World of Final Warcraft Scrolls of the Rings

The MMO thread.

I'm pretty much always playing one MMO or another, and we have a few other members who appreciate them, so shall we give them their own thread?

I've pre-ordered Battle for Azeroth after having a blast with Warlords of Draenor and Legion. I'm playing catch-up, but everything is still very lovely. Patch 8.0 dropped last night and introduced War Mode – this is a toggle on your character screen that turns on faction PvP. For people who have never played, PvP in WoW centres around the two factions, Horde and Alliance. The playerbase is split in two, and has always had different quests, different leveling zones, and can't even speak the same language in game.

It's always been a clever idea, and the new War Mode reignites a lot of the old excitement of faction wars. They've done away with all PvP/normal servers, and made it a toggle switch you can choose to activate. If you do, you become fair game for an enemy player to attack, but you also get rewards for having War Mode enabled. And last night, for the first time in years, that old faction magic was back. I spent half an hour defending Stormwind (the human capital) from a raid group of orcs, Tauren and other dirty Horde. Very exciting that it's got people playing like that again, taking the fun into their own hands. That's where the magic of MMOs has always been, for me.

On an unrelated note, the CGI intro for the new expansion is spectacular. If you've ever played Horde, I dare you not to get goosebumps during THAT bit. And if you're Alliance, try to keep the hairs on the back of your neck down during THAT bit.

I played a lot of WoW back in the day - Warlords was the last expansion I really saw anything much of, though, and I don't know that much could tempt me back.

Most of the other MMOs I've played over the years - SWtOR, Wildstar, LotRO, Elder Scrolls, mostly in betas, and each one touted as The WoW Killer™ - have gone free to play since, and there's nothing weirder or more offputting than coming back to a game you sunk a hundred hours into to find everything obscured under three layers of UI, five currencies, and an in-game store.

I still have a fondness for Wildstar (quiet, Luscan), mainly for the more dynamic combat/movement; similarly, SWtOR's story stuff worked surprisingly well, even in groups, and I do miss my smuggler a little from time to time. But the problem that they all have is that WoW is ancient, and enormous, and while all these whippersnappers are scrambling around trying to invent themselves from scratch, Warcraft is just iterating, honing itself to a blinding, razor-sharp edge. There's no catching up; if you're building an MMO now, you're already going to be 3 years behind WoW by the time you launch.

That's why there's never been a WoW-killer; it's why there'll never be a WoW-killer - not as long as MMOs are still just trying to beat WoW at its own highly-polished game.

One potential negative of all that history, of course, is bloat. If you start now as a new WoW player you're thrown into a story about the Cataclysm, a world in which the Lich King was recently killed. You then level up through BC and Lich King, and enter a storyline where the Lich King is alive and the Cataclysm hasn't happened yet. It's all very odd.

Blizzard have made great strides to make everything as frictionless as possible – they recently added something similar to ESO and made the zones level with you (to a certain degree). So if you want to skip what is now the oldest content in the game, Outland, you can go straight to Northrend at level 60. And if you're level 40, say, and want to go to Westfall for the first time, the zone will be an appropriate level for you.

There are calls now, on Reddit and the like, to squish the levels with the next expansion. Make it 1-60 again, with the next expansion increasing the cap to 70 again.

Any solution will be messy – aside from an impossibly large rebuild from the ground up, there's simply too much history to 'fix' stuff like that – but it's hardly game-breaking stuff. As you say it's still the most polished MMO out there.

They've also just made the whole thing (sort of) free. You can install the base game for free, and play every expanion right up to Legion, without buying any of it – just paying the sub.

Yeah, and if I could afford it (or had any game time cards left from my Blizz days…), I probably would still be playing.

FFXIV has still managed to avoid going free to play and FFXI despite being by all acounts, kinda sparse and dead now, still isn't, for a game that outdates even WoW I'm impressed.

You can kinda see why XIV has survived so long, it's very welcoming to newcomers, not very hard, looks nice and plays well with an emphasis on story. You can argue the FF name but that didn't save the 1.0 version of the game which as I love to point out, was destroyed and said destruction became the intro to 2.0.

