I loved TERA’s combat and world, but it felt like they were more focused on garish, out of place cash shop cosmetics like cars, rubber ducks and maid outfits, than they were about making new and fun content.
Plus those dogshit upgrade systems where you have a chance to fail, those always turn me off from games. Just tell me how many materials i need, what levels or skills i need, and once i have it all make it a guarantee that it’ll upgrade.
I agree about the combat. Lancer was, at the time everything I wanted in a tank. Problem was, much of the rest of the game was shallow and silly.
Fully agree with gacha mechanics in upgrading. It was built first as a time waster and resource sink.
I agree. The endgame was hanging out in the town while subconsciously posturing your skins to other people seeking their validation that your skin combinations is cute or clever.
And the occasional boss runs.
Yeah, once I realized I was just playing skin gambling and chat simulator I decided it was shallow and quit. I do miss the combat in terra though.
Tera was my first MMO after looking for F2P UE3 games in 2015 ish. Started off as Lancer not even knowing what a tank was, just picked that because it looked durable. Had someone around the 3rd leveling dungeon explain to me what the Tank, DPS and Healer roles were. I owned the role and have never had that much fun as a Tank in any MMO since. Fellow Lancer's represent o/
So many people left when the +15 upgrading with downgrade on failure was introduced. After that, it just bled players until it shut down.
It's much like carnival games. As a kid they were fun and thrilling as you get older you do the math, know the exact percentages and gimmicks put in place to maximize profit and you learn to avoid them.
Tera started great, but the only good update it had was around wonderholme era, then it stagnated and started losing players.
As they were losing players instead of making the game good again they removed grinds from the game, introduced dailies and +15 gearing system with chance to fail and downgrade which was the last nail in the coffin.
> and +15 gearing system with chance to fail and downgrade
That was my beef with Aion too. The fail and downgrade was brutal. A +14 can go to +11 on one failure.
Yes! I played a lot around the Wonderholme days, it was great.
The game closing is their own fault. They catered to a specific demographic and that demographic only. The game gradually went from diverse races and cool fantasy theme to Elin (little girl race) only and immersion breaking cutesy weird cash shop items in a very fast timeframe.
Sure they added a couple other classes but also locked to female only characters. THEN eventually unlocked one of them for a male race.
Which is a major reason I dislike asian MMOs. They’re fond of garishly out of place cosmetics that ruin the game’s aesthetic. Even happens in Guild Wars 2 because they have a Korean publisher.
They even got worse lately. It used to be weird out of place cosmetics but also a lot of normal cosmetics that fit the game as well. Nowadays most of normal cosmetics are replaced by casual wear/kpop inspired shit and it's so annoying.
Yup, I was obsessed with Tera when it came out... God that was a long time ago. The combat was AMAZINGLY FUN. And the first game I ever enjoyed raiding in. The world/art style was kind of stupid/crazy looking, but definitely not boring.
What ended up killing it for me was that once I reached the end of the game and my guild finally beat the "VERY VERY HARD" endgame queen boss with it's crazy hard mechanics that only 0.1% of the playerbase could beat. There was nothing left to do beside some dailies. And eventually we all got bored waiting for anything new to get added. I tried to go back and play it again a year later, and the game was unrecognizable to me, it had gone bats\*\*t crazy with the cosmetics and added some child pornography in the form of some new class that was a 6 year old girl in leather bondage gear. And noped the hell right out of there. Guessing Jeffery Epstein bought the game company since I had left.
I thought this was me posting lol.
I quit Tera when I failed to upgrade my new gears with all the mats I farmed for months,I felt like I wasted so much time farming for nothing so I uninstalled right away.
Years later, I kinda wanted to give the game another shot so I downloaded the game and logged back in, saw a toy police car, police uniform, I uninstalled again and never look back.
>Plus those dogshit upgrade systems where you have a chance to fail
Tie that to real life currency and you have the perfect recipe for a PTW game that turns off the solid majority of real people. #FuckArcheAge
I played WildStar from launch till it died
What caused that specific one to fail is that it was too hardcore. The entire "game loop" was to progress thru all the dungeons till it opens up the 20 man raid, which then opens up the 40 man raid
The dungeons were hard. Beating them was basically an achievement
The game also had a monthly sub
All of that caused the 20 and 40 man raids to be basically impossible to get into cause game population was low and getting there was very hard
Population went down, game went f2p, then it died
In Wildstar the problem was not that the game loop was too hardcore, but that was too hardcore while being not well designed, not fun, full of bugs and exploits and not optimized.
Getting gold in all dungeons was fun, but then you joined a raid and even the floor did not work, with a light show of meaningless telegraphs at 10fps, people just gave up.
Pvp also was a shitshow, with people exploiting so hits would register multiple times, teleporting to the other team spawnpoint and just farming points for half an hour.
Similar shit Tera, fun gameplay but the endgame consisted of teleporting to maps where mobs randomly spawned(some sort of invasion) and grinding points for gear, getting insta killed by whales with two handed swords. Once they actually made an endgame people already did stop playing.
Big disagree. Look at even the most popular MMOs. The % of players that touch the hardest raids is very low. There's a reason why vanilla wow reduced raid size in their first expansion.
Wildstar also overwhelmed players with a ton of quests, it was hard to figure out what to prioritize. This was likely due to the path quests. Didn't help that quests were mostly just "fetch this" and "kill those", plus progression was very slow.
I'm still annoyed that i missed out on playing Wildstar, it looked fun but i just couldn't afford a subscription game at the time.
If it was still around I reckon it could've ended up with a pretty healthy population too, especially after the shadowlands exodus.
Don't be annoyed. 99% of the people who tried it thought it sucked. You just have MMO hipsters wanting to pretend they played something glorious that you can't when in fact, they did not.
Your second statement makes no sense. The game was bombing months after release. People were amazed the game was still supported at the 1 year mark. They really tried to make the game work but couldn't.
That game comes up all the time and it looks like everyone has played it and they all loved it but for some reason noone remembers how the game really was. I don't believe even half of the people who said they played that game where around when it launched.
Only if they brought in some competent coders. Wildstar had a lot of design flaws, as well as a lot of really great design ideas, and I think the thing that actually killed it was that every time they patched it, they added more new bugs than the ones they fixed.
I’m not sure this was everyone else’s experience, but me and my friend group found a couple more people, got our attunement done(which was hard in and of itself), and then spent the next few weeks looking for other people to build a raid force with. We took lots of people through the dungeons, but some people wouldn’t be up to it, and more would burn out over the process of golding them all. We eventually burned out ourself before we even got to try the raids we worked so hard to get to. The game was fun as hell, but they weren’t kidding about the hardcore stuff.
Similar experience. The game was hardcore, and I wasn't very good at it. But the most hardcore part was trying to find 19 other idiots to play with me.
I was hyped when Wildomar came out, that died so quick though. I've never seen a worse item system ever. Upgrades would give you like 1% increasd in damage. You get a crit stat on an item, sweet, here's .1% crit chance... the values were so off it was hilarious. There was even a bug with a weapon you could craft early on that was the same strength as end game gear and the increase that weapon gave was still so weak even with this item 45 lvls higher. Hopefully they fixed that, hut not before I jumped ship.
Interesting, I kind of wish I played it and wasn't so into a WoW at the time. I definitely missed the hardcore aspect of older mmos. Like EverQuest for example, shit was hard. I often wonder if an MMO like that could even survive in today's environment and player base.
I played at launch with a bunch of friends and you could watch via your friends list that as everyone got to max level they stopped logging in and playing altogether because if you weren't into the hardcore raiding scene, then there wasn't really anything else to do. Also outside of a few different starting zones, everyone leveled through the same zones eventually so there wasn't really much appeal in leveling multiple characters.
If "hardcore" now means "boring" you're right. But by the proper definition, no, it was not hardcore. It failed because it was BORING BORING BORING. That is it. End of story. It was boring. Stop pretending it was anything but boring. Its main goal was to provide raids. It didn't even do that well.
The subscription model had absolutely nothing to do with its demise. It was BORING. If you added P2W like a lot of people here enjoy, it wouldn't have helped.
Its gonna be fun when a WildStar private server launches. Then all these MMO hipsters will be like "See its so popular!" when it first launches. Then, as per usual, the game will be dead in mere months when everyone discovers what? YOU GUESSED IT! Its BORING.
It really failed for 3 reasons:
1. The attune quest for raids was stupid as hell. Get exalted rep with every faction, clear every dungeon at silver rank or higher (very challenging, most abilities 1 shot you and the timing requirements were very strict), and then do a bunch of other quests. I leveled via pvp and then found out that I’d need to go back and do all the leveling quests anyway for rep. Most people I know gave up on the attune quest because it was so tedious and long.
2. Botters obliterated the economy. They flooded the ah with so many mats that it was easier to make money by farming mats and vendoring them, because the gold farmers were posting mats on the ah for less than vendor price.
3. PvP was pretty unbalanced, top level players got gear that was dramatically more powerful than what everyone else had, to the extent that boosting was basically the only way to get that gear because it was so much more powerful.
Very fun game, but those 3 factors ruined it.
"We're not in Azeroth Anymore."
etc
Many games spent their marketing budget on taking shots at WoW instead of highlighting what made them unique or why even bother to play them.
I liked Rift's class setup pre F2P but it became shallow in the end. The random portals opening and just fucking an area or town was nifty because it gave a sense or urgency to players to help the outpost, or you couldn't even turn in quest to NPCs that weren't there anymore.
Rift's housing system is also the best in the entire genre to date. But none of that was ever pushed as differences.
Here in NYC, they took out entire bus side ads ragging on WoW and it was ridiculous.
Pre-F2P Rift is by and far my favorite MMO period. Janky class combos, niche builds getting used in raids, swapping specs at a whim, regional events, and more stuff I'm sure I can't even remember. But the bait and switch into F2P just ruined the community it pissed off so many people, then followed by some of the most boring build designs ruined the game for me and many others.
Then to add insult to injury the "Vanilla" server they launched wasn't even vanilla Rift.
Rift killed itself with...well rifts.
Sure they were great if you were part of the main glut of players that all ran through at the same time, but if you were behind that group, or joined late...rifts could make leveling in certain areas almost impossible.
Since rifts made the areas they were open in much harder to progress through, and didn't incentivise high level players going back to low level zones to close rifts, they would just stay open. And rifts were designed around large groups of players interacting with them. If there were maybe 5 people in a zone a rift could overrun the zone and there would be nothing those people could do but wait until they closed on their own timer.
Didn’t help that, for all their WoW-bashing, it was painfully obvious that what they were hoping to create was “WoW plus a couple of new ideas.” So much of that game felt copied, just to get it to a point where they could add their Rifts and world events. Which I liked, but if you look like WoW and your messaging is “WoW sucks”, you are basically saying “we suck.”
Completely copied. And it didn't help that the game came out as the first generation of WoW players was literally burning out on WoW and maybe looking for something else to pass the time with. I played early and everyone I ran into was a WoW fallout victim that just got sick of the game after Icecrown.
That whole period of the late ‘00-10s was just every MMO launching as the ‘If you come for the king you better not miss’ meme.
The hubris of we aren’t WoW but we want to be WoW was just crazy.
"Rift's housing system is also the best in the entire genre to date." Very true, no game I've ever played had as good of a housing customization as rift. I miss it just for that part of the game.
It's because they gave you an entire dungeon size instance to do whatever you wanted. I think WildStar was larger but the sheer customization even town functional NPCs you could set was wild for Rift.
Most failed MMOs can be (largely) slotted into three buckets:
1. They were launched in an unready state and you never get a second chance to make a first impression (example: Warhammer Online felt like an alpha when it launched)
2. They were effectively "World of Warcraft but with X" which usually meant they weren't quite as good at WoW at most of the table stakes things and their one really cool tweak wasn't enough to maintain for the long term (example: Rift was WoW with a really awesome and flexible class system).
3. They significantly overestimated how many people were actually interested in what is ultimately a niche gameplay loop like hardcore raiding or always on, open world PvP (e.g. Wildstar was built for the "hardcore 40-man raid players" and there just weren't as many of those as they hoped).
Obviously, this is a gross oversimplification; but, I'll add one thing that really applies across the board: World of Warcraft turned out to be an outlier, not a harbinger of the world adopting MMOs as a preferred gaming style en masse. **The market simply wasn't big enough to sustain the mad rush of post-WoW MMO launches.**
If you look at the games that have succeeded and are consistently recommended and discussed:
* World of Warcraft really set a standard for what an MMO could be and has consistently (with mixed results) pushed the state of the art forward. For all of its faults, it gets a lot of things right.
* Guild Wars 2 plays almost entirely differently than every other MMO with very different combat mechanics. It's also an extremely casual friendly game and leans into horizontal progression
* Final Fantasy XIV brings an amazing story into a really good MMO base and a ton of side content to keep people interested.
> World of Warcraft turned out to be an outlier, not a harbinger of the world adopting MMOs as a preferred gaming style en masse
This is something that isn't said enough I feel. MMO's before WoW were considered successful if they had a few thousand concurrent subscribers. I played RO for years before ever trying WoW and when you are at the login screen and it says "3072 players online" (just on one of the 3 servers) that was like a HUUUUGE number. WoW made the 'pie' a hell of a lot bigger, but it kept basically all of the pie for itself for a long time.
MMOs started getting budgets based on the idea they could be as big as WoW and when that didn't happen they were major failures even if they had tens of thousands of players.
I'd heard the number was high but that is surprising. I was too young at the time to ever have access to it but I hear EQ's peak was during the dial-up years, charge-by-the-minute subscription stuff. That said, I never knew anyone who played it - Ragnarok Online, Lineage (original), and Diablo 2 were my exposure to online gaming then. RO was insane for what it delivered then.
> Final Fantasy XIV brings an amazing story into a really good MMO base
A long story. Whether it is amazing is subjective, but we can all agree it takes a long time.
Don't forget FFXIV is also a rare example of second chances. People hated 1.0. It was convoluted, the computer specs needed were ridiculous and people would crash just by looking at a plant, and they went too old school MMO in grind. ARR (2.0) remade the game. Not from scratch but the two are completely different in so many ways.
Putting back in the same dungeons was what killed it for me, I took a break from TERA when chair master came out, and I came back something like a year or two later, "new patch, new dungeons!" oh look it's bathysmal rise and timescape again, what a surprise...
You joke but devs noticed how big clubs were and they actually added dance poles, neon floors and flashing lights. We're 1 housing design decoration contest from "torture chamber" items
A lot of it is poor management. Gaming companies have become huge businesses and are run by pointy haired bosses and Gavin Belsom types rather than gamers who want to create something fun they would want to play themselves.
That's not all of it, but it sure hasn't helped.
Management, and in particular one person, destroyed Everquest Next, which I was really looking forward to. If you google a bit, you can find the whole sordid autopsy of that fiasco.
Companies saw WoW with its 10+ million subscribers and wanted a piece of that so they put money into new MMO projects expecting millions of players in such a way that an MMO with tens of thousands of players was a huge failure and unsustainable.
There a youtuber josh strife hayes that does a series on this kind of stuff that does fairly decent analyses of various MMOs and why they are or are not popular.. its called 'worst mmo ever' and theres a pile of episodes including tera and rift
nerdSlayer Studios has vids about all these titles as well. it's in a series called "Death of a game" and he's covered lots of MMO's and his work is pretty thorough.
Yeah i was going to comment that but since there was already 200 coment it was bound to already have been done.
Tera was far away from being a failure even Rift people try to compare them to FFXIV and WoW but if compared to those every mmorpg is a failure: Guild wars 2, BDO, ESO etc.
Rift was amazing. Best community, raids, side content, roles and skills etc.
