was amazing… but its raid content was way the hell too complicated for most players and the casual content while great… just did not have enough meat on its bones to keep people engaged. Both Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV were driven by decade long story arcs… and both began to flounder a bit when they lacked the story chops to keep people coming back for more.
In truth… I shifted my focus away from MMORPGs and began devoting the majority of my time to ARPGs where I could group up with friends if I wanted to… but the majority of my time was spent soloing. Other games have similarly become way more solo focused, like Elder Scrolls Online which churns through regularly story content updates… all of which can be completed in their entirety without the help of other players. We’ve lost this whole era where doing group content was a heck of a lot of fun, and I believe it is in large part because the players driving the narrative are the players craving challenge in their games. This also coincides with the birth of Streamer culture, and the focus on showing off how good you are at games in a public manner. If you are not doing something on the hardest of hardcore difficulty modes… then you are wasting your time… or at least that has become the prevailing public sentiment. However none of this takes into account the fun factor. Players who get their satisfaction by doing the sweatiest content ever… are a minority in the total player pie.
What you don’t hear publicly talked about is the number of players who bounce because they realize that none of the content is actually designed for them. The majority of folks don’t storm out the front door raging about how bad the game is. Instead they simply slip out a side door, cancel their subscription, uninstall the game… and then gravitate towards games that are giving them a better experience for their limited game time. There is a reason why Gacha games have seen this massive rise in popularity over the years, because they really hone in on the feeling of giving the players power… without actually increasing the difficulty terribly much. It is very easy to busily chase a bunch of objectives and feel like you are doing important things… regardless of whether or not the game is largely playing itself. They feel just connected enough so that you know you have friends who are also playing… but unfortunately there is no real meaningful multiplayer experiences.
I feel like for the most part Guild Wars 2 has done a pretty good job of catering content correctly, however there are still numerous cases where they drank the hardcore Kool-Aid and it shows. With the most recently expansion Janthir Wilds, they introduced a zone meta that is quite honestly… not capable of being completed without a large number of ringers in zone participating. As a result it is pretty rare that you actually find a group doing it, and succeeding at it. Similarly Dragon’s End to this day still fails more often than not. Contrast this with old classics like Tequatl, Octovine, or Chak Gerent that pretty much succeed damned near 100% of the time… and have full zones of players showing up every time they are run. The events that are being completed are just better designed, and it does not matter how much the “hardcores” turn their nose up at them… the participation proves it. People will come out of the woodwork for something that is chill, fun, and rewarding… and honestly does not ask that much of them.
Ultimately my theory is that MMORPGs have been struggling and shrinking… because they have been listening to the wrong voices. They lost sight of the inclusive content design that made their best zones great… and have leaned into chasing and ever shrinking piece of the player-base. World of Warcraft was a game changer. The number of people that I knew that had never really played another game seriously before that… was pretty freaking massive. However as the content kept getting more and more finely focused… the folks who did it for fun and did not have the time to devote to all of the prep work… quietly faded away. Essentially there are two paths to take… either you make it so that class design exists in a way that the difference between the most hardcore player and the most brain dead casual is about 10% efficiency… or you make the content designed in a way that you only need about 20% of the player base to be really paying attention to complete it. The best content tends to follow that second path. I am not saying do not put the double mythic extra plus hardcore content into your game… but make it for bragging rights only, and in no way connected to the flow of necessarily content.
Granted take everything I just said with a grain of salt. The fact that I have a gaming blog… already puts me on the narrow end of the “cares about games” spectrum. However I am very much a burnt out ex-raider who used to take this shit super seriously… until I realized that I would just be happier if I did not give a fuck about passing arbitrary skill checks in the games that I am playing. I mostly play ARPGs like Path of Exile and Last Epoch, where I only have to care about myself and my actions in order to complete them, and that reset on a regular enough basis that I can ignore a season/league if my devotion is elsewhere. That said… the whole conversation this weekend… did make me miss those glory days of raiding and a lot of the nonsense that used to happen on voice chat. To some extent I am getting some of this back with my small group shenanigans in Guild Wars 2, and I hope maybe we gather enough mass to be able to do some strikes at some point. I miss us progressing through Binding Coil in FFXIV and quite honestly… that was the last time when raiding with a large-ish group of people was super enjoyable for me. I had a blast learning the Arcadion with the release of Dawntrail, but that was pretty short lived.