DCUO (DC Universe Online) is janky as FUCK, feels reallly cheap just to see people move about imo but there's cool stuff in there, being a Green Lantern and fighting the Sinestro Corp in a PvP server, randomly, geektastic.

I didn't play a lot if the TERA beta but didn't really enjoy a single second of it, it looks kinda wank and combat didnt seem too exciting but I was low level.

Said in the other thread but ESO has sick as fuck Elder Scrolls lore, having beat Morrowind it was kinda cool to see that fucking traitor, Almalexia in Mournhold for a quest. MMOness of it kinda fails so far, they added a chat log but hardly see anyone talk outside of LFG shouts. Also Tanking so far feels terrible, we apparently buff the team, do low dps and aggro priority targets but we have no aoe aggro because dps kill those anyway by intended design so pulling trash is kinda shitty atm.

XIV is the best because the combat is sick, looks great and it has so much polish the above are lacking, it feels like a solid mmo and as its subbed theres no paid shit and animations and whatnot are solid. Has bad eggs in the community same as any other but we talk, we ask for help, we dance in Mor Dhona/Idyllshire/Rhalgr's Reach and ofc we get toxic in chat for early pullers!

And the mudic is amazing, A M A Z I N G, from temixed FF themes to rock primal themes and more, it's been a consistent plus since the game dropped.

You can kinda see why XIV has survived so long, it's very welcoming to newcomers, not very hard, looks nice and plays well with an emphasis on story.

Twice now I've attempted to play FFXIV, but gotten overwhelmed or bored after less than an hour and nope'd out. Just doesn't do it for me.

DCUO tried to do something different, but it never seemed to have a stable foundation, so yeah - janky as heckfire.

ESO is Elder Scrolls, so I immediately dislike it for Reasons I can't muster the energy to expound here; the TL;DR is that the lore might be immense and interesting (I've never read enough of it to know for sure), but the story you're actually playing through is garbage, and the world doesn't respond to you or the things you do in a significant way.

Relatively speaking I still think XIV is easy compared to other MMO's I've played, stats, classes and builds are much more simple, it's nowhere near as open ended as ESO too so you can only do so much at first and that's usually follow the MSQ marker and there are tons of (too many sometimes) pop ups every time you do something new.

I played a bunch of Guild Wars, significantly less Guild Wars 2, and have bounced off every other MMO I've ever tried, often before finishing character creation. (Unless Elite counts.)

But there are a lot of their mechanics slowly working their way into other genres; I'm dumping embarrassing amounts of my limited free time into Destiny which owes lots of its grind 'n' gear loops to WoW and it's ilk.

I think Ninchilla has a point about catching up to WoW, but then how could you assail that fortress? You can't just copy it because you'll fall behind or just fail to match up; but at the same time you can't mess with the formula too much or you'll be too niche and the investors will get spooked. It's not a cheap arena to move into, either - you don't need to have cutting edge graphics, but all that quest content won't create itself (yet) and servers will burn cash pretty fast of you mis-spec your stack.

Part of me can't help wonder, though, what changes Blizzard have made to WoW in response to their challengers. The short-lived newcomers might not have secured their own foothold in the market, but did they make Warcraft better?

XIV is basically Final Fantasy WoW from what I know (theme park MMO, mounts, raids and shit) , which probably helps explain it's relative success more, but with subtle nuances like player and boss rotations (a WoW dev has made a post of him analysing a FFXIV boss and how it differs from Blizz's design, it was interesting).

I wish I got to play Wildstar, I heard it had fun and hard raids which is what appeals to me.

It's still going, and it's free to play.

I can't believe no-one's saying City of Heroes was the best.

City of Heroes was the best though. :)

There's no way I can run that on this thing, ha, I'll just continue to be impressed by the raids I've seen, which is just about all I've seen so I dunno' if the rest of it is any good. I look at other MMO raids from time to time to see how the grass looks on the other side and all differences aside, they look fun in their own ways.

So far I continue to be unimpressed with ESO tanking, I only feel like a Tank during bosses because of the 'ESO tanks don't aggro trash' thing, and not one that feels all that useful. I will say this, the combat is 'better' than non MMO Elder Scrolls at least.

Free log in campaign for FFXIV atm.