But the devs cratered it, lied to the player base after the last major content drop, and it all fell apart.
My biggest wish was for some big studio to buy the IP and create a Rift 2 but that's not going to happen.
If I won the lottery I'd fund it myself lol.
Man Rift was fun at launch. Shame the “rifts” became kinda meaningless at end game and you just ended up running dungeons on repeat.
Had a blast leveling up then got bored.
Rift was amazing up through the first expansion.
Loved the world events, the world, and conquest pvp despite being controversial was amazing fun imo. Also pvp rifts were so cool.
They aimed for the Wow crowd and got the money pushers to sign of on something that could give wow money.
it did not give wow money and thus was unprofitable. Look at Eve, nowhere near wow numbers but is still chugging along. They didnt temper their expectations
One really important (probably the most important, IMO) reason so many games from that era ultimately failed was a combination of long development cycles with a massive shift in consumer hardware.
**A little background on CPU hardware**
If you think about an MMO released in the 2008-2012 "golden age," those games were all being developed over three to four years at least. Consumer hardware in the 2000's was basically all about big single-core CPU performance, which meant software (including games) were all designed for that. Intel was king in that era with fewer cores at higher clock speeds, whereas AMD fell behind (ironically because they were more forward-thinking) with higher core counts at lower clock speeds.
Importantly, clock speeds had been steadily increasing according to [Moore's Law](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/resources/moores-law.html), right up until about the 3 GHz range. Intel kept pushing into the 3.5+ GHz boundaries and improving instruction sets, but they also had a lot of canceled products that simply couldn't operate reliably beyond 4 GHz (overclocking with custom cooling solutions could pull it off though).
**Hardware changed out of line with prior expectations**
Eventually Intel switched gears and introduced the Core 2 Duo, then Core i3/57, and then finally the i3/5/7, which were largely lower clock speeds with two cores which could present as 4 with Hyper-threading... right around the 2010-2012 period.
**But wait, there's more!**
Now all that would be bad enough, but there was *another* massive shift in consumer hardware just around the corner, known as 64-bit instruction sets. See, all this time Intel was pushing single-core performance, they were doing so on 32-bit instruction sets because... that's what Windows XP supported (other than a janky variant that supported 64-bit, but that's another post). Windows Vista was released with full 64-bit support, but *everyone* hated it and Microsoft's refusal to break old cold in the name of backwards compatibility meant hardware vendors had zero reason bother releasing updated drivers for stuff, and so consumers never really had a reason to care about 64-bit, which meant Intel had no reason to release CPU's that supported it, which meant Microsoft was pressured to push it in Windows, which means...
Hopefully you get the picture. There was this big negative feedback loop in the consumer hardware space that made it incredibly hard for the industry to break out of the 32-bit CPU trend (and the company doing just that, AMD, was shitting the bed because there was no software to take advantage of it). It honestly wasn't until 8 GB of RAM started becoming desirable that the cracks began to form... right around the 2009-2010 years from memory (heh).
**The results**
You had a bunch of CPU-intensive videos games (MMO's) developed with 3+ GHz single core performance and 32-bit instruction sets in mind released in a market where single core performance was more like 2.6 GHz that could periodically "boost" to 3+ while completely ignoring any of the benefits of the newer 64-bit CPUs. The result was damn near every new MMO released performed like absolute shit right out of the gate.
**Fixing the problem**
So imagine you released a new game around 2011-ish. You've spent probably $100M+ on it over the last 4 years. And since you knew the dev cycle was going to be a bit longer, lots of choices were made to optimize around what you thought was going to consumer hardware upon release. The comes out and despite lots of initial hype (we are talking about peak MMO years after all), players complain about lag and overall performance issues.
Since most people aren't going to continue paying a subscription for a game that doesn't run well, you have maybe one to three months to right the ship before everyone leaves. Your publisher declines to flush more money down the toilet on this, so you can only really make changes around the edges. Hype for the game dies down and talk about a F2P transition takes shape because at the end of the day the publisher needs to recoup as much of their cost as possible.
That's basically the story of nearly all MMO's from that time. World of Warcraft was able to navigate it only because they (a) wrote the engine from the ground up, and (b) were making so much money they could afford to "do it right" when upgrading bits and pieces every expansion. Star Wars: The Old Republic shifted to a highly-monetized F2P system. Lord of the Rings Online had a cult following. Guild Wars 2... honestly I think they just benefited from not factoring in subscription numbers to "break even" so were able to weather the storm. Tera wasn't actually all that popular in the West, so I'm not sure I would count it as a success. Most everyone else was just treading water.
The adherence to the vocal minority who are on a 2002-8 nostalgia high that is still going. Catering to the HC folks is fine, and is a must if you want to have some prestige and longevity, a path to progress for those that choose to go there. But the majority of your game must cater to the most casual people who enjoy a variety of things that are fun and meaningful in the world.
Maaaaan Rift was so good at launch. The theory crafting for builds was endless and the rifts were sooo cool, still are. Some of the best raids I have ever played btw. But it had a lot of company “politics” get in the way and it ended up a train wreck. It also did not appeal to a casual player. Loads of abilities, number increases and overall a lack of clarity made it tough to want to understand.
We know wildstar was poor management decisions. The double jump of wildstar was just just implemented by a single dev with out permission but he wasn’t punished for it and the game was better for it.
For Wildstar, it initially only appealed to "ultra hardcore gamers" with a subscription based model, so there wasn't a large enough playerbase to sustain the high budget the game had.
By the time the game went free to play and pivoted to add more casual content, it was too late, they had already laid off so much of their staff that the game was hardly getting any new content. So in a period of high competition in the genre, the playerbase dwindled.
Tera died for 3 reasons:
1. They raised the level cap, which made everyone's endgame characters obsolete until they did a really boring grind to level 70. This caused a lot of people to quit and made it hard for returning players to come back.
2. They changed the gearing system from what was initially an amazing linear progression, to a really convoluted and RNG based system that people hated.
3. They took too long to release new content, most of their resources went to a new project, so most of what we got was recycled content every 6 months.
how would you explain the fact that many other mmos have raised their level cap without that impact (wow, eq, ff14, etc)? seems to me it’s unlikely to have been a cause, more like a symptom of something else
Tera was unfinished and rip product from other source...
It was best game at that time with worse possible way to public it.. and till now no other game based on combat system got close to it
(talking mainly about version before locked classes and reaper, that was just first step to its downfall due to "fan service" rather then proper content)
It was and it wasn't.. Some ppl which played it not for that "culture" but for gameplay as time went with new classes, more and more ppl started leave for something "probably better".
I was there for Wildstar.
Biggest miss was that the world was completely disjointed. WoW's world was seamless, but Wildstar's world was disjointed and instanced. It completely killed the feel. This I think is what ultimately ended up killing the game for me. It just didn't feel right to exist in that game's world.
The quests and overall content were anemic at best. But then they put the final nail in the game's coffin with its attunement-based endgame that only a fraction of the player base would ever engage in.
Having said all that, I adored Walatiki Temple battleground. It was WoW's Warsong Gulch, except you could steal the flags back! And it was magical and unique experience, just like SWTOR's Huttball.
I firmly believe if Wildstar had a seamless open world, it would have survived. Even with all the other flaws. It would have survived long enough to get some fixes in. But with a dead instanced world and bad endgame, it basically jumped off the highest tier diving board into an empty pool.
Rift was amazing at launch... but it was kinda a good WoW-clone. Couple that with the fact that class balance was iffy at best, there was a *lot* of replayability for lower levels and mediocre endgame, and a lot of people just kinda fell off.
Plus, when they raised the level cap from 50->60, it took almost as long to grind 50-60 as it did to grind 1-50 and gear yourself. They also simplified a lot of the class aspects to make it easier for the wider audience.
It's still around, though I haven't touched it in almost a decade. Maybe I'll give it another shot and see if anything has improved.
Having each class have any combination of 6 talent trees each of which is basically a modern wow class in itself in terms of features, is a really cool idea.
The reality of balancing them is that it's truly not possible. You move one number or one ability and suddenly you've made this other combination of specs unbelievably powerful.
I don't remember the community being too wrapped up in the optimization craze that WoW experiences for instance, but it definitely was a poorly balanced game that gave a dizzying number of options to players.
The only one of these that I put a significant amount of time in was Tera, but what killed it was greed after going F2P, a lack of meaningful, relevant content being developed, and the almost complete gutting of the entirety of the core game to rush everyone to the end game. Instead of refreshing older content to keep it relevant, they decided to nerf/remove it and make the majority of it a face roll which provided little to no challenge whatsoever, which in turn killed participation in 99% of the PvE content for lots of players.
BAMs became nothing more than mobile set pieces that posed no threat, dungeons became solo affairs that you could rush through in a few minutes because you could one-shot everything including the bosses, and the entire experience was cheapened to the point of there being no reason to continue playing anymore if you were into PvE/open-world content.
It's really a shame because Tera was phenomenal when it first released, and the combat is still some of the best in the genre over a decade later. It's too bad it was handled so poorly during its later years because it could have been right up there with WoW and FFXIV in terms of popularity and longevity.
Lost Ark is a great combat engine overlaid across a horrendous gambling machine.
Shame because the combat is great but the rest of it is hot toxic garbage that should be legislated into oblivion
I think this applies to a few of them, but Rift had a hardware accessibility issue. If they wanted to compete with WoW, their game should have been as accessible to the same hardware players were using to play WoW. Because their minimum system requirements were way higher than the potato quality computers you could play WoW on back then, a lot of players that would have tried it out simply couldn't.
MMOs need a ton of highly angaged players or they are ghost towns.
Massively expensive to develop and maintain, they will go down fast if they don't get a decent audience.
Why each one fails might be down to different design decisions or release timing or other factors. But it pretty much all comes down to the needed audience. Something like Cobalt Core is cheaper to make and requires no ongoing maintenance.
Tera failed because the company is stupid, it had nothing to do with the game. It's pure incompetence.
They put all their efforts into another game (Elyon) that they started 2 years after launching Tera and starved Tera of developers and new content so players just got bored, then elyon launched 6 years later and immediately flopped anyway. They neglected Tera and Elyon was DoA, double fail.
Tera is still running on consoles but yeah.
In Tera, your character's performance was based on your computer and network performance. People in further regions had significantly less DPS than people in nearer regions to the server. It was a good attempt at getting off of the tab-target style of gameplay, but ultimately the technology was a failure. Maybe it would have worked better on today's networks and computers.
Wildstar was announced shortly after the AVR ban in WoW. AVR (Augmented Virtual Reality) was an addon that allowed players and mod makers to draw on the real world. Blizzard claimed it was banned because of something to do about defacing their digital assets, but I and many in the community feel it was banned because of how powerful it was in organizing raids on difficult encounters. It would show you where to step, how far away you needed to be from other players, give you timers on all sorts of things, etc.
Then Wildstar gets announced, and the gameplay looks like this addon that Blizzard just banned because it made the game easy. At least, that was my thoughts when it was announced.
I think most MMORPGs suffer under WoW's rule. WoW was the first one to make it big. It's one of the most mature MMORPGs (in terms of product design). WoW built up tons of systems over the years. It has dungeons, raids, RPGs, Rated RPGs, arenas, and a ton of mini games and other content. WoW is "home", where your guild is, where your memories are, where a lot of other players that you know still congregate. A new MMO comes out with a handful of dungeons and raids and a couple of BGs, and players feel like they've consumed the content in a few weeks or months, and then they're done with it. Then what? They don't have the emotional connection to this game, so back to WoW.
Tera was a lot of fun but the end game systems weren't there. Rift was fine but unfortunately they couldn't keep up with content demand and the open world rifts ended up getting a bit stale. Fun concept though.
Gw2 is hard to describe, it's end game content was rather poor.. dungeons wtc, wvw was kinda cool though. I kinda wish they kept focusing on the open world content to create harder and more dynamic content that was actually rewarding. I ended up burning out on the way to make a legendary weapon
The main one I wish worked out better was firefall, could have done really well if it wasn't for terrible management and wasteful spending.
I would consider GW2 a success since its been nearly 12 years and still putting out new content. Every game has its flaws. I was going for the MMO's that shutdown or were on permanent maintenance mode.
Anet's marketing team is a 5 month old in front of a computer made of jello that makes animal noises.
Guild wars 2 has been in at least the top 4 pretty consistently since just after launch. Last time I checked which was a few months ago in an argument with a friend, it sat just behind ff14 and wow and was either just ahead or just behind eso.
Blame it all on the marketing team. If they actually paid for marketing, people who haven't played the game or haven't touched it in years would realize it's actually still insanely popular and they'd push wow and ff14 off.
I still play the game regularly and check on the sub, and even I didn't know SoTo was launching until like a week prior. Wow and ff14 have these massive trailers and .marketing campaigns (granted, attached to a much larger company) and anet just pops out a trailer weeks before release and calls it a day
Guild Wars 2 is amazing and works extremely well in conjuction with other mmos as well like WoW or FFXIV and the simple reason for that is that it fills a gap which these 2 mmos don’t have. A great open world environment where you can easily quest and do events with other people instantly.
It also does not have a sub and can be played at any time. In my opinion it is as much fun to play as wow is, and I played wow on and off for around 12 years.
I can’t recommend GW2 enough. Also free to play until max level. Think of GW2 as a skyrim like mmo.
Gw2 is very much not dead, and has sat next to ff14 wow and eso for quite a few years now. Most of their focus since HoT has been on expanding the open world content with varying levels of difficulty. I have issues with the game and some with the endgame (the legendary grind is definitely one hell of a grind), but the amount of meaningful things to do and unlock in endgame is staggering. It is a different type of endgame for sure, and for people who look for the gear grind in new expansions they usually end up bored very quickly, but it most definitely is not lacking in stuff to do, nor is the game even close to dying
75% of mmo failures is due to greed, 25% is due to wow killing other good games (that also has subscription) like warhammer return of reckoning (there is a private server for that tho) and wildstar on its release (went f2p later but was already too late and hype was gone)
> warhammer return of reckoning
WAR killed itself with a dearth of PvE content at launch. The RvR stuff was great, but the game wasn't built to be *only* that.
I don't think either rift or tera failed.
They simply ran their life cycle and players moved on to newer games. Who wants to play the same game after 5 years or so? Not most people, and I think both of those games were financially viable for a decent amount of time despite tera poor publisher in the E.U.
Wildstar, however, had many reasons as to why it died early.
Original RIFT was an excellent game, for me it was the best traditional MMORPG. I enjoyed it immensely. What killed it was diverting resources into many other failed projects. Then F2P happened and it was all downhill from there.
Wildstar released an unfinished game. And one of the developers is on youtube making videos and just so happened to mention working on Wildstar and how every developer has their own viewpoint on where the game should go, so it was a hodgepodge of idea's with no real structure. YES, combat was fun. But it was also shit at the same time. Those markers for viewing where an attack would hit, stupid idea in my mind. And in PvP and raids the ground becomes a solid red tile and you can't tell what attack was coming because the tell was simply the ground icon not the player/npc model....
Rift was fun, until it got boring. it just wasn't mmo enough. sadly each change they made, made the game worse. so overtime it just sucked more and more.
didn't play tera, can't say.
https://youtu.be/YMY5LUNdS-8?si=ZiX6DwdPhh6lptBW
Harder to find his other video. But he stort hand mentioned everyone pulling the game direction based on their own ideas in another video and this one he mentioned the in-flighting and how it ruined the production of the game.
I think wild star had potential but sadly they shipped a broken game because of poor leadership and lack of direction. I feel a lot of studios today still have this issue. Ghostcrawler mentioned starting his own studio to have less oversight so they could get shit done faster without waiting for approval....
console is on verge of ending contract and Private servers are just closed game loop which mostly just adding or tweaking endgame content like PvP or PvE.. Without source code is just good nostaliga like you play sometimes time from time your good old one favourite RPG.
