Free to Play Cast: GW2 Expansion Speculation And Steam, Planetside 2 Is On The Rise, And Some Gamescom News! Ep 353

QOTW: WARNING INCOMING WALL OF TEXT

For mmos to become big again they need to stop focusing on traditional end game content. Most end game content, because it's a game within a game, is the easiest content for other genres take and do better than mmos. Instead mmos need to focus on the three things they still do better than other genres: progression, economy, and community. The game that I think does this best right now is Old School Runescape. It has a ton of progression (if anything it has too much) with multiple methods to training most skills that are balanced by the community in terms of cost to xp through the trading on the Grand Exchange.

To make it better devs could do the following:
1) Put it in a game with better core gameplay and graphics than OSRS
2) Make it less grindy so it doesn't turn away more casual players
3) Give hardcore players reasons to replay the core content such as:
A) Add challenge modes like OSRS's ironman modes
B) Add prestige levels for each time a player resets their progress at max
C) Add some other form of new game + that makes progressing harder
D) Add better support for custom account types so players can make their own challenge modes

This way the core game becomes the end game for the more hardcore players. Also since everyone is playing the same content there are more chances to meet player outside of the usual circles creating a more tight nit community. I think a modern sandbox mmo that's fun to play and gets this right would be the next decently sized mmo. If they add live sim aspects from games like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley, aka the OSRS Stardew Valley love child ;), and market it right it could be huge with people who normally don't play mmos.

Oh who am I kidding, the next big mmo will be the one that rips off WoW with prettier graphics in 2 to 5 years.

Qotw: Yeah, i wouldn't say dead, but it fells like open world mmo's are on their last legs. I don't think the genre will completely die, but it definitely feels like mmo's overall are dropping to the end of the list, open world ones even more so. Other then New World there is nothing i can say i am excited about.

A-bomb: I want to give an A-bomb to Youtube and them disabling email notification. Since most of the content i watch or listen on youtube is considerably long, i just watch them when i can/want, i almost never watch a video when it gets uploaded, quite often i happen to watch a video days or in some rare cases even weeks after upload. Chrome or phone notifications do not work in my situation. I've been relying on email for years and for me, this is the worse change they did.
On the plus side my total youtube watch time for the last week is 5 hours and 10 minutes, that's 20+ hours less then what i probably spent on youtube before. That doesn't mean i got more free time, just my gaming has a lot less background noise.

QotW : sadly it is dead i mean i remember there was a time there were so many mmos coming out i didn't know what to play (even if most were wow clones) and now? to little and far in between
But il never loose hope that we will get a full flagged mmo that does it all.