Part of me can't help wonder, though, what changes Blizzard have made to WoW in response to their challengers. The short-lived newcomers might not have secured their own foothold in the market, but did they make Warcraft better?

I can't answer with regards to the 'end-game', but they've definitely made leveling more accessible over the years. And the quality of life stuff is worlds apart from 2004. Whether that's a response to other MMOs I don't know, though.

You can now change spec on the fly. They've made leveling professions much less of a ballache (you used to have to start at 1, and level to 800 through all the other expansions – now each expansion is assigned its own 1-100). You get mounts much sooner and for much less money now – there was a time when a slow ground mount was a rite of passage, and took literal weeks to save up for. Quest markers have been added – you used to have to read the description and just sort of work out where to go.

All these little things probably owe something to more accessible MMOs having launched over the years.

I bounce between a few different MMOs - but I've usually got one of FFXIV, ESO and LOTRO on the go.

Of them all, I think LOTRO's probably my favourite. It's very old-school now and really quite dated graphically but the scale of the thing is simply unrivalled and of all the games it's the only one that's resisted the temptation to accelerate its early game. So the journey through the Shire, Bree and the Lone Lands, all the way to Moria, is as much of an epic journey as it ever was. It's primarily a solo game these days (multiplayer dungeons exist but they're eminently skippable) and they've streamlined the systems enough to make it all still accessible despite all the extra bloat it's acquired over the years. It's also an incredible adaptation of the source material, spinning out the tiniest of references into enormous, well-designed areas and quests that fit perfectly with Tolkien's original vision.

ESO's similarly single-player in focus and it's an enjoyable game with really high production values but the auto-levelling spoils it a bit for me - when you can go anywhere and do anything, a lot of the driving force in the game is lost. I like levelling up and then being rewarded with new things to do and new places to see. With ESO you can see it all from the very beginning, if you like. That said, I haven't been to Morrowind yet (and I loved the original Morrowind) so I can feel a revisit coming on.

FFXIV is an incredible game, I genuinely love it, but it's a time sponge. So much of it is multiplayer-focussed in terms of dungeons and bosses and instances that you need to be able to devote big chunks of your life to progressing. I find it enthralling in small doses and regularly jump back in for a month or two to do another chunk of the main plot but there are only so many evenings I have spare to sit in queues then play uninterruptible instances and sadly I couldn't ever make it a full-time thing.

WoW I find inaccessible these days. They've accelerated the early game so much that it feels completely pointless, you can't enjoy the incredible design or appreciate the quests because it's pushing you through so quickly that you've outlevelled areas by the time you've even begun to find your way around. I know why they've done this but it's very much a game for the fans these days, I can't imagine many people coming to it completely fresh. It does look surprisingly lovely for a game of its vintage though (it's several years older than LOTRO, for instance, but has aged incomparably better).

It's kind of a dead market these days, though, isn't it? I can't see another big-budget MMO coming along in this style, ever. The Destiny/Monster Hunter style of drop-in/drop-out multiplayer and level grinding has pretty much supplanted this mad, expensive, outdated genre, however much I love it.

I do think that MMOs manage to do worldbuilding and storytelling better than the likes of Destiny, though - its endless streams of dialogue about The Noun and wildly uneven lore (some of it's uber-serious, some of it's straight-up jokes, none of it's interesting) mean that I've totally checked out of the plot. With the new expansion coming soon I can see the subreddit whipping themselves into a frenzy over the names of Hive priests who have started to show up in top-tier endgame missions with What It All Means for the story and I'm honestly staggered that anybody remembers the names of any character in this fucking thing.

I think also the scope and scale of some AAA single-player games these days has seriously encroached on MMO territory, at least for players like me who played them more for their world-building and scale than for multiplayer fun. I mean, LOTRO's vast and detailed with great world-building and that's a huge part of the appeal but then so are The Witcher 3 and Assassin's Creed Origins, and they don't have other players bunny-hopping around ruining the immersion AND you can pause them. As such you can see why FFXIV in particular has doubled down on its group stuff as it does definitely distinguish it from pretty much anything else on the market.