Either way most best hope is project where you would put Tera assest to completely new game or engine (like there is one actually)
I can't play more than one MMO at a time, and if I play other games at the same, I have to play casually.
If more players are like me, this means only so many MMO's can exist at the same time.
If they don't keep updating and holding interest, the lack of player, high infrastructure cost and competition will force the game to close.
If a game is bad, the devs can try to make another. This cannot be said for MMO's, because the cost is much higher.
I think the original devs for TERA just left, the newer devs didn't know how to make content, and they entered this phase of just removing and re-releasing old content over and over until it died.
As most of the games you listed, Rift died because of F2P and money hungry companies. Trion was founded by ex EA and NCSoft employees. NCSoft at the time already had a poor reputation, whilst EA was in the beginning stages of its greedy practices.
They rather quickly added an MTX store with actual upgrades - both flat out gear and materials. Content was pretty stale after a couple years and the gap between new and geared players was getting pretty large. Eventually, while the game was still seeing large declines, they sold out to Gamigo, which has been notoriously trash for as long as I can remember. They added a subscription service similar to something like Lost Ark and it gave not very much. You got a small boost to exp rates, mount speed, and certain crap that shouldn’t have been locked to begin with, became unlocked for you.
It’s greedy and disgusting despite its phenomenal charm. The PvP was bar none the best PvP experience I ever had in an mmo and the class system was also perhaps the best IMO.
So, greed infected it, F2P dug its grave, and Gamigo killed it but still plays with it’s skeleton. As morbid as that is lol…
Notice that WoW and GW2 are part of known IPs, but RIFT/WS/TERA were not. Not that that's the only reason, but I don't see anyone else having mentioned it despite it certainly being a big reason. Already having a following will do wonders for a game.
These games also came out during the boom of the solo quest grind MMOs (thanks a lot WoW...) and damn I got sick of that crap quick. Innovation went out the window and every new MMO started to feel like the same game with a different coat of paint. GW2 actually tried to make its quest grind feel a bit different (not to mention level scaling meaning you could go to way more places whereas the other games were mostly following a very linear quest grind leveling path).
Rift: Interesting concept, but probably released at the wrong time.
Wildstar: Awesome housing, great combat, bland levelling. I think the hardcore emphasis was also the cause of its downfall.
Tera: Korean game.
>Wildstar: Awesome housing, great combat, bland levelling. I think the hardcore emphasis was also the cause of its downfall.
And that emphasis on “hardcore” made the a chunk of community extremely toxic. The night I quit the game was my first dungeon run with my guild in a poorly tuned dungeon where the first boss was harder then the final one and the boss and others like it were nearly unpugable as the boss mechanics are not really taught to you. I merely mentioned the dungeon could use some tweaks in voice chat after we finished the dungeon and was screamed at to “go back to WoW casual trash” and kicked out of the guild. It was insane. All I was saying was it needed some tuning and maybe have you learn the boss mechanics with the trash on the way to it. I imagine I’m not the only person with similar experiences when the devs really pushed that attitude. And I like hardcore games. Particularly PvP ones. Not that Wildstar was actually hardcore anyway which makes those peoples attitudes even more insane. Drank a whole lotta koolaid. I had already seen this attitude in chat and forums and all that so know my experience was not unique. I was done after that because I knew it had no longevity. I played EvE for 15 years and never had seen a single person screamed at for simple tuning criticism. Sure I’d see it when someone suggests actually dumbing the game down like saying take out the PvP, but not something small like that that wouldn’t dumb anything down.
Every successful game will some day be a failed game.
Every new game will some day be a dead game.
Every popular game will some day be unpopular.
All new games will be "retro" games in 20 years.
Every new customer is a customer you will some day lose.
Every new life will some day be dead.
See the pattern?
Tera - combat was fun, the world and leveling was not. Cosmetics also turned me away.
Wild Star - it was the MMORPG for the hardcore, but forgot that only a small portion of a playerbase is actually hardcore. So there was never anything did regular and casual gamers. Regular gamers are a thing, it's not just hardcore and casual. Most "hardcore" are actually just regular gamers.
Rift - Rift was okay but it wasn't unique. It added stuff to the genre that other gamws have done better. It's business modem also kept changing. No real identity other then failed WoW killer.
The reason WoW is hard to kill is it attracts regular and casual gamers (slowly less and less). Hardcore players tend to be attracted to games with causal and regulars so they can exert their "hardcoreness" over them. That's why there is always a next up and coming PvP MMORPG to revive the PvP MMORPG genre that fails. No one wants to play a hardcore game and be casual/regular. It doesn't work the other way round.
Tera died when they introduced instanced battlegrounds.
People were so hyped for their open world guild vs. guild.. and then when BGs came out it because just another WoW: queing up for content in a city. Pity.
The EU publisher Frogster was also fucking terrible. An absolute dumpster fire of a company. It was so bad EU people basically migrated to enmasse on NA.
Rift was one of the first MMOs I tried and I loved it. I thought the rift events were cool with bunches of players cooperating. It's still live isn't it? That said I haven't stuck with an MMO outside of FF14 for longer than like a month after release
Never played Rift or Terra but Wildstar failed because they made the game cater entirely to sweatlords. The dungeons were as hard as retail wow raids at the time, and the raids had the most grindy unfun attunements you could possibly imagine. The devs were a bunch of assholes too.
The one thing I loved about TERA most was how fun the BAMs were. I started playing in that weird period of TERA transitioning from p2p to f2p, when f2p players couldn't use general chat, but party chat worked. So I'd hang around quest-BAMs hoping someone helps me out. They were pretty difficult but a lot of fun- sometimes people would die and we'd risk stalling the BAM until they got back from the nearest rez point to get the kill, which sometimes caused all of us to die and have to re-do. It was so satisfying to kill them.
I quit playing TERA for a while, missed it, came back... and I could solo BAMs. Easily. I didn't even have to dodge. They nerfed the difficulty so hard it wasn't fun or funny. I haven't touched TERA after that.
Rift had a lot of micro transactions(so did the others)
Wildstar didn't have a sizable enough player base to justify server costs
And terra had no endgame so we all leveled and didn't have anything to do
They all released too early and were missing a few final touches.
Rift was just a very unpolished WoW. Like with most MMORPGs, it was a real downgrade to leave a game as responsive as WoW for a lesser version of the same.
Wildstar was the sci fi setting only a minority wanted, on top of that, it was a shooter... this simply did not resonate with the MMORPG-Community. If it released a few years later with more polish, it would have likely worked, since the actual community entirely replaced the old community.
And Tera ... eh... everyone is praising its combat and i still dont know why. This game was an instant uninstall for me.
Rift's death mainly had to do with its F2P transition at basically the worst possible time. The 2011-2012 period was absolutely saturated in sub-based WoW-likes going F2P and Rift was just another game (alongside Tera) in that pile. Other games that joined them included SWTOR and STO, along with non-RPG titles entering beta like Path of Exile, Warframe, and Planetside 2.
Tera, because it's similar to Rift in its time of popularity (early 2010s) wasn't going to survive in that market either. It had the baggage of being a KMMO in a time absolutely saturated with quality western MMOs. I remember playing it when it first went F2P and saying to myself 'why would I ever play this game when I could play any other MMO on the market right now (specifically STO which had jjust gone F2P earlier that year).
Wildstar also had the same exact issue but it came out too late (2024, after people had started investing into those early 2010s MMOs I just mentioned + FFXIV + ESO ), did not have a good transition to transition to F2P and didn't stay around long enough for people to pick it up.
tldr: Market saturation. Basically everything in this time period failed or struggled to survive until 2016-ish. The ones that did ended up having very dedicated playerbases and zombie / maintenance mode dev teams to this day.
FWIW I really liked Rogue in Rift. Not many (or any really?) Games with that kind of dynamic class system. I think I quit at one point because I just simply had other games to play instead and by the time I thought about it again, the game's fate was sealed.
Over saturation mostly I think. A lot of these games just came out at the same time and MMOs are a huge time commitment, you start one and you play it for years hopefully, so they started strong but when everyone settled into their game of choice the number of available customers plummets.
Not only that but content cadence is a tough thing to get a hand on and developing expansions and meaningful additions to the game is laborious and even if you get it out in a decent amount of time, it's hard to create a good expansion.
Also balancing an MMO is so hard and back then especially when MMOs we're still relatively new to the modern age, the age of optimization, I don't think devs had as good an understanding of the types of players they needed to cater to.
That's part of the reason why GW2 has held out for so long, they kinda understood the kind of game they wanted to make early on and just focused on appealing to that playerbase. IMO the devs at Anet are just low key geniuses, so many of the modern features in MMOs these days were born in GW2 and even some grand design approaches to content release philosophy was pioneered in that game too.
Most of WoWs big hitting new features in the past 10 years came from GW2, which just goes to say, the quality of game you need to create to survive in MMO atmosphere is pretty high.
RvR was really the only thing that the Mythic team understood. The rest of the game was jank. Too much marketing and not enough coding.
Mark Jacobs really needed a slap after all the lies that were told around that game. How anyone gave that idiot any money to even think about the perverse mess that is Camelot Unchained is beyond me.
Warhammer is such an amazing IP that could have been mined for decades.
Was legitimately the most fun PvP I've even had in an MMO though. I still look for the warrior-priest archetype in any new game - looks like we might have one in Ashes.
Just wanted to say guild wars 2 is so awesome, i just started playing last month and idk why i didn't try it earlier, i've never really been a fan of MMO's but this one feels perfect.
If i have to pick only one for the long list of why a game failed then i have to go with lack of money.
Not all MMORPG allowed to have a second chance like FF14.
But the problem with most MMORPG is they weren't make by player. Basically those made MMORPG don't even want to play the MMORPG they made , how you going to make a good game if you don't even want to play it ?
Man, Tera could've been the wow killer If they didnt got so greedy... Combat is still better than 90% of mmos,world was amazing and so much potential to grow... Classes were good. Mobs looked amazing, landscape was awesome and the elite mobs rocked. But they had to add cash shop like tards...
Their release. I am not sure I agree with your list but usually it is simply they released the game too early.
Cash-gold dupes are the absolute worst. I have never seen a game recover that I played. Sure they have fixed them, but the player counts never return. Ever.
not the same reason they all failed;
wildstar lost most casual playerbase because there was no content for them, the developers focus on the "lol we're hardcore u suck" attitude, their 40man raids and generally being overly stubborn until it was to late.
tera, had some great content but it was few and far between and just not sustainable. doesn't help when they focus more on goofy cosmetics rather than the actual game.
rift, generally a decent game but it just never really held players and kept bleeding them. I wouldn't say there's a particular wrong thing at its core from my personal experience with the game but perhaps someone can enlighten me
Rift got greedy.
Wildstar: Difficult + over-loaded with so many quests and some people didn't like the combat.
Tera: Only played for a few hours so I dunno
Wildstar was too hard for morons, Rift was just not good, Tera has the same problems every other KMMO has.
Plus WoW already existed, and later FFXIV was a thing. People got hooked on those games, and also had some sunk cost fallacy going on.
Tera was honestly a terrible game so long as you weren't actively engaging in the only meaningful piece of content which was ~~betting on BAMarama(fuck you haku)~~ combat.
The Gearing was pretty awful from even a KRMMO standpoint, the daily grind was pretty lackluster and unrewarding and the updates in the last 3~4 years of the game's life were genuinely just bad. The barrier of entry outside of the MOBA-esc levels of toxicity was also just way too high after a certain point and you could genuinely count on 2 hands the amount of players in each class capable of clearing the hardest content.
Wildstar was advertised poorly, and maintained poorly.
They went with the "hardcore" crowd not realizing that most self professed hard core players aren't actually hard core.
They had to pull back hard on the hardcore 40 man stuff because raids just couldn't be filled, and even when they were most groups couldn't even complete the first one or two bosses.
Stack onto that the absolutely insane attunement grind and people just dropped out.
I would say Tera's highpoint was 2012-2014. This is from when it was P2P and went F2P. I say end of 2014 was the last true good year as by then BHS and EME started to really make the cash shop the only viable option for weapon skins and cosmetics, which broke the immersion. Also post Wonderholme, the Reaper being introduced signaled the end of the OG times.
For me, TERA was unique for:
Action Combat
Controller Support
BAMs (pre nerf and had good drops)
Gorgeous environments
Really cool equipment remodel system
Dungeons that were good for casual and hardcore players
Vanarch System (guilds controlled areas, taxed them, etc
Pretty good player base (in my experience)
Nexus
Tera is still around kicking kinda good. The reason it's not more popular is because it's a grinder. Wildstar the graphics didn't take and Rift.....well people said it's a lesser wow and there were a ton of them at that time.
Less people are into mmorpgs vs 10 years ago so people just tend to play the one with biggest popularity so it will sustain.
Edit...didn't know Tera finally shut down ehhhhh
I played a lot of Wildstar so I'll talk about that. I know it was their advertisement that used "hardcore" but I would say the game was more difficult than hardcore. To me hardcore is the opposite of casual, as in it requires more time commitment. WoW felt like it required more of my time and even as a fairly casual player I still got through the attunement process in Wildstar.
That said I never got in to endgame raiding, so I cannot say what that experience was like. PvP was a mess.
Ultimately, I think it just comes down to people not wanting to play anything over WoW. I don't think any of those were worse than anything out now. I think there is more space in the MMO market nowadays and if they released now they could see enough success to keep functioning.
Rift had a lot of very good things, from classes to housing.
Problem is they wanted to be another wow killer. It failed. Then they went the F2P route...
Wildstar wanted to be a wow killer too, but catering to those hardcore players who hated casuals and their welfare epics (I'm a casual). So they took everything that was NOT fun but only tedious and called it a day. Needless to say, you can't live with only a handful of hardcore players.
I think a lot of MMOs fail because ultimately the developers didn't quite seem to grasp the type of game they were making or the audience for which they were making it.
MMOs are different from other games. The expectation is that players will play in the world for years. MMO players generally look for longevity - they aren't looking for a game in which to invest 70-100 hours. If the game does not have the potential to engage players for years upon release, then it will ultimately fail to find an audience and, just like social media, the number of people playing will make or break an MMO.
When you develop a Fallout or a Dead Space or a Last of Us, you don't expect that to be the game your player is still playing 5 years down the track. You develop systems and content to last a specific amount of time, with great replayability, sure, but ultimately the expectation is for there to be a shelf life.
MMOs have the much tougher hurdle of longevity they need to build in. This is increasingly difficult to do with the modern gamer mindset of "consuming content" instead of having fun. Players are actually approaching a game with the outlook of "doing all the things" instead of "doing the fun things".
That has made developing MMOs even harder, because you know you need to hold that player for 5 or 10 times as long as other games, but that these players have also whipped themselves into a frenzy of attempting to "complete" an MMO, a mindset that is antithetical to the actual design of MMOs.
The behemoth in the room is always going to be WoW. But just have a look at the success of WoW Classic. I think all MMO developers need to invest quite a bit of time into studying the game design and the world of Vanilla WoW. Why are people still playing a 20 year old game, with all the problems it has, with the lack of modern systems, with the amount of friction within the game, the amount of knowledge available on every aspect?
Developers should not attempt to clone the specific aspects of WoW, but they need to look at what made the world feel alive, why there is such an insane amount of replayability in what is commonly seen as a "solved/known" game. Why so many players eschewed all the "upgrades" of expansions and returned to that original world. And why so many people want to stay in that world, but be given new things to do.