Mostly I think we would be better of if games were designed to allow more casual players… to ride all the rides. I think the bar for entry for a lot of content has just gotten too high in order to keep the masses engaged anymore. That is the problem with the MMORPG design model… you need everyone bought in for them to succeed. We’ve spent the last decade filtering out who can reasonably play them… and they are going to keep shrinking unless that line of thinking changes. I say this as someone who has only one foot left in the genre… and could probably happily cancel the few subscriptions I have remaining without seriously impacting my enjoyment. If I am almost out the door… someone who is already well into the more serious end of the community… you’ve got problems.
And here I am once again to mention New World Aeternum; a true MMO that is approachable and to your request “lets everyone ride all the rides”. Yet it got lambasted for “not having an end game” or “not enough grind to keep players”; to which they replied and added mutated expeditions (dungeons) with 10 difficulties. Nope; that was too complicated so down to 3 difficulties. Then they added raids. Now all we hear about is the raid excludes the casual players.
All I want is to go back to that original promise of New World when it launched where every play style could attain the same end game status just by playing the game for the most part. Trying to cater to these niches is just death for these games. New World would have been so much better just producing new content vs re-inventing the game 3x over.
As WoW Classic was ramping up back in 2019 I wrote a post about the different forum factions and how they were responding to the coming launch. The only group not represented was casuals. Not everybody on the forums was the hardest of hardcore, but as I occasionally point out in the comments over at Massively OP, we are the outliers, the weirdos who are too invested in all of this. The official forums are the distillation of the hardest of the hardcore.
But the devs are also filtering all of that through their own lens. EQII doesn’t keep going back to try and make PvP a thing because that is all that is on the forums. (Raiders are actually better represented.) They do so because somebody on the team has an affinity for it, remembers that moment in 2007 when things clicked for a couple of months, and want to make that happen again as mush as the half dozen people who keep bringing it up. One message supporting your bias is more powerful than a dozen against it or a hundred about some other topic.
And it is funny to watch some dev groups change as leaders turn over and somebody has a different passion. LOTRO devs are all about raiding right now. I have a post from 2014 where I quoted the devs saying that raiders comprised the smallest player group in the game, smaller even than those engaged in MPvP, that was way over represented in the forums and that they were no longer going to emphasize raiding. (Raiding and MPvP combined was less than 10% of the player base.)
I suspect that the population hasn’t swung radically towards raiding in the last decade, raiding being a pretty hardcore commitment for non-hardcore players. Instead the dev leadership is now run by people who favor raiding so they are emphasizing that again and doing things like breaking blue line hunters for MPvP to optimize them for raiding.
So… um… I had a point when I started this. Oh, yeah, the devs do have their own predisposition about who they can actually hear. We see it all the time where a bias you suspect they have is reinforced in the forums so they confirm your suspicion.
One thing I’d note is that some games have tried to address this problem by having multiple difficulty settings, with something for everyone. For instance, WoW has normal mode dungeons and LFR raids that where you can really just show up and do whatever you want, then progressively higher difficulties for people who want more challenge.
I think the population drop is really just that other genres are eating into the playerbase that at one point could only find what they wanted out of MMOs.
Not much there that I’d disagree with, except to say that almost all big events ANet added to GW2 absolutely were very hard to begin with and only became accessible after a lot of controversial nerfing. Teq was famously unforgiving at the start and failed all the time. I did it so many times before I ever saw a win. I think it went through several months of signifcant nerfs before it finally became the turn-up-and-collect-your-chest fun for all it ended up being.
As for Chak Gerent, it was next to impossible even to get a map to do it for ages because of how rarely it succeeded. Octovine was better but still quite challenging for a while. As for things like the Three Headed Hydra or whatever it was called, for months I thought I’d never see a map that could finish the damn thing… nightmare event.
ANet did mostly adapt to the metrics of failure, though, and make the tougher events easier, so credit to them for that, at least. They also tried to downtune raiding to make it accessible, although that never really worked, hence the introduction of Strikes a s a kind of raid-lite… and those are still too hard to be fun for most players, probably. I left not long after they were added so I don’t know what they’re like now.