I still expect Final Fantasy XI to be revived one day as a single-player game - over the course of its 15-year lifespan it's transformed itself from an intensely multiplayer-focussed experience where you basically couldn't do anything solo and any progress was incredibly hard-won, to a breezy soloable game where hugely increased XP rates and AI companions mean you can sail through to end-game in a matter of weeks. It's not hard to see them taking the good stuff (the world, the storylines), taking out the multiplayer and subscription, and selling it as an offline Final Fantasy experience for those who want to see what all the fuss was about. I have incredibly fond memories of OG FFXI, but to all extents and purposes that game doesn't exist any more, and the market wouldn't sustain a similar product in this day and age.

The single player stuff in ESO is all well and good, but I mean, I could just play Skyrim for that, so far this feels like a 'best of Elder Scrolls' multiplayer game. It has Skyrim, Morrowind, Summerset and the Morag Tong, Fighter's Gulds, Vampires and Daedric Princes all in one game but so far I'm not sure I'm enjoying the MMO mechanics.

Welp, this made me cry at work.

As Alastor is aware after watching me trying to find my feet again, I've gone back into FFXIV and, well, I'm lost!

Actually I'm not, I have a boss fight I need to queue for and thankfully, whilst watching me stream today, Alastor noted I didn't have all my level 50 Dragoon garb so have now found my way round to the Highlands and grabbed the quest that continues that route. I basically spent most of the weekend since I re-subbed fishing and one of my additional storage people needs to go and live on Red Dwarf to serve the Cat.

https://66.media.tumblr.com/8d0f258eedf16fe862951cf18dfc945c/tumblr_n6r6xw4Qp11qgw8eko4_250.gif

Yeah, get that questline sorted for the Lv50 Dragoon set and Chaos Thrust. Then you'll at least be geared up for the rest of ARR, though you can quite easily carry on getting better stuff.

Righto, got all my Dragoon garb and now queueing to take on Ultimate Weapon on FFXIV

Oh my god (look at her butt!) Spent the morning on the FFXIVxFFXV crossover event ant Garuda keeps kicking my arse. Well not mine, mostly, but Noctis'. However whilst the targeting system on PS4 works well 99% of the time on FFXIV it gets in a bit of a tizzy on this fight when you're trying to target Garuda (or a monument) to perform a Warp Strike but instead it picks up Noctis instead. Fair enough if I was a WHM but im a DGN so no healing powers what so ever.

Haven't tried it yet, are the Warp Strikes done with the analog sticks?

You hold L2/R2 then click the stick, yeah. So you either balls it up and change to first person view or the targeting system picks Noctis instead and you don't do the Warp Strike. The biggest issue is keeping Noctis alive as he never moves out of the AoE apart from when he's Warp Striking

Ah, they picked up that mechanic in Stormblood to enable you to do certain actions you wouldn't do normally, and they seem to love it, not many players do after the first time (So I guess consider this your first preview taste of Stormblood). I have no idea if the Noctis thing is a healer issue or you need to outdamage Garuda before she dies though.

According to the FFXIV forums you can have act as a tank and stack where possible

I was looking at transferring datacenters earlier but it's £12!? That's more than a months sub (unless I'm.missing something?)

Yeah, that's what it says on the SE website too. :<

I think it's twenty quid in WoW. And twenty quid to change your race/sex.

Maybe it's a faff that they have to manage manually. (Or maybe they're just money-grabbing gits.)

Oh there's probably a reason for it being fairly high (and also an element of "well you made your bed" maybe) it's just off putting as I know of two people (Alastor being one) on the opposite datacentre to where I'm at.

The recently added a new 'World Visit' function where you can travel to any server in a data centre…..then moved the data centres around. America got it fine and even managed to get away from the ERP server but EU got split right down the middle of two of the more popular servers. So like, me and Wev atm can travel to parralel universes except the ones we're both on so all we can do is cry and place a palm on the TV screens at the same time. [/feelsbadman]

It'd be cool to see some of you but I'm not really playing lot this pre-expansion period, so definitely don't move just to Phoenix see me, it'd be pretty cool though and you'd have a pocket tank/healer for the queues!

Also, anyone here who plays WoW mind telling me if they think WoW Classic is going to be what everyone actually wants or are people wering rose tinted glasses? My timeline is full of disgruntled WoW/XIV players, oftentimes acting like the other game is better because it's not doing what the other is doing, which is very amusing.