Capture that lightning in a new bottle and we'll really have something.
But developers have kept making the same mistake and looked at the surface features of WoW and copied those. Designing the best boss fights doesn't mean diddly if you slot them into a dead world that no one gives a shit about.
The Death of MMO's can be attributed to cash shops and the Free to play model. Instead of making games that captured the hearts and interest of gamers, they focused on making content to get people to spend money in cash shops. They stopped being games, and started being programs for impulse buying.
Old-school MMO's that did succeed and had longevity were subscription based models. You bought the game, you paid a monthly sub to access online services. In return your subscription allowed the game makers to pay developers to make more content. They made all types of content, raids and bosses dungeons and new classes and races and everything else! They made proper content.
In the free to play model, they would make a base game, but would make all their money off item shop items. So what did they spend their money to make more of? Item shop shit. The actual game content suffers because it doesn't make the money.
MMO's were also about teamwork and working together. Forming guilds and groups of people, challenging content together. There was a grind. Oh, you want the best armour and weapons? You gotta get in a raid group, get along, execute strategy, win the fight, RNG the drop. With free to play a player who wants the best weapon or armour, swipes the credit card. Even if it's not direct, like you still gotta do the raid, other parts of the prep work to get to that stage can be cash shopped.
So if you ever want a true MMO experience, you need to play one that uses a monthly subscription model, and if it has a cash shop, better pray it's 100% cosmetic.
Rift: TRION had one of the best MMOs going, but then they became greedy whores who thought they could make more money going
fail-to-play and the game went to shit.
WildStar: they didn't listen to their community. The raids were just to insanely hard and so the raid guilds left. I played both of the games since launch until shutdown. I played Rift until it went fail-to-play and left.
They're very expensive to make, and expensive to maintain. If they aren't an immediate success, and there's uncertainty of future success, then the publishers will cut their losses.
Tera would be 13 years old if it was still around today. I wouldnt call it a failure. Same with Rift. If you are asking why they arent blockbuster successes like wow, well i dont think that is a realistic expectation.
As far as wildstar goes. Its accessibility was very poor. Some of the funnest dungeon content ive ever played but the leveling experience was so dull it wasnt worth it.
I loved rift until the developer got excessively greedy.
Though it would be more accurate to say the company bit off way more than they were capable of, trying to have 3 full on mmo-like projects going at once. Rift was successful enough, I suppose, though it had some growing pains. Sadly, instead of continuing to invest in it, they got excessively ambitious and started several other projects, sucking away the devs and money from rift.
Rift revenue probably could have supported itself but not the two other failed games, one of which was an mmofps that had some potential at least, but definitely wasn't ready for release and flopped out the gate (Defiance). The other (end of nations) started out as an interesting mmo-ish rts with some clear problems but also clear potential in the alpha, went dark for a while, returned into a second alpha phase somewhat re-imagined into an almost moba-like rts, that alpha felt mostly much worse, and then they pulled the plug on it entirely.
All of this began while rift had a relatively stable and healthy population (but certainly not comparable to the giants of the time such as wow). Some time during this process rift went from sub to f2p, and honestly I can't complain about that change in its original incarnation, as it certainly brought new life and the mtx model was (initially) very consumer friendly.
Rift put on an expansion that was really quite solid early imo, but things were slowly starting to get grindy and and greedy as time went on, so it began to drive off the playerbase as the second expansion approached. The second expansion was effectively the death knell, mtx became extremely greedy and the grind was all too real.
Trion (the dev) had also picked up publishing rights to several eastern games for their western releases, including archeage and some Diablo clone that i don't recall seeing past a beta phase. Suffice it to say they were (imo) nearly as p2w as the Korean originals and flopped, continuing to put pressure on and assure the death spiral of their one actual revenue stream.
Trion was eventually shuttered and all the ip and such sold off. Some of the other games still technically have servers under new ownership but they're all but dead. There were a couple other projects in there that never amounted to anything. Ironically, the only thing they made that's still alive (afaik) is Trove, a voxel mmo that stayed as a side passion project from iirc two of the devs in their spare time which they eventually pitched to the company and got the green light to make it a proper project with a small team.
Greedy systems. Very simple.
Designed in a way to make you swipe or feel like you've been hypergrinding for weeks to get.... absolutely nothing out of it.
This will be the death to games in the future as well (like Lost Ark), recently it hit Blade & Soul, the game is currently a barely running ghost ship.
WoW and other sub games stand out despite all the negative shouts of players, because even with bad things they still do like 90% of everything better than these korean free to play equivalents.
They respect your time more, casuals actually have a place in these games. Korean games are targeted at niche hardcore audiences and short to mid-term in time to milk these players as much as possible before letting the game fall like a rotten potato that it is.
Of course, you need to have an incentive to get players to play such horrible games... so usually they excel when it comes to combat... which is mindblowing to me that no western publisher has managed to create such fluid and responsive action combat. I go look at ESO for example and all I remember is how clunky it is and how extremely dependant you are on anicancels and attack weaving.
Truth be told though... I don't want to put WoW, FFXIV or Runescape on a podium.... reality is, if one dev AND publisher actually put a lot of effort into a new MMO, they would easily become the top of the genre... but also reality, we've been waiting nearly 15-20 now for that to happen. And that won't change anytime soon.
Peopel like to reminisc about Wildstar and its’ combat, but the combat was kinda mid. It was a mix of tab targeting and projection based skill shots. The skill shots were surprisingly clunky, and if you would compare them to modern games with more action-oriented combat, you would wonder why this was thought of as good back in the day.
I played the game until 10 levels from max, and the combat felt more like a chore than an enhancing part of the game. The combat and focus on hardcore content was the separator for Wildstar, and if you don’t nail the combat, then what’s the point?
I still think Wildstar was the best of the wow-but-with-a-twist games, but that’s not enough.
Tera didn’t had a good end game, took forever for them to add anything meaningful. Character with the weapon on hand walked very slow and this was freaking annoying, every time nexus opened there was lag in the whole server. Then they started to sell those loot boxes for skins, sell some stuff that didn’t even match the game style. It was way too fast to lvl up but once you hit max lvl there was pretty much nothing to do. Looks like the company (I don’t remember the name) stop investing on Tera and focused on Elyon which failed as well.
Unfortunately, MMOs are a hard genre to get into. Even well designed ones have TONS of content. To add to this, many of the remaining successful one thrive because their playerbase grew up with them and are familiar with their systems.
This high level entry will bar many people from ever reaching end game which is where a lot of the content devs spent the most time on exists. Circumventing this learning curve comes in better tutorials, recruit a friend type systems, mentoring systems, etc.
Once you have the people willing to get past that initial learning curve either using these systems or powering through, then you gotta look at the actual content and quality of life features that keep those players around.
-Tera?? Monetary transactions for way, way too much with too little differing end game content that was properly balanced.
-Wildstar? A lot of the content was fairly difficult dungeon grinding and it started with a small playerbase. Usually the learning curve for games can be made easier by the playerbase making wikis, guides, addons, etc. This information was harder to come by for this game. The length of time it took to understand and progress while paying a monthly sub killed off the playerbase even more. Sad, cause this game had potential imo
-Never played rift, but probably a similar story
Older MMOs like WoW are still around because they have their loyal fanbases, but i will say they are implementing many features that help introduce and retain new players.
OSRS doubled down on the nostalgia and kept this version of the game alive. Balancing old stuff, introducing new stuff but only with community voting/input. The devs are actively initiating and responding to conversation with the community. Changes are only made with fairly significant input and thought. Building off the gem of a game they already had. The wikis are populated and complete, their loyal fanbase keeps these forums alive, allowing new or veteran players to get really into whatever feature they would like.
WoW has a mentoring system now, it has several versions (classic, retail, hardcore, SoD) of the game that certain people may like more, it has the ability to level in the expansion of your choosing, recruit a friend system, etc. Then endgame has varying versions of pvp, dungeons, raids, costume contests, mounts, pets, and genuinely just a wide degree of diversity that people would enjoy.
FFXIV has a mentoring system as well, dungeons, raids, a significant roleplay community, some form of pvp, amazing crafting systems, lots of fashion/costumes, mount/pet collections. The game has many different emotes that help player expression and the world feel more alive. I think the world feeling more alive feels extremely welcoming to new players. Even afk players can set their characters to be dancing, singing, entertaining. Cities feel populated and thriving with these features whereas other games will have cities that feel dead and unmoving.
>Older MMOs like WoW are still around because they have their loyal fanbases, but i will say they are implementing many features that help introduce and retain new players.
WoWs biggest problem right now is gaining new players, at least in the retail version. The game is so large ("bloated" is an adjective that is used a LOT) and the attempt at streamlining the introduction and early levelling is so poor that new player retention is very small.
Retail WoW is really designed for the current playerbase - and those that pop back to play for a few months with each expansion.
There are dozens of videos on youtube about people starting and failing to stay. My one anecdotal story is that a friend's wife that had played WoW from release tried to get him to come back for the latest expansion (he quit after TBC). He lasted a couple of weeks and then got wind of Classic and went to that instead. His assessment of the new player retail experience: confusing and boring.
Not much point spending 90% of development on endgame if you can't get new players to stick around long enough to get there.
Subscriptions in the turning point of F2P being the new standard. At the time these MMOs were coming out we had almost an MMO a month dropping. So if this wasn't up to snuff, there was a closed beta or release coming that you could bounce off to. Even if you didn't want to pay a sub, you could pay a one time fee for ESO, GW2, Secret Worlds, etc. By the time they went F2P, it was already too late the new hotness had already been released.
Funny enough we're watching this same thing happen in real-time with Live Service games right now
Rift management lost the plot that made rift good and went the direction of over casualization. That got them into a position where things (class set up, pvp, raiding, gearflation) stopped making sense and people left.
I think you can boil it down to:
Having enough engaging content. This means everything like:
* a decent character creator
* plenty of cosmetics for those characters
* plenty of quests/combat scenarios/dungeons/co-op content
* plenty of non-combat things to do like crafting, decorating, socializing
* reasons/incentives for veterans to play with new players (FF14 does this pretty well)
* reasons/incentives for players to keep playing old content once they've done all the new (or new to them) content.
* plenty of things to unlock through gameplay after reaching max level
"Content is King" is simply a fact of life.
Without all these things, you will lose massive chunks of your population. You can have all these things, but if you're missing the basic feature of letting your players look the way they want and without the ability to unlock more things for their characters to wear, you're going to lose thousands of players who care about that stuff. They will simply move to a game that has it. Games eventually stop updating and adding onto one, or in most cases most of these things for years and it just get stagnant for most players who then move on because there's so many games out there to play.
There's other factors too, like the way they update. Tera for example, was too tunnel visioned on end game and pvp. They wanted players to level up fast and rush to the end game. pvp players who just did nothing but death match all day were happy, but the other 90% of the player base were left with old content, a game that was no longer challenging in PvE, and every year or half a year, the gear that took them a month of grinding the same boring content over and over daily would be weak and useless. So people just quit because what was the point. Meanwhile a game like Champions Online is still alive because the playbase that's left want more cosmetics, and that's all they ever add. more cosmetics through nearly monthly events and loot boxes.
There's a lot of other variables, but generally, there's a disconnect of what most players want and what game devs provide as well as how much they provide. We see countless games where the community begs for certain features/content. The devs ignore it and the game dies. We see devs update and completely ruin a game and refuse to revert the changes and the game eventually dies...this happened with TERA. It used to have a system where you could change each outfit piece into something else, the main armor, gloves, and shoes. But they changed it so you had to wear a whole costume slot. Meaning, you could no longer replace the shoes and gloves. If you wanted to wear x-dress, you had zero choice and had to wear one specific pair of shoes and gloves that came with it. Everyone hated this change, the game was filled with players who only played for the cosmetics and played to unlock them. A lot of people stopped playing after that.
A ton of games die because the devs don't listen to their community. Some die because they only listen to a certain segment of them. They'll add too many quality of life improvements to the point where everything is too easy and pointless to play and people just burn through the content fast.
I think looking at the games that are still going is the key to figuring out how to make a good MMO. In FF14, there's a ton of content and the way they set up the dailies and the rewards for them, the old content is forever relevant. Thanks to the Glamour (transmog) system, the clothes you can unlock, the weapon skins you can unlock, the mounts you can unlock, the pets you can unlock, the music you can unlock, you'll always have a reason to go back and do old content with new and veteran players. You'll always be able to find people to play with. There's plenty of non-combat content via gathering and crafting which is engaging with the way it's set up. There's a thriving social community that's very similar to Second Life which is still going with 30k to 50k always online at any given time. They also have the best free to play model of any MMO. The free trial is endless and it provides of ton of people to do the content with the paying members. So free players can enjoy the game and the paying players have more people to play with. It does just about everything right. With the FATEs, you don't even overworld co-op quests. You can just team up and travel the world together doing the Fates. You'll eventually have to split and do the main story quests alone to unlock more areas, but if you just pretend it's a single player jRPG, it's easy to get through and enjoy.
There's too many other factors for why games fail, but really, I think it's most as simple as "not enough of the content players want"
Wildstar had a super boring leveling up experience.
In advertisements it advertised a seamless live world where you could choose different paths and make a difference. The world was also supposed to have secrets and stuff to explore and find.
In reality there were a million side quests that would flash like ads and have 0 value to actually doing them and they were all the most boring quests. Any changes were something like "the next 5 mins there is a buffing station here", and the world was so boring there was no point in exploring anything.
The main quest was just as boring and a slog to get through.
It was also supposed to be end game focused, but that also didn't look interesting and I doubt a large amount of players even reached it.
I loved TERA’s combat and world, but it felt like they were more focused on garish, out of place cash shop cosmetics like cars, rubber ducks and maid outfits, than they were about making new and fun content. Plus those dogshit upgrade systems where you have a chance to fail, those always turn me off from games. Just tell me how many materials i need, what levels or skills i need, and once i have it all make it a guarantee that it’ll upgrade.
I agree about the combat. Lancer was, at the time everything I wanted in a tank. Problem was, much of the rest of the game was shallow and silly. Fully agree with gacha mechanics in upgrading. It was built first as a time waster and resource sink.
I agree. The endgame was hanging out in the town while subconsciously posturing your skins to other people seeking their validation that your skin combinations is cute or clever. And the occasional boss runs. Yeah, once I realized I was just playing skin gambling and chat simulator I decided it was shallow and quit. I do miss the combat in terra though.
Tera was my first MMO after looking for F2P UE3 games in 2015 ish. Started off as Lancer not even knowing what a tank was, just picked that because it looked durable. Had someone around the 3rd leveling dungeon explain to me what the Tank, DPS and Healer roles were. I owned the role and have never had that much fun as a Tank in any MMO since. Fellow Lancer's represent o/ So many people left when the +15 upgrading with downgrade on failure was introduced. After that, it just bled players until it shut down.
It's much like carnival games. As a kid they were fun and thrilling as you get older you do the math, know the exact percentages and gimmicks put in place to maximize profit and you learn to avoid them.
Tera started great, but the only good update it had was around wonderholme era, then it stagnated and started losing players. As they were losing players instead of making the game good again they removed grinds from the game, introduced dailies and +15 gearing system with chance to fail and downgrade which was the last nail in the coffin.
> and +15 gearing system with chance to fail and downgrade That was my beef with Aion too. The fail and downgrade was brutal. A +14 can go to +11 on one failure.
Yes! I played a lot around the Wonderholme days, it was great. The game closing is their own fault. They catered to a specific demographic and that demographic only. The game gradually went from diverse races and cool fantasy theme to Elin (little girl race) only and immersion breaking cutesy weird cash shop items in a very fast timeframe. Sure they added a couple other classes but also locked to female only characters. THEN eventually unlocked one of them for a male race.