Generally, though, survival and gacha open world RPGs are just an absolute ton more fun than almost any MMORPG these days, plus they have higher-quality graphics and much better storylines and writing. I’ve moved mostly to games like that iand it wasn’t any kind of intentional choice – I just played a few and enjoyed them more than the games I had been playing and then kept on heading in that direction. After a couple of years of that, MMORPGs seem very stodgy and slow these days, with the endgame all wrapped up in the kind of hardcore nonsense you descibe. Doesn’t make for an attractive package.
I’d like to say Stars Reach might be more casual-friendly but even in the very early stages the infatuation with hardcore difficulty was painfully apparent so I’m not holding out much hope.
Very insightful, thank you! I have been thinking about this too, and wonder if MMOs are “our” (Gen-X, early Millennials) game genre, and the declining population is a side-affect of competing real-life priorities.
I say this, because I work with a lot of later millennials and gen-z, and for most of them, they’re gaming habits are shifted towards Destiny/Fortnite/etc. And my kids’ (8 and 10) are in a peer group that is heavily Roblox/Minecraft.
That said, will we see a resurgence in MMOs as GenX’s kids get older and X-ers shift into retirement?
This ties in so well with a lot of what I’ve been thinking about and just chatted about with Stargrace on my Discord. Very WoW focused but: it’s too seasonal (which definitely ties in with your points, the idea that each “season”, your gear becomes shit and you have to completely gear up again, jump on that treadmill and push push push. Meanwhile, there’s a bajillion events coming out of your ears left, right, and centre because those zoomy sweaties were whining for so long that once the patch comes out and a day has passed “now there’s nothing to do”. Meanwhile… the rest of us are flailing trying to work on collections and completing new content and grind the gear treadmill and make some gold and level our alts and professions and EVENT, LOOK HERE, IT’S TIMEWALKING! OH HEY NEW CLASSIC VERSION! GOBLINS ARE SPAWNING KILL THEM! OH HI, HOW ABOUT REMIX? REP BONUS EVENT TOO! LOOK LOOK!! and…. ._. exhausting.
I WISH gear didn’t feel so “irrelevant” beyond its season. I wish… things felt more evergreen? I wish… they’d just bloody slow down. Of course they’re struggling – everybody’s too exhausted to play, let alone keep up. I have to take months-long breaks because I try and enjoy raiding with my guild and it hurts my health to do so. Eh, my problem I guess…
You can look at all of these events though… that are more casual in focus and people will come out of the woodwork for them. I have not been as serious about the mount chase as some… but coming back and doing some of that made me think the other day how much better World of Warcraft would be… if they had gone for the horizontal progression that Guild Wars 2 has. I think I have just gotten tired of the expansion cycle of invalidating everything every patch. The worst part about FFXIV for me is coming back right before an expansion and having no reasonable option to play catch up save for either grinding content that is now irrelevant… or paying millions of gil for crafted stuff just so I can see the story.
I never thought I would have this mindset, given how much I used to love getting new gear… but I really love having one set of gear that I can do ALL of the content with and effectively ALL content being evergreen.
Though there’s the potential that such not-so-hardcore MMOs exist, but they aren’t on your radar for one reason or another. There’s also the age difference. The games you mention ARE the “old guard” that came up during the heydays of MMOdom. Maybe at some point those who enjoyed the early iterations just aged out of those titles and ceded the floor to the next generation of players who grew up in a more competitive title atmosphere and now crave challenges that they only get from cooperative “hardcore” if there’s little to no competitive modes.
I do feel what you’re saying here, though, even though I was only ever “hardcore” in the sense that I played a very wide array of titles, just none very deep. I see some companies pushing this ethos as well, an extreme “risk versus reward” mentality that certainly has it’s audience, but is it a large enough audience that can actually support a game for the long haul?
I guess I would be curious about that. ARE there modern MMORPGs that do not have these pitfalls? Like I don’t know of any… but not discounting that I might just not be in the know. MMORPG releases really seem to be almost nonexistent these days. You get adjacent things like Monster Hunter games, that almost FEEL Like an MMORPG but have nowhere near the complexity.
I haven’t seen any. Heck, they don’t even use the term mmorpg for any of the new games I see coming out. MMO is the term and it, very specifically, has gone in different direction than mmo”rpg”. RPGs have gone the opposite direction, moving back to a solo experience. Even the dreams of making ttrpgs an “online game” experience have basically floundered; stalling at the “virtual tabletop” point and not moving much beyond that.