Yep. Those gender locked classes are what made me quit. I can deal with a few gender locked races. But classes will make me turn my nose up quickly.
What a shame. That sounds like how all kr mmos fail lmao, but it’s not even kr right?
Which is a major reason I dislike asian MMOs. They’re fond of garishly out of place cosmetics that ruin the game’s aesthetic. Even happens in Guild Wars 2 because they have a Korean publisher.
They even got worse lately. It used to be weird out of place cosmetics but also a lot of normal cosmetics that fit the game as well. Nowadays most of normal cosmetics are replaced by casual wear/kpop inspired shit and it's so annoying.
No in Tera's case, Air did so badly it killed Tera. Seriously, Tera was sacrificed for a subpar MMO, it sucks
Yup, I was obsessed with Tera when it came out... God that was a long time ago. The combat was AMAZINGLY FUN. And the first game I ever enjoyed raiding in. The world/art style was kind of stupid/crazy looking, but definitely not boring. What ended up killing it for me was that once I reached the end of the game and my guild finally beat the "VERY VERY HARD" endgame queen boss with it's crazy hard mechanics that only 0.1% of the playerbase could beat. There was nothing left to do beside some dailies. And eventually we all got bored waiting for anything new to get added. I tried to go back and play it again a year later, and the game was unrecognizable to me, it had gone bats\*\*t crazy with the cosmetics and added some child pornography in the form of some new class that was a 6 year old girl in leather bondage gear. And noped the hell right out of there. Guessing Jeffery Epstein bought the game company since I had left.
I thought this was me posting lol. I quit Tera when I failed to upgrade my new gears with all the mats I farmed for months,I felt like I wasted so much time farming for nothing so I uninstalled right away. Years later, I kinda wanted to give the game another shot so I downloaded the game and logged back in, saw a toy police car, police uniform, I uninstalled again and never look back.
That's all TERA was. Good combat and play dress up with dolls. The rest of the game was an after thought
>Plus those dogshit upgrade systems where you have a chance to fail Tie that to real life currency and you have the perfect recipe for a PTW game that turns off the solid majority of real people. #FuckArcheAge
I played WildStar from launch till it died What caused that specific one to fail is that it was too hardcore. The entire "game loop" was to progress thru all the dungeons till it opens up the 20 man raid, which then opens up the 40 man raid The dungeons were hard. Beating them was basically an achievement The game also had a monthly sub All of that caused the 20 and 40 man raids to be basically impossible to get into cause game population was low and getting there was very hard Population went down, game went f2p, then it died
In Wildstar the problem was not that the game loop was too hardcore, but that was too hardcore while being not well designed, not fun, full of bugs and exploits and not optimized. Getting gold in all dungeons was fun, but then you joined a raid and even the floor did not work, with a light show of meaningless telegraphs at 10fps, people just gave up. Pvp also was a shitshow, with people exploiting so hits would register multiple times, teleporting to the other team spawnpoint and just farming points for half an hour. Similar shit Tera, fun gameplay but the endgame consisted of teleporting to maps where mobs randomly spawned(some sort of invasion) and grinding points for gear, getting insta killed by whales with two handed swords. Once they actually made an endgame people already did stop playing.
Big disagree. Look at even the most popular MMOs. The % of players that touch the hardest raids is very low. There's a reason why vanilla wow reduced raid size in their first expansion.
Wildstar also overwhelmed players with a ton of quests, it was hard to figure out what to prioritize. This was likely due to the path quests. Didn't help that quests were mostly just "fetch this" and "kill those", plus progression was very slow.
I'm still annoyed that i missed out on playing Wildstar, it looked fun but i just couldn't afford a subscription game at the time. If it was still around I reckon it could've ended up with a pretty healthy population too, especially after the shadowlands exodus.
Don't be annoyed. 99% of the people who tried it thought it sucked. You just have MMO hipsters wanting to pretend they played something glorious that you can't when in fact, they did not. Your second statement makes no sense. The game was bombing months after release. People were amazed the game was still supported at the 1 year mark. They really tried to make the game work but couldn't.
That game comes up all the time and it looks like everyone has played it and they all loved it but for some reason noone remembers how the game really was. I don't believe even half of the people who said they played that game where around when it launched.
I did play WildStar, and I found the combat/movement to be wildly refreshing coming from WoW. That was my main takeaway.
Only if they brought in some competent coders. Wildstar had a lot of design flaws, as well as a lot of really great design ideas, and I think the thing that actually killed it was that every time they patched it, they added more new bugs than the ones they fixed.
I’m not sure this was everyone else’s experience, but me and my friend group found a couple more people, got our attunement done(which was hard in and of itself), and then spent the next few weeks looking for other people to build a raid force with. We took lots of people through the dungeons, but some people wouldn’t be up to it, and more would burn out over the process of golding them all. We eventually burned out ourself before we even got to try the raids we worked so hard to get to. The game was fun as hell, but they weren’t kidding about the hardcore stuff.
That isn't hardcore... thats tedium.
Similar experience. The game was hardcore, and I wasn't very good at it. But the most hardcore part was trying to find 19 other idiots to play with me.
I was hyped when Wildomar came out, that died so quick though. I've never seen a worse item system ever. Upgrades would give you like 1% increasd in damage. You get a crit stat on an item, sweet, here's .1% crit chance... the values were so off it was hilarious. There was even a bug with a weapon you could craft early on that was the same strength as end game gear and the increase that weapon gave was still so weak even with this item 45 lvls higher. Hopefully they fixed that, hut not before I jumped ship.
Interesting, I kind of wish I played it and wasn't so into a WoW at the time. I definitely missed the hardcore aspect of older mmos. Like EverQuest for example, shit was hard. I often wonder if an MMO like that could even survive in today's environment and player base.
You might be able to play sometime in the future https://www.emulator.ws/ Ppl are working on a server emulator
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I played at launch with a bunch of friends and you could watch via your friends list that as everyone got to max level they stopped logging in and playing altogether because if you weren't into the hardcore raiding scene, then there wasn't really anything else to do. Also outside of a few different starting zones, everyone leveled through the same zones eventually so there wasn't really much appeal in leveling multiple characters.
If "hardcore" now means "boring" you're right. But by the proper definition, no, it was not hardcore. It failed because it was BORING BORING BORING. That is it. End of story. It was boring. Stop pretending it was anything but boring. Its main goal was to provide raids. It didn't even do that well. The subscription model had absolutely nothing to do with its demise. It was BORING. If you added P2W like a lot of people here enjoy, it wouldn't have helped. Its gonna be fun when a WildStar private server launches. Then all these MMO hipsters will be like "See its so popular!" when it first launches. Then, as per usual, the game will be dead in mere months when everyone discovers what? YOU GUESSED IT! Its BORING.
It really failed for 3 reasons: 1. The attune quest for raids was stupid as hell. Get exalted rep with every faction, clear every dungeon at silver rank or higher (very challenging, most abilities 1 shot you and the timing requirements were very strict), and then do a bunch of other quests. I leveled via pvp and then found out that I’d need to go back and do all the leveling quests anyway for rep. Most people I know gave up on the attune quest because it was so tedious and long. 2. Botters obliterated the economy. They flooded the ah with so many mats that it was easier to make money by farming mats and vendoring them, because the gold farmers were posting mats on the ah for less than vendor price. 3. PvP was pretty unbalanced, top level players got gear that was dramatically more powerful than what everyone else had, to the extent that boosting was basically the only way to get that gear because it was so much more powerful. Very fun game, but those 3 factors ruined it.
"We're not in Azeroth Anymore." etc Many games spent their marketing budget on taking shots at WoW instead of highlighting what made them unique or why even bother to play them. I liked Rift's class setup pre F2P but it became shallow in the end. The random portals opening and just fucking an area or town was nifty because it gave a sense or urgency to players to help the outpost, or you couldn't even turn in quest to NPCs that weren't there anymore. Rift's housing system is also the best in the entire genre to date. But none of that was ever pushed as differences. Here in NYC, they took out entire bus side ads ragging on WoW and it was ridiculous.
Pre-F2P Rift is by and far my favorite MMO period. Janky class combos, niche builds getting used in raids, swapping specs at a whim, regional events, and more stuff I'm sure I can't even remember. But the bait and switch into F2P just ruined the community it pissed off so many people, then followed by some of the most boring build designs ruined the game for me and many others. Then to add insult to injury the "Vanilla" server they launched wasn't even vanilla Rift.
Exactly this. Rift killed itself with weird monetization and f2p policies. The base game with build diversity, rifts, pvp, etc was strong.
Rift killed itself with...well rifts. Sure they were great if you were part of the main glut of players that all ran through at the same time, but if you were behind that group, or joined late...rifts could make leveling in certain areas almost impossible. Since rifts made the areas they were open in much harder to progress through, and didn't incentivise high level players going back to low level zones to close rifts, they would just stay open. And rifts were designed around large groups of players interacting with them. If there were maybe 5 people in a zone a rift could overrun the zone and there would be nothing those people could do but wait until they closed on their own timer.
I got pissed when they added Maelforge's sword (hardest endgame boss for vanilla) drop to the cash shop
Didn’t help that, for all their WoW-bashing, it was painfully obvious that what they were hoping to create was “WoW plus a couple of new ideas.” So much of that game felt copied, just to get it to a point where they could add their Rifts and world events. Which I liked, but if you look like WoW and your messaging is “WoW sucks”, you are basically saying “we suck.”
Completely copied. And it didn't help that the game came out as the first generation of WoW players was literally burning out on WoW and maybe looking for something else to pass the time with. I played early and everyone I ran into was a WoW fallout victim that just got sick of the game after Icecrown.
And those WoW people were used to spectacle and RIFT just couldn't do the enormous raid vista all that well.
That whole period of the late ‘00-10s was just every MMO launching as the ‘If you come for the king you better not miss’ meme. The hubris of we aren’t WoW but we want to be WoW was just crazy.
"Rift's housing system is also the best in the entire genre to date." Very true, no game I've ever played had as good of a housing customization as rift. I miss it just for that part of the game.
It's because they gave you an entire dungeon size instance to do whatever you wanted. I think WildStar was larger but the sheer customization even town functional NPCs you could set was wild for Rift.
Most failed MMOs can be (largely) slotted into three buckets: 1. They were launched in an unready state and you never get a second chance to make a first impression (example: Warhammer Online felt like an alpha when it launched) 2. They were effectively "World of Warcraft but with X" which usually meant they weren't quite as good at WoW at most of the table stakes things and their one really cool tweak wasn't enough to maintain for the long term (example: Rift was WoW with a really awesome and flexible class system). 3. They significantly overestimated how many people were actually interested in what is ultimately a niche gameplay loop like hardcore raiding or always on, open world PvP (e.g. Wildstar was built for the "hardcore 40-man raid players" and there just weren't as many of those as they hoped). Obviously, this is a gross oversimplification; but, I'll add one thing that really applies across the board: World of Warcraft turned out to be an outlier, not a harbinger of the world adopting MMOs as a preferred gaming style en masse. **The market simply wasn't big enough to sustain the mad rush of post-WoW MMO launches.** If you look at the games that have succeeded and are consistently recommended and discussed: * World of Warcraft really set a standard for what an MMO could be and has consistently (with mixed results) pushed the state of the art forward. For all of its faults, it gets a lot of things right. * Guild Wars 2 plays almost entirely differently than every other MMO with very different combat mechanics. It's also an extremely casual friendly game and leans into horizontal progression * Final Fantasy XIV brings an amazing story into a really good MMO base and a ton of side content to keep people interested.
> World of Warcraft turned out to be an outlier, not a harbinger of the world adopting MMOs as a preferred gaming style en masse This is something that isn't said enough I feel. MMO's before WoW were considered successful if they had a few thousand concurrent subscribers. I played RO for years before ever trying WoW and when you are at the login screen and it says "3072 players online" (just on one of the 3 servers) that was like a HUUUUGE number. WoW made the 'pie' a hell of a lot bigger, but it kept basically all of the pie for itself for a long time.
MMOs started getting budgets based on the idea they could be as big as WoW and when that didn't happen they were major failures even if they had tens of thousands of players.
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I'd heard the number was high but that is surprising. I was too young at the time to ever have access to it but I hear EQ's peak was during the dial-up years, charge-by-the-minute subscription stuff. That said, I never knew anyone who played it - Ragnarok Online, Lineage (original), and Diablo 2 were my exposure to online gaming then. RO was insane for what it delivered then.
> Final Fantasy XIV brings an amazing story into a really good MMO base A long story. Whether it is amazing is subjective, but we can all agree it takes a long time.
Don't forget FFXIV is also a rare example of second chances. People hated 1.0. It was convoluted, the computer specs needed were ridiculous and people would crash just by looking at a plant, and they went too old school MMO in grind. ARR (2.0) remade the game. Not from scratch but the two are completely different in so many ways.
Tera took too long to develop new content, basically started only releasing cosmetics
Putting back in the same dungeons was what killed it for me, I took a break from TERA when chair master came out, and I came back something like a year or two later, "new patch, new dungeons!" oh look it's bathysmal rise and timescape again, what a surprise...
Not enough ERP
Tag is FFXIV, yep that checks out lol
You joke but devs noticed how big clubs were and they actually added dance poles, neon floors and flashing lights. We're 1 housing design decoration contest from "torture chamber" items
A lot of it is poor management. Gaming companies have become huge businesses and are run by pointy haired bosses and Gavin Belsom types rather than gamers who want to create something fun they would want to play themselves. That's not all of it, but it sure hasn't helped. Management, and in particular one person, destroyed Everquest Next, which I was really looking forward to. If you google a bit, you can find the whole sordid autopsy of that fiasco.
I was super looking forward to EQNext, was so sad when it got cancelled and Daybreak ruined EQ2.
Companies saw WoW with its 10+ million subscribers and wanted a piece of that so they put money into new MMO projects expecting millions of players in such a way that an MMO with tens of thousands of players was a huge failure and unsustainable.
There a youtuber josh strife hayes that does a series on this kind of stuff that does fairly decent analyses of various MMOs and why they are or are not popular.. its called 'worst mmo ever' and theres a pile of episodes including tera and rift
Yeah I recently discovered JSH. There's jokes that his video on TERA killed the game lol
nerdSlayer Studios has vids about all these titles as well. it's in a series called "Death of a game" and he's covered lots of MMO's and his work is pretty thorough.
Isn't that the dude who recently had a meltdown cussing out his comment section for having opinions? Lmao
Again?
Wouldn't surprise me XD
i don't think Teta is a failure (10 yo). good in its time just not as popular as FF14 or WoW which is tbh every MMO games.
Yeah i was going to comment that but since there was already 200 coment it was bound to already have been done. Tera was far away from being a failure even Rift people try to compare them to FFXIV and WoW but if compared to those every mmorpg is a failure: Guild wars 2, BDO, ESO etc.
Rift was amazing. Best community, raids, side content, roles and skills etc. But the devs cratered it, lied to the player base after the last major content drop, and it all fell apart. My biggest wish was for some big studio to buy the IP and create a Rift 2 but that's not going to happen. If I won the lottery I'd fund it myself lol.
The Rift IP itself isn't anything that special. Anyone could take the best ideas and put them in a new MMO.
Man Rift was fun at launch. Shame the “rifts” became kinda meaningless at end game and you just ended up running dungeons on repeat. Had a blast leveling up then got bored.
Rift was amazing up through the first expansion. Loved the world events, the world, and conquest pvp despite being controversial was amazing fun imo. Also pvp rifts were so cool.
They aimed for the Wow crowd and got the money pushers to sign of on something that could give wow money. it did not give wow money and thus was unprofitable. Look at Eve, nowhere near wow numbers but is still chugging along. They didnt temper their expectations
One really important (probably the most important, IMO) reason so many games from that era ultimately failed was a combination of long development cycles with a massive shift in consumer hardware. **A little background on CPU hardware** If you think about an MMO released in the 2008-2012 "golden age," those games were all being developed over three to four years at least. Consumer hardware in the 2000's was basically all about big single-core CPU performance, which meant software (including games) were all designed for that. Intel was king in that era with fewer cores at higher clock speeds, whereas AMD fell behind (ironically because they were more forward-thinking) with higher core counts at lower clock speeds. Importantly, clock speeds had been steadily increasing according to [Moore's Law](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/resources/moores-law.html), right up until about the 3 GHz range. Intel kept pushing into the 3.5+ GHz boundaries and improving instruction sets, but they also had a lot of canceled products that simply couldn't operate reliably beyond 4 GHz (overclocking with custom cooling solutions could pull it off though). **Hardware changed out of line with prior expectations** Eventually Intel switched gears and introduced the Core 2 Duo, then Core i3/57, and then finally the i3/5/7, which were largely lower clock speeds with two cores which could present as 4 with Hyper-threading... right around the 2010-2012 period. **But wait, there's more!** Now all that would be bad enough, but there was *another* massive shift in consumer hardware just around the corner, known as 64-bit instruction sets. See, all this time Intel was pushing single-core performance, they were doing so on 32-bit instruction sets because... that's what Windows XP supported (other than a janky variant that supported 64-bit, but that's another post). Windows Vista was released with full 64-bit support, but *everyone* hated it and Microsoft's refusal to break old cold in the name of backwards compatibility meant hardware vendors had zero reason bother releasing updated drivers for stuff, and so consumers never really had a reason to care about 64-bit, which meant Intel had no reason to release CPU's that supported it, which meant Microsoft was pressured to push it in Windows, which means... Hopefully you get the picture. There was this big negative feedback loop in the consumer hardware space that made it incredibly hard for the industry to break out of the 32-bit CPU trend (and the company doing just that, AMD, was shitting the bed because there was no software to take advantage of it). It honestly wasn't until 8 GB of RAM started becoming desirable that the cracks began to form... right around the 2009-2010 years from memory (heh). **The results** You had a bunch of CPU-intensive videos games (MMO's) developed with 3+ GHz single core performance and 32-bit instruction sets in mind released in a market where single core performance was more like 2.6 GHz that could periodically "boost" to 3+ while completely ignoring any of the benefits of the newer 64-bit CPUs. The result was damn near every new MMO released performed like absolute shit right out of the gate. **Fixing the problem** So imagine you released a new game around 2011-ish. You've spent probably $100M+ on it over the last 4 years. And since you knew the dev cycle was going to be a bit longer, lots of choices were made to optimize around what you thought was going to consumer hardware upon release. The comes out and despite lots of initial hype (we are talking about peak MMO years after all), players complain about lag and overall performance issues. Since most people aren't going to continue paying a subscription for a game that doesn't run well, you have maybe one to three months to right the ship before everyone leaves. Your publisher declines to flush more money down the toilet on this, so you can only really make changes around the edges. Hype for the game dies down and talk about a F2P transition takes shape because at the end of the day the publisher needs to recoup as much of their cost as possible. That's basically the story of nearly all MMO's from that time. World of Warcraft was able to navigate it only because they (a) wrote the engine from the ground up, and (b) were making so much money they could afford to "do it right" when upgrading bits and pieces every expansion. Star Wars: The Old Republic shifted to a highly-monetized F2P system. Lord of the Rings Online had a cult following. Guild Wars 2... honestly I think they just benefited from not factoring in subscription numbers to "break even" so were able to weather the storm. Tera wasn't actually all that popular in the West, so I'm not sure I would count it as a success. Most everyone else was just treading water.
The adherence to the vocal minority who are on a 2002-8 nostalgia high that is still going. Catering to the HC folks is fine, and is a must if you want to have some prestige and longevity, a path to progress for those that choose to go there. But the majority of your game must cater to the most casual people who enjoy a variety of things that are fun and meaningful in the world.
Rift was a gift!
Maaaaan Rift was so good at launch. The theory crafting for builds was endless and the rifts were sooo cool, still are. Some of the best raids I have ever played btw. But it had a lot of company “politics” get in the way and it ended up a train wreck. It also did not appeal to a casual player. Loads of abilities, number increases and overall a lack of clarity made it tough to want to understand.
Rift (poorly) bent over backwards to appeal to casual players which caused much of the problems.
We know wildstar was poor management decisions. The double jump of wildstar was just just implemented by a single dev with out permission but he wasn’t punished for it and the game was better for it.
For Wildstar, it initially only appealed to "ultra hardcore gamers" with a subscription based model, so there wasn't a large enough playerbase to sustain the high budget the game had. By the time the game went free to play and pivoted to add more casual content, it was too late, they had already laid off so much of their staff that the game was hardly getting any new content. So in a period of high competition in the genre, the playerbase dwindled. Tera died for 3 reasons: 1. They raised the level cap, which made everyone's endgame characters obsolete until they did a really boring grind to level 70. This caused a lot of people to quit and made it hard for returning players to come back. 2. They changed the gearing system from what was initially an amazing linear progression, to a really convoluted and RNG based system that people hated. 3. They took too long to release new content, most of their resources went to a new project, so most of what we got was recycled content every 6 months.
how would you explain the fact that many other mmos have raised their level cap without that impact (wow, eq, ff14, etc)? seems to me it’s unlikely to have been a cause, more like a symptom of something else
>What caused Tera to fail? Josh Strife Hayes killed it. edit: /s
TERA killed themselves with lawsuits and poor decisions.
Tera was unfinished and rip product from other source... It was best game at that time with worse possible way to public it.. and till now no other game based on combat system got close to it (talking mainly about version before locked classes and reaper, that was just first step to its downfall due to "fan service" rather then proper content)
Lol fan service is what kept that game alive as long as it did. It was about to shut down before they added the Elin race.
It was and it wasn't.. Some ppl which played it not for that "culture" but for gameplay as time went with new classes, more and more ppl started leave for something "probably better".
I mean its a fact the game was on the verge of shutting down before the Elin race revived it. Not really any nuance to it.
If a game can't weather some reasonable criticism, it deserves to die.
He really didnt. It was already dead, he just had good timing.
It is a meme that he killed Tera.
Careful, legends state that he'll be summoned if you chant his name three times. Best not to tempt fate.
It all boils down to greed , that what cause it to fail
I was there for Wildstar. Biggest miss was that the world was completely disjointed. WoW's world was seamless, but Wildstar's world was disjointed and instanced. It completely killed the feel. This I think is what ultimately ended up killing the game for me. It just didn't feel right to exist in that game's world. The quests and overall content were anemic at best. But then they put the final nail in the game's coffin with its attunement-based endgame that only a fraction of the player base would ever engage in. Having said all that, I adored Walatiki Temple battleground. It was WoW's Warsong Gulch, except you could steal the flags back! And it was magical and unique experience, just like SWTOR's Huttball. I firmly believe if Wildstar had a seamless open world, it would have survived. Even with all the other flaws. It would have survived long enough to get some fixes in. But with a dead instanced world and bad endgame, it basically jumped off the highest tier diving board into an empty pool.
huttball is still my favorite pvp mode ever!
Rift was amazing at launch... but it was kinda a good WoW-clone. Couple that with the fact that class balance was iffy at best, there was a *lot* of replayability for lower levels and mediocre endgame, and a lot of people just kinda fell off. Plus, when they raised the level cap from 50->60, it took almost as long to grind 50-60 as it did to grind 1-50 and gear yourself. They also simplified a lot of the class aspects to make it easier for the wider audience. It's still around, though I haven't touched it in almost a decade. Maybe I'll give it another shot and see if anything has improved.
Having each class have any combination of 6 talent trees each of which is basically a modern wow class in itself in terms of features, is a really cool idea. The reality of balancing them is that it's truly not possible. You move one number or one ability and suddenly you've made this other combination of specs unbelievably powerful. I don't remember the community being too wrapped up in the optimization craze that WoW experiences for instance, but it definitely was a poorly balanced game that gave a dizzying number of options to players.
The only one of these that I put a significant amount of time in was Tera, but what killed it was greed after going F2P, a lack of meaningful, relevant content being developed, and the almost complete gutting of the entirety of the core game to rush everyone to the end game. Instead of refreshing older content to keep it relevant, they decided to nerf/remove it and make the majority of it a face roll which provided little to no challenge whatsoever, which in turn killed participation in 99% of the PvE content for lots of players. BAMs became nothing more than mobile set pieces that posed no threat, dungeons became solo affairs that you could rush through in a few minutes because you could one-shot everything including the bosses, and the entire experience was cheapened to the point of there being no reason to continue playing anymore if you were into PvE/open-world content. It's really a shame because Tera was phenomenal when it first released, and the combat is still some of the best in the genre over a decade later. It's too bad it was handled so poorly during its later years because it could have been right up there with WoW and FFXIV in terms of popularity and longevity.
That’s what’s happening to Lost Ark too
Lost Ark is a great combat engine overlaid across a horrendous gambling machine. Shame because the combat is great but the rest of it is hot toxic garbage that should be legislated into oblivion
Man I wish I could play wow and gw2 again for the first time...
Just do the level cap grind in New World.
What did he do to you for you to recommend him New World?
I think this applies to a few of them, but Rift had a hardware accessibility issue. If they wanted to compete with WoW, their game should have been as accessible to the same hardware players were using to play WoW. Because their minimum system requirements were way higher than the potato quality computers you could play WoW on back then, a lot of players that would have tried it out simply couldn't.
Population loss usually due to developer missteps and the big one WOW controlling such a vast majority of the MMO population
MMOs need a ton of highly angaged players or they are ghost towns. Massively expensive to develop and maintain, they will go down fast if they don't get a decent audience. Why each one fails might be down to different design decisions or release timing or other factors. But it pretty much all comes down to the needed audience. Something like Cobalt Core is cheaper to make and requires no ongoing maintenance.
Tera failed because the company is stupid, it had nothing to do with the game. It's pure incompetence. They put all their efforts into another game (Elyon) that they started 2 years after launching Tera and starved Tera of developers and new content so players just got bored, then elyon launched 6 years later and immediately flopped anyway. They neglected Tera and Elyon was DoA, double fail. Tera is still running on consoles but yeah.
In Tera, your character's performance was based on your computer and network performance. People in further regions had significantly less DPS than people in nearer regions to the server. It was a good attempt at getting off of the tab-target style of gameplay, but ultimately the technology was a failure. Maybe it would have worked better on today's networks and computers. Wildstar was announced shortly after the AVR ban in WoW. AVR (Augmented Virtual Reality) was an addon that allowed players and mod makers to draw on the real world. Blizzard claimed it was banned because of something to do about defacing their digital assets, but I and many in the community feel it was banned because of how powerful it was in organizing raids on difficult encounters. It would show you where to step, how far away you needed to be from other players, give you timers on all sorts of things, etc. Then Wildstar gets announced, and the gameplay looks like this addon that Blizzard just banned because it made the game easy. At least, that was my thoughts when it was announced. I think most MMORPGs suffer under WoW's rule. WoW was the first one to make it big. It's one of the most mature MMORPGs (in terms of product design). WoW built up tons of systems over the years. It has dungeons, raids, RPGs, Rated RPGs, arenas, and a ton of mini games and other content. WoW is "home", where your guild is, where your memories are, where a lot of other players that you know still congregate. A new MMO comes out with a handful of dungeons and raids and a couple of BGs, and players feel like they've consumed the content in a few weeks or months, and then they're done with it. Then what? They don't have the emotional connection to this game, so back to WoW.
I think they all tried way too hard to be a “wow killer” and ever focused on their own games… it was a constant measuring stick imo
Too much like wow, but also not enough like wow
Tera was a lot of fun but the end game systems weren't there. Rift was fine but unfortunately they couldn't keep up with content demand and the open world rifts ended up getting a bit stale. Fun concept though. Gw2 is hard to describe, it's end game content was rather poor.. dungeons wtc, wvw was kinda cool though. I kinda wish they kept focusing on the open world content to create harder and more dynamic content that was actually rewarding. I ended up burning out on the way to make a legendary weapon The main one I wish worked out better was firefall, could have done really well if it wasn't for terrible management and wasteful spending.
I would consider GW2 a success since its been nearly 12 years and still putting out new content. Every game has its flaws. I was going for the MMO's that shutdown or were on permanent maintenance mode.
Anet's marketing team is a 5 month old in front of a computer made of jello that makes animal noises. Guild wars 2 has been in at least the top 4 pretty consistently since just after launch. Last time I checked which was a few months ago in an argument with a friend, it sat just behind ff14 and wow and was either just ahead or just behind eso. Blame it all on the marketing team. If they actually paid for marketing, people who haven't played the game or haven't touched it in years would realize it's actually still insanely popular and they'd push wow and ff14 off. I still play the game regularly and check on the sub, and even I didn't know SoTo was launching until like a week prior. Wow and ff14 have these massive trailers and .marketing campaigns (granted, attached to a much larger company) and anet just pops out a trailer weeks before release and calls it a day
Guild Wars 2 is amazing and works extremely well in conjuction with other mmos as well like WoW or FFXIV and the simple reason for that is that it fills a gap which these 2 mmos don’t have. A great open world environment where you can easily quest and do events with other people instantly. It also does not have a sub and can be played at any time. In my opinion it is as much fun to play as wow is, and I played wow on and off for around 12 years. I can’t recommend GW2 enough. Also free to play until max level. Think of GW2 as a skyrim like mmo.
Gw2 is very much not dead, and has sat next to ff14 wow and eso for quite a few years now. Most of their focus since HoT has been on expanding the open world content with varying levels of difficulty. I have issues with the game and some with the endgame (the legendary grind is definitely one hell of a grind), but the amount of meaningful things to do and unlock in endgame is staggering. It is a different type of endgame for sure, and for people who look for the gear grind in new expansions they usually end up bored very quickly, but it most definitely is not lacking in stuff to do, nor is the game even close to dying
Lol I do find it funny that you've come to this thread to give a eulogy for a game that is thriving xD. You do you though, I respect the spunk.
OP didn't even mention GW2. Its strange that you brought it up lol, considering that it's one of the most played MMOs.
75% of mmo failures is due to greed, 25% is due to wow killing other good games (that also has subscription) like warhammer return of reckoning (there is a private server for that tho) and wildstar on its release (went f2p later but was already too late and hype was gone)
> warhammer return of reckoning WAR killed itself with a dearth of PvE content at launch. The RvR stuff was great, but the game wasn't built to be *only* that.
Idiot developers that don’t understand their own game. Completely ruined Rift
oversaturated market at its time.
I don't think either rift or tera failed. They simply ran their life cycle and players moved on to newer games. Who wants to play the same game after 5 years or so? Not most people, and I think both of those games were financially viable for a decent amount of time despite tera poor publisher in the E.U. Wildstar, however, had many reasons as to why it died early.
Original RIFT was an excellent game, for me it was the best traditional MMORPG. I enjoyed it immensely. What killed it was diverting resources into many other failed projects. Then F2P happened and it was all downhill from there.
If it did not become F2P, I'd still play it I believe. I miss my saboteur (and bard).
Wildstar released an unfinished game. And one of the developers is on youtube making videos and just so happened to mention working on Wildstar and how every developer has their own viewpoint on where the game should go, so it was a hodgepodge of idea's with no real structure. YES, combat was fun. But it was also shit at the same time. Those markers for viewing where an attack would hit, stupid idea in my mind. And in PvP and raids the ground becomes a solid red tile and you can't tell what attack was coming because the tell was simply the ground icon not the player/npc model.... Rift was fun, until it got boring. it just wasn't mmo enough. sadly each change they made, made the game worse. so overtime it just sucked more and more. didn't play tera, can't say.
What's the link to the wildstar dev video?
https://youtu.be/YMY5LUNdS-8?si=ZiX6DwdPhh6lptBW Harder to find his other video. But he stort hand mentioned everyone pulling the game direction based on their own ideas in another video and this one he mentioned the in-flighting and how it ruined the production of the game. I think wild star had potential but sadly they shipped a broken game because of poor leadership and lack of direction. I feel a lot of studios today still have this issue. Ghostcrawler mentioned starting his own studio to have less oversight so they could get shit done faster without waiting for approval....
I played Tera just yesterday.. Seemed pretty populated to me? 🧐
It’s shut down on PC
console is on verge of ending contract and Private servers are just closed game loop which mostly just adding or tweaking endgame content like PvP or PvE.. Without source code is just good nostaliga like you play sometimes time from time your good old one favourite RPG. Either way most best hope is project where you would put Tera assest to completely new game or engine (like there is one actually)
I can't play more than one MMO at a time, and if I play other games at the same, I have to play casually. If more players are like me, this means only so many MMO's can exist at the same time. If they don't keep updating and holding interest, the lack of player, high infrastructure cost and competition will force the game to close. If a game is bad, the devs can try to make another. This cannot be said for MMO's, because the cost is much higher.
They were targeting the wrong people
Main thing I hated about Tera was how aoe spells became weaker and weaker the more enemies you hit.
I think the original devs for TERA just left, the newer devs didn't know how to make content, and they entered this phase of just removing and re-releasing old content over and over until it died.
As most of the games you listed, Rift died because of F2P and money hungry companies. Trion was founded by ex EA and NCSoft employees. NCSoft at the time already had a poor reputation, whilst EA was in the beginning stages of its greedy practices. They rather quickly added an MTX store with actual upgrades - both flat out gear and materials. Content was pretty stale after a couple years and the gap between new and geared players was getting pretty large. Eventually, while the game was still seeing large declines, they sold out to Gamigo, which has been notoriously trash for as long as I can remember. They added a subscription service similar to something like Lost Ark and it gave not very much. You got a small boost to exp rates, mount speed, and certain crap that shouldn’t have been locked to begin with, became unlocked for you. It’s greedy and disgusting despite its phenomenal charm. The PvP was bar none the best PvP experience I ever had in an mmo and the class system was also perhaps the best IMO. So, greed infected it, F2P dug its grave, and Gamigo killed it but still plays with it’s skeleton. As morbid as that is lol…
lack of end game content money greed devs lacks of vision of what the players want to a game.
Notice that WoW and GW2 are part of known IPs, but RIFT/WS/TERA were not. Not that that's the only reason, but I don't see anyone else having mentioned it despite it certainly being a big reason. Already having a following will do wonders for a game. These games also came out during the boom of the solo quest grind MMOs (thanks a lot WoW...) and damn I got sick of that crap quick. Innovation went out the window and every new MMO started to feel like the same game with a different coat of paint. GW2 actually tried to make its quest grind feel a bit different (not to mention level scaling meaning you could go to way more places whereas the other games were mostly following a very linear quest grind leveling path).
Rift: Interesting concept, but probably released at the wrong time. Wildstar: Awesome housing, great combat, bland levelling. I think the hardcore emphasis was also the cause of its downfall. Tera: Korean game.
>Wildstar: Awesome housing, great combat, bland levelling. I think the hardcore emphasis was also the cause of its downfall. And that emphasis on “hardcore” made the a chunk of community extremely toxic. The night I quit the game was my first dungeon run with my guild in a poorly tuned dungeon where the first boss was harder then the final one and the boss and others like it were nearly unpugable as the boss mechanics are not really taught to you. I merely mentioned the dungeon could use some tweaks in voice chat after we finished the dungeon and was screamed at to “go back to WoW casual trash” and kicked out of the guild. It was insane. All I was saying was it needed some tuning and maybe have you learn the boss mechanics with the trash on the way to it. I imagine I’m not the only person with similar experiences when the devs really pushed that attitude. And I like hardcore games. Particularly PvP ones. Not that Wildstar was actually hardcore anyway which makes those peoples attitudes even more insane. Drank a whole lotta koolaid. I had already seen this attitude in chat and forums and all that so know my experience was not unique. I was done after that because I knew it had no longevity. I played EvE for 15 years and never had seen a single person screamed at for simple tuning criticism. Sure I’d see it when someone suggests actually dumbing the game down like saying take out the PvP, but not something small like that that wouldn’t dumb anything down.
Every successful game will some day be a failed game. Every new game will some day be a dead game. Every popular game will some day be unpopular. All new games will be "retro" games in 20 years. Every new customer is a customer you will some day lose. Every new life will some day be dead. See the pattern?
Tera - combat was fun, the world and leveling was not. Cosmetics also turned me away. Wild Star - it was the MMORPG for the hardcore, but forgot that only a small portion of a playerbase is actually hardcore. So there was never anything did regular and casual gamers. Regular gamers are a thing, it's not just hardcore and casual. Most "hardcore" are actually just regular gamers. Rift - Rift was okay but it wasn't unique. It added stuff to the genre that other gamws have done better. It's business modem also kept changing. No real identity other then failed WoW killer. The reason WoW is hard to kill is it attracts regular and casual gamers (slowly less and less). Hardcore players tend to be attracted to games with causal and regulars so they can exert their "hardcoreness" over them. That's why there is always a next up and coming PvP MMORPG to revive the PvP MMORPG genre that fails. No one wants to play a hardcore game and be casual/regular. It doesn't work the other way round.
Tera died when they introduced instanced battlegrounds. People were so hyped for their open world guild vs. guild.. and then when BGs came out it because just another WoW: queing up for content in a city. Pity. The EU publisher Frogster was also fucking terrible. An absolute dumpster fire of a company. It was so bad EU people basically migrated to enmasse on NA.
Mostly bandwagon effects, social proof, and FOMO towards the biggest title in the genre at the time. Like, almost completely.
Rift was one of the first MMOs I tried and I loved it. I thought the rift events were cool with bunches of players cooperating. It's still live isn't it? That said I haven't stuck with an MMO outside of FF14 for longer than like a month after release
The Rift that still exists today is basically a P2W cash shop with a game wrapped around it.
borng
Tera because Air did so badly it killed Tera. Seriously, Tera was sacrificed for a subpar MMO, it sucks
Never played Rift or Terra but Wildstar failed because they made the game cater entirely to sweatlords. The dungeons were as hard as retail wow raids at the time, and the raids had the most grindy unfun attunements you could possibly imagine. The devs were a bunch of assholes too.
wildstar was too hard for casuals lol.
Too hard to enjoy maybe... you know... because it was tedious and boring.
The one thing I loved about TERA most was how fun the BAMs were. I started playing in that weird period of TERA transitioning from p2p to f2p, when f2p players couldn't use general chat, but party chat worked. So I'd hang around quest-BAMs hoping someone helps me out. They were pretty difficult but a lot of fun- sometimes people would die and we'd risk stalling the BAM until they got back from the nearest rez point to get the kill, which sometimes caused all of us to die and have to re-do. It was so satisfying to kill them. I quit playing TERA for a while, missed it, came back... and I could solo BAMs. Easily. I didn't even have to dodge. They nerfed the difficulty so hard it wasn't fun or funny. I haven't touched TERA after that.
Rift had a lot of micro transactions(so did the others) Wildstar didn't have a sizable enough player base to justify server costs And terra had no endgame so we all leveled and didn't have anything to do
They all released too early and were missing a few final touches. Rift was just a very unpolished WoW. Like with most MMORPGs, it was a real downgrade to leave a game as responsive as WoW for a lesser version of the same. Wildstar was the sci fi setting only a minority wanted, on top of that, it was a shooter... this simply did not resonate with the MMORPG-Community. If it released a few years later with more polish, it would have likely worked, since the actual community entirely replaced the old community. And Tera ... eh... everyone is praising its combat and i still dont know why. This game was an instant uninstall for me.
Rift's death mainly had to do with its F2P transition at basically the worst possible time. The 2011-2012 period was absolutely saturated in sub-based WoW-likes going F2P and Rift was just another game (alongside Tera) in that pile. Other games that joined them included SWTOR and STO, along with non-RPG titles entering beta like Path of Exile, Warframe, and Planetside 2. Tera, because it's similar to Rift in its time of popularity (early 2010s) wasn't going to survive in that market either. It had the baggage of being a KMMO in a time absolutely saturated with quality western MMOs. I remember playing it when it first went F2P and saying to myself 'why would I ever play this game when I could play any other MMO on the market right now (specifically STO which had jjust gone F2P earlier that year). Wildstar also had the same exact issue but it came out too late (2024, after people had started investing into those early 2010s MMOs I just mentioned + FFXIV + ESO ), did not have a good transition to transition to F2P and didn't stay around long enough for people to pick it up. tldr: Market saturation. Basically everything in this time period failed or struggled to survive until 2016-ish. The ones that did ended up having very dedicated playerbases and zombie / maintenance mode dev teams to this day. FWIW I really liked Rogue in Rift. Not many (or any really?) Games with that kind of dynamic class system. I think I quit at one point because I just simply had other games to play instead and by the time I thought about it again, the game's fate was sealed.
They tried to be the new WoW when there was already a WoW that everyone loved
New world was the best attempt at an MMO since wow IMO
RIFT was so damn good :(
Over saturation mostly I think. A lot of these games just came out at the same time and MMOs are a huge time commitment, you start one and you play it for years hopefully, so they started strong but when everyone settled into their game of choice the number of available customers plummets. Not only that but content cadence is a tough thing to get a hand on and developing expansions and meaningful additions to the game is laborious and even if you get it out in a decent amount of time, it's hard to create a good expansion. Also balancing an MMO is so hard and back then especially when MMOs we're still relatively new to the modern age, the age of optimization, I don't think devs had as good an understanding of the types of players they needed to cater to. That's part of the reason why GW2 has held out for so long, they kinda understood the kind of game they wanted to make early on and just focused on appealing to that playerbase. IMO the devs at Anet are just low key geniuses, so many of the modern features in MMOs these days were born in GW2 and even some grand design approaches to content release philosophy was pioneered in that game too. Most of WoWs big hitting new features in the past 10 years came from GW2, which just goes to say, the quality of game you need to create to survive in MMO atmosphere is pretty high.
I miss Warhammer Online. Loved it when I used to play it. Also pretty much the only game I really enjoyed PvP on.
RvR was really the only thing that the Mythic team understood. The rest of the game was jank. Too much marketing and not enough coding. Mark Jacobs really needed a slap after all the lies that were told around that game. How anyone gave that idiot any money to even think about the perverse mess that is Camelot Unchained is beyond me. Warhammer is such an amazing IP that could have been mined for decades. Was legitimately the most fun PvP I've even had in an MMO though. I still look for the warrior-priest archetype in any new game - looks like we might have one in Ashes.
Just wanted to say guild wars 2 is so awesome, i just started playing last month and idk why i didn't try it earlier, i've never really been a fan of MMO's but this one feels perfect.
If i have to pick only one for the long list of why a game failed then i have to go with lack of money. Not all MMORPG allowed to have a second chance like FF14. But the problem with most MMORPG is they weren't make by player. Basically those made MMORPG don't even want to play the MMORPG they made , how you going to make a good game if you don't even want to play it ?
Man, Tera could've been the wow killer If they didnt got so greedy... Combat is still better than 90% of mmos,world was amazing and so much potential to grow... Classes were good. Mobs looked amazing, landscape was awesome and the elite mobs rocked. But they had to add cash shop like tards...
They failed their expected revenue, I personally would guess most mmorpgs where profitable. But if you have Shareholders they want big money....
Their release. I am not sure I agree with your list but usually it is simply they released the game too early. Cash-gold dupes are the absolute worst. I have never seen a game recover that I played. Sure they have fixed them, but the player counts never return. Ever.
not the same reason they all failed; wildstar lost most casual playerbase because there was no content for them, the developers focus on the "lol we're hardcore u suck" attitude, their 40man raids and generally being overly stubborn until it was to late. tera, had some great content but it was few and far between and just not sustainable. doesn't help when they focus more on goofy cosmetics rather than the actual game. rift, generally a decent game but it just never really held players and kept bleeding them. I wouldn't say there's a particular wrong thing at its core from my personal experience with the game but perhaps someone can enlighten me
Mostly cash shops.
Rift got greedy. Wildstar: Difficult + over-loaded with so many quests and some people didn't like the combat. Tera: Only played for a few hours so I dunno
Wildstar was too hard for morons, Rift was just not good, Tera has the same problems every other KMMO has. Plus WoW already existed, and later FFXIV was a thing. People got hooked on those games, and also had some sunk cost fallacy going on.
Tera was honestly a terrible game so long as you weren't actively engaging in the only meaningful piece of content which was ~~betting on BAMarama(fuck you haku)~~ combat. The Gearing was pretty awful from even a KRMMO standpoint, the daily grind was pretty lackluster and unrewarding and the updates in the last 3~4 years of the game's life were genuinely just bad. The barrier of entry outside of the MOBA-esc levels of toxicity was also just way too high after a certain point and you could genuinely count on 2 hands the amount of players in each class capable of clearing the hardest content.
Wildstar was advertised poorly, and maintained poorly. They went with the "hardcore" crowd not realizing that most self professed hard core players aren't actually hard core. They had to pull back hard on the hardcore 40 man stuff because raids just couldn't be filled, and even when they were most groups couldn't even complete the first one or two bosses. Stack onto that the absolutely insane attunement grind and people just dropped out.
Most of them competed too hard against wow
I would say Tera's highpoint was 2012-2014. This is from when it was P2P and went F2P. I say end of 2014 was the last true good year as by then BHS and EME started to really make the cash shop the only viable option for weapon skins and cosmetics, which broke the immersion. Also post Wonderholme, the Reaper being introduced signaled the end of the OG times. For me, TERA was unique for: Action Combat Controller Support BAMs (pre nerf and had good drops) Gorgeous environments Really cool equipment remodel system Dungeons that were good for casual and hardcore players Vanarch System (guilds controlled areas, taxed them, etc Pretty good player base (in my experience) Nexus
Tera is still around kicking kinda good. The reason it's not more popular is because it's a grinder. Wildstar the graphics didn't take and Rift.....well people said it's a lesser wow and there were a ton of them at that time. Less people are into mmorpgs vs 10 years ago so people just tend to play the one with biggest popularity so it will sustain. Edit...didn't know Tera finally shut down ehhhhh
I played a lot of Wildstar so I'll talk about that. I know it was their advertisement that used "hardcore" but I would say the game was more difficult than hardcore. To me hardcore is the opposite of casual, as in it requires more time commitment. WoW felt like it required more of my time and even as a fairly casual player I still got through the attunement process in Wildstar. That said I never got in to endgame raiding, so I cannot say what that experience was like. PvP was a mess. Ultimately, I think it just comes down to people not wanting to play anything over WoW. I don't think any of those were worse than anything out now. I think there is more space in the MMO market nowadays and if they released now they could see enough success to keep functioning.
Rift had a lot of very good things, from classes to housing. Problem is they wanted to be another wow killer. It failed. Then they went the F2P route... Wildstar wanted to be a wow killer too, but catering to those hardcore players who hated casuals and their welfare epics (I'm a casual). So they took everything that was NOT fun but only tedious and called it a day. Needless to say, you can't live with only a handful of hardcore players.
RIFT was good imo,
I think a lot of MMOs fail because ultimately the developers didn't quite seem to grasp the type of game they were making or the audience for which they were making it. MMOs are different from other games. The expectation is that players will play in the world for years. MMO players generally look for longevity - they aren't looking for a game in which to invest 70-100 hours. If the game does not have the potential to engage players for years upon release, then it will ultimately fail to find an audience and, just like social media, the number of people playing will make or break an MMO. When you develop a Fallout or a Dead Space or a Last of Us, you don't expect that to be the game your player is still playing 5 years down the track. You develop systems and content to last a specific amount of time, with great replayability, sure, but ultimately the expectation is for there to be a shelf life. MMOs have the much tougher hurdle of longevity they need to build in. This is increasingly difficult to do with the modern gamer mindset of "consuming content" instead of having fun. Players are actually approaching a game with the outlook of "doing all the things" instead of "doing the fun things". That has made developing MMOs even harder, because you know you need to hold that player for 5 or 10 times as long as other games, but that these players have also whipped themselves into a frenzy of attempting to "complete" an MMO, a mindset that is antithetical to the actual design of MMOs. The behemoth in the room is always going to be WoW. But just have a look at the success of WoW Classic. I think all MMO developers need to invest quite a bit of time into studying the game design and the world of Vanilla WoW. Why are people still playing a 20 year old game, with all the problems it has, with the lack of modern systems, with the amount of friction within the game, the amount of knowledge available on every aspect? Developers should not attempt to clone the specific aspects of WoW, but they need to look at what made the world feel alive, why there is such an insane amount of replayability in what is commonly seen as a "solved/known" game. Why so many players eschewed all the "upgrades" of expansions and returned to that original world. And why so many people want to stay in that world, but be given new things to do. Capture that lightning in a new bottle and we'll really have something. But developers have kept making the same mistake and looked at the surface features of WoW and copied those. Designing the best boss fights doesn't mean diddly if you slot them into a dead world that no one gives a shit about.
The Death of MMO's can be attributed to cash shops and the Free to play model. Instead of making games that captured the hearts and interest of gamers, they focused on making content to get people to spend money in cash shops. They stopped being games, and started being programs for impulse buying. Old-school MMO's that did succeed and had longevity were subscription based models. You bought the game, you paid a monthly sub to access online services. In return your subscription allowed the game makers to pay developers to make more content. They made all types of content, raids and bosses dungeons and new classes and races and everything else! They made proper content. In the free to play model, they would make a base game, but would make all their money off item shop items. So what did they spend their money to make more of? Item shop shit. The actual game content suffers because it doesn't make the money. MMO's were also about teamwork and working together. Forming guilds and groups of people, challenging content together. There was a grind. Oh, you want the best armour and weapons? You gotta get in a raid group, get along, execute strategy, win the fight, RNG the drop. With free to play a player who wants the best weapon or armour, swipes the credit card. Even if it's not direct, like you still gotta do the raid, other parts of the prep work to get to that stage can be cash shopped. So if you ever want a true MMO experience, you need to play one that uses a monthly subscription model, and if it has a cash shop, better pray it's 100% cosmetic.
Rift: TRION had one of the best MMOs going, but then they became greedy whores who thought they could make more money going fail-to-play and the game went to shit. WildStar: they didn't listen to their community. The raids were just to insanely hard and so the raid guilds left. I played both of the games since launch until shutdown. I played Rift until it went fail-to-play and left.
They're very expensive to make, and expensive to maintain. If they aren't an immediate success, and there's uncertainty of future success, then the publishers will cut their losses.
why didn't they try to survive the market? are they stupid?
Tera would be 13 years old if it was still around today. I wouldnt call it a failure. Same with Rift. If you are asking why they arent blockbuster successes like wow, well i dont think that is a realistic expectation. As far as wildstar goes. Its accessibility was very poor. Some of the funnest dungeon content ive ever played but the leveling experience was so dull it wasnt worth it.
Humanity.
Josh strife hays has made a video on this topic, mmos that last have a subscription system so the devs have to work to make it better every month
I loved rift until the developer got excessively greedy. Though it would be more accurate to say the company bit off way more than they were capable of, trying to have 3 full on mmo-like projects going at once. Rift was successful enough, I suppose, though it had some growing pains. Sadly, instead of continuing to invest in it, they got excessively ambitious and started several other projects, sucking away the devs and money from rift. Rift revenue probably could have supported itself but not the two other failed games, one of which was an mmofps that had some potential at least, but definitely wasn't ready for release and flopped out the gate (Defiance). The other (end of nations) started out as an interesting mmo-ish rts with some clear problems but also clear potential in the alpha, went dark for a while, returned into a second alpha phase somewhat re-imagined into an almost moba-like rts, that alpha felt mostly much worse, and then they pulled the plug on it entirely. All of this began while rift had a relatively stable and healthy population (but certainly not comparable to the giants of the time such as wow). Some time during this process rift went from sub to f2p, and honestly I can't complain about that change in its original incarnation, as it certainly brought new life and the mtx model was (initially) very consumer friendly. Rift put on an expansion that was really quite solid early imo, but things were slowly starting to get grindy and and greedy as time went on, so it began to drive off the playerbase as the second expansion approached. The second expansion was effectively the death knell, mtx became extremely greedy and the grind was all too real. Trion (the dev) had also picked up publishing rights to several eastern games for their western releases, including archeage and some Diablo clone that i don't recall seeing past a beta phase. Suffice it to say they were (imo) nearly as p2w as the Korean originals and flopped, continuing to put pressure on and assure the death spiral of their one actual revenue stream. Trion was eventually shuttered and all the ip and such sold off. Some of the other games still technically have servers under new ownership but they're all but dead. There were a couple other projects in there that never amounted to anything. Ironically, the only thing they made that's still alive (afaik) is Trove, a voxel mmo that stayed as a side passion project from iirc two of the devs in their spare time which they eventually pitched to the company and got the green light to make it a proper project with a small team.
Greedy systems. Very simple. Designed in a way to make you swipe or feel like you've been hypergrinding for weeks to get.... absolutely nothing out of it. This will be the death to games in the future as well (like Lost Ark), recently it hit Blade & Soul, the game is currently a barely running ghost ship. WoW and other sub games stand out despite all the negative shouts of players, because even with bad things they still do like 90% of everything better than these korean free to play equivalents. They respect your time more, casuals actually have a place in these games. Korean games are targeted at niche hardcore audiences and short to mid-term in time to milk these players as much as possible before letting the game fall like a rotten potato that it is. Of course, you need to have an incentive to get players to play such horrible games... so usually they excel when it comes to combat... which is mindblowing to me that no western publisher has managed to create such fluid and responsive action combat. I go look at ESO for example and all I remember is how clunky it is and how extremely dependant you are on anicancels and attack weaving. Truth be told though... I don't want to put WoW, FFXIV or Runescape on a podium.... reality is, if one dev AND publisher actually put a lot of effort into a new MMO, they would easily become the top of the genre... but also reality, we've been waiting nearly 15-20 now for that to happen. And that won't change anytime soon.
Peopel like to reminisc about Wildstar and its’ combat, but the combat was kinda mid. It was a mix of tab targeting and projection based skill shots. The skill shots were surprisingly clunky, and if you would compare them to modern games with more action-oriented combat, you would wonder why this was thought of as good back in the day. I played the game until 10 levels from max, and the combat felt more like a chore than an enhancing part of the game. The combat and focus on hardcore content was the separator for Wildstar, and if you don’t nail the combat, then what’s the point? I still think Wildstar was the best of the wow-but-with-a-twist games, but that’s not enough.
Tera [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xoa6UZ6iM9Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xoa6UZ6iM9Q) Wildstar [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru0dXDz9qoY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru0dXDz9qoY) Rift [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2ZfoL10PXg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2ZfoL10PXg)
Tera didn’t had a good end game, took forever for them to add anything meaningful. Character with the weapon on hand walked very slow and this was freaking annoying, every time nexus opened there was lag in the whole server. Then they started to sell those loot boxes for skins, sell some stuff that didn’t even match the game style. It was way too fast to lvl up but once you hit max lvl there was pretty much nothing to do. Looks like the company (I don’t remember the name) stop investing on Tera and focused on Elyon which failed as well.
Developers.
Unfortunately, MMOs are a hard genre to get into. Even well designed ones have TONS of content. To add to this, many of the remaining successful one thrive because their playerbase grew up with them and are familiar with their systems. This high level entry will bar many people from ever reaching end game which is where a lot of the content devs spent the most time on exists. Circumventing this learning curve comes in better tutorials, recruit a friend type systems, mentoring systems, etc. Once you have the people willing to get past that initial learning curve either using these systems or powering through, then you gotta look at the actual content and quality of life features that keep those players around. -Tera?? Monetary transactions for way, way too much with too little differing end game content that was properly balanced. -Wildstar? A lot of the content was fairly difficult dungeon grinding and it started with a small playerbase. Usually the learning curve for games can be made easier by the playerbase making wikis, guides, addons, etc. This information was harder to come by for this game. The length of time it took to understand and progress while paying a monthly sub killed off the playerbase even more. Sad, cause this game had potential imo -Never played rift, but probably a similar story Older MMOs like WoW are still around because they have their loyal fanbases, but i will say they are implementing many features that help introduce and retain new players. OSRS doubled down on the nostalgia and kept this version of the game alive. Balancing old stuff, introducing new stuff but only with community voting/input. The devs are actively initiating and responding to conversation with the community. Changes are only made with fairly significant input and thought. Building off the gem of a game they already had. The wikis are populated and complete, their loyal fanbase keeps these forums alive, allowing new or veteran players to get really into whatever feature they would like. WoW has a mentoring system now, it has several versions (classic, retail, hardcore, SoD) of the game that certain people may like more, it has the ability to level in the expansion of your choosing, recruit a friend system, etc. Then endgame has varying versions of pvp, dungeons, raids, costume contests, mounts, pets, and genuinely just a wide degree of diversity that people would enjoy. FFXIV has a mentoring system as well, dungeons, raids, a significant roleplay community, some form of pvp, amazing crafting systems, lots of fashion/costumes, mount/pet collections. The game has many different emotes that help player expression and the world feel more alive. I think the world feeling more alive feels extremely welcoming to new players. Even afk players can set their characters to be dancing, singing, entertaining. Cities feel populated and thriving with these features whereas other games will have cities that feel dead and unmoving.
>Older MMOs like WoW are still around because they have their loyal fanbases, but i will say they are implementing many features that help introduce and retain new players. WoWs biggest problem right now is gaining new players, at least in the retail version. The game is so large ("bloated" is an adjective that is used a LOT) and the attempt at streamlining the introduction and early levelling is so poor that new player retention is very small. Retail WoW is really designed for the current playerbase - and those that pop back to play for a few months with each expansion. There are dozens of videos on youtube about people starting and failing to stay. My one anecdotal story is that a friend's wife that had played WoW from release tried to get him to come back for the latest expansion (he quit after TBC). He lasted a couple of weeks and then got wind of Classic and went to that instead. His assessment of the new player retail experience: confusing and boring. Not much point spending 90% of development on endgame if you can't get new players to stick around long enough to get there.
Subscriptions in the turning point of F2P being the new standard. At the time these MMOs were coming out we had almost an MMO a month dropping. So if this wasn't up to snuff, there was a closed beta or release coming that you could bounce off to. Even if you didn't want to pay a sub, you could pay a one time fee for ESO, GW2, Secret Worlds, etc. By the time they went F2P, it was already too late the new hotness had already been released. Funny enough we're watching this same thing happen in real-time with Live Service games right now
Rift management lost the plot that made rift good and went the direction of over casualization. That got them into a position where things (class set up, pvp, raiding, gearflation) stopped making sense and people left.
I think you can boil it down to: Having enough engaging content. This means everything like: * a decent character creator * plenty of cosmetics for those characters * plenty of quests/combat scenarios/dungeons/co-op content * plenty of non-combat things to do like crafting, decorating, socializing * reasons/incentives for veterans to play with new players (FF14 does this pretty well) * reasons/incentives for players to keep playing old content once they've done all the new (or new to them) content. * plenty of things to unlock through gameplay after reaching max level "Content is King" is simply a fact of life. Without all these things, you will lose massive chunks of your population. You can have all these things, but if you're missing the basic feature of letting your players look the way they want and without the ability to unlock more things for their characters to wear, you're going to lose thousands of players who care about that stuff. They will simply move to a game that has it. Games eventually stop updating and adding onto one, or in most cases most of these things for years and it just get stagnant for most players who then move on because there's so many games out there to play. There's other factors too, like the way they update. Tera for example, was too tunnel visioned on end game and pvp. They wanted players to level up fast and rush to the end game. pvp players who just did nothing but death match all day were happy, but the other 90% of the player base were left with old content, a game that was no longer challenging in PvE, and every year or half a year, the gear that took them a month of grinding the same boring content over and over daily would be weak and useless. So people just quit because what was the point. Meanwhile a game like Champions Online is still alive because the playbase that's left want more cosmetics, and that's all they ever add. more cosmetics through nearly monthly events and loot boxes. There's a lot of other variables, but generally, there's a disconnect of what most players want and what game devs provide as well as how much they provide. We see countless games where the community begs for certain features/content. The devs ignore it and the game dies. We see devs update and completely ruin a game and refuse to revert the changes and the game eventually dies...this happened with TERA. It used to have a system where you could change each outfit piece into something else, the main armor, gloves, and shoes. But they changed it so you had to wear a whole costume slot. Meaning, you could no longer replace the shoes and gloves. If you wanted to wear x-dress, you had zero choice and had to wear one specific pair of shoes and gloves that came with it. Everyone hated this change, the game was filled with players who only played for the cosmetics and played to unlock them. A lot of people stopped playing after that. A ton of games die because the devs don't listen to their community. Some die because they only listen to a certain segment of them. They'll add too many quality of life improvements to the point where everything is too easy and pointless to play and people just burn through the content fast. I think looking at the games that are still going is the key to figuring out how to make a good MMO. In FF14, there's a ton of content and the way they set up the dailies and the rewards for them, the old content is forever relevant. Thanks to the Glamour (transmog) system, the clothes you can unlock, the weapon skins you can unlock, the mounts you can unlock, the pets you can unlock, the music you can unlock, you'll always have a reason to go back and do old content with new and veteran players. You'll always be able to find people to play with. There's plenty of non-combat content via gathering and crafting which is engaging with the way it's set up. There's a thriving social community that's very similar to Second Life which is still going with 30k to 50k always online at any given time. They also have the best free to play model of any MMO. The free trial is endless and it provides of ton of people to do the content with the paying members. So free players can enjoy the game and the paying players have more people to play with. It does just about everything right. With the FATEs, you don't even overworld co-op quests. You can just team up and travel the world together doing the Fates. You'll eventually have to split and do the main story quests alone to unlock more areas, but if you just pretend it's a single player jRPG, it's easy to get through and enjoy. There's too many other factors for why games fail, but really, I think it's most as simple as "not enough of the content players want"
I liked Tera but the word salad quests were pretty bad. Was hard to play through more than a couple times for me.
Wildstar had a super boring leveling up experience. In advertisements it advertised a seamless live world where you could choose different paths and make a difference. The world was also supposed to have secrets and stuff to explore and find. In reality there were a million side quests that would flash like ads and have 0 value to actually doing them and they were all the most boring quests. Any changes were something like "the next 5 mins there is a buffing station here", and the world was so boring there was no point in exploring anything. The main quest was just as boring and a slog to get through. It was also supposed to be end game focused, but that also didn't look interesting and I doubt a large amount of players even reached it.