Well tbh I've no one on Moogle server and the chat log is predominantly French, I started there as it was deemed the "official RLLMUK server" but pretty much everyone has long since abandoned the game, even if they return for the expansion I'm unlikely to get game time with them as I haven't quite made it to Heavensward yet (I've had the credits roll for ARR but there's more to do to get to Heavensward?)

Also, anyone here who plays WoW mind telling me if they think WoW Classic is going to be what everyone actually wants or are people wering rose tinted glasses? My timeline is full of disgruntled WoW/XIV players, oftentimes acting like the other game is better because it's not doing what the other is doing, which is very amusing.

I think what people actually want is to be 14 again, and explore somewhere new with their mates for the first time. Classic won't achieve that.

The thrill, in 2004, came from not knowing what was around each corner.

You've got LOADS to go before you get to Heavensward. It's really good stuff though especially if you're into the storyline.

I'm on Moogle too - I dip in for a month or two every so often - currently sitting in the same place as you but one expansion on, right at the end of Heavensward preparing for the run in to Stormblood.

Yeah, keep playing it gets pretty great. When you meet a character called Lady Iceheart is when it starts to get really interesting and sew the seeds of Heavensward early because she is a very important character in that expansion and her issues are the issues of the entire Ishgard region.

And then actual end to ARR made my jaw drop.

Is it like WoW, in that you have to raid to see the ends of storylines? Or when/if I resub, will I get to see the end in world quests and normal dungeons?

In ARR the raid tells you what truly happened after Bahamut nuked the planet in the intro, and what happened to Louisoix (the old man). But that has nothing to do with any main story in ARR.

In Heavensward and Stormblood, they introduced norml difficulty raids but they also have nothing to do with the main quests, the raids in Stormblood actully have you fighting bosses from old games, like Kefka in FF6. They're pretty fun 'raids', they're more like boss fights, very little exploration.

We have 24 man raids too but they're really simple by comparison so I don't see them as raids, but they're also pretty self contained. Everyone doing Heavensward needs to the Weeping City of Mhach though, just to experience Ozma.

I accidentally did some PvP the other night, I had no clue what was going on and contributed as much as Jon Snow has done to GoT S8

I'm not fan of PvP usually. But when I went to the FanFest a few months ago, they held some regional qualifiers for Feast and honestly, it was a highlight of the entire event. We had an EU team playing, so obviously they were the favourites to win I think being that the event was in Paris, I knew some of the people playing too. The atmosphere was incredible, they had commentary and a big TV screen that followed the whole action, watching the EU Dragoon player's HP yo-yo every second or so was super exciting when you're actually there and everyone is screaming out.

My MMO bounce-around continues, and back to Elder Scrolls Online I go. It's on Game Pass now, with Morrowind, so I'm playing on the One X instead of PS4. As with most games, this makes a big difference. 4K and a stable framerate, nom nom.

Of the MMOs I've played, ESO nails the smaller quest stories better than any other. FF14's overarching plot is better, and WoW's world-building is in a league of its own, but the individual quests in ESO are consistently brilliant. There's a bit of 'collect 7 bear anuses', but not much, and it usually feeds into a genuinely entertaining plot point.

Not a surprise, really, as that's the stuff Skyrim and Oblivion did so well. And ESO is now, basically, a single-player RPG.

Lemme tell yall about Destiny 2.

It good.

I'm at least three expansions behind on Destiny 2 at this point, and I don't see myself getting back into it anytime soon. Which is kind of a shame, 'cos it is a very satisfying loop.

I think Foresaken is going free soon. Shadowkeep was kind of a whatever expansion. Beyond Light could be cool.

I can't remember what's included with the base game now, what I've already got, where I got up to, or anything. I think I did the first raid or two, and then was mainly playing solo/in little groups, and then just gradually dropped off altogether.

I do sort of miss it, and sometimes consider starting a new character (at whatever the jumping-on point is now), as it is a very satisfying loop, and I quite like the world/lore, but I haven't. Yet.

I’m not sure if anyone here still plays The Lord of the Rings Online but it’s still going strong and they’re giving most the content away at the moment for some unknown reason. If you use the code LOTROFREEQUESTS in the in-game store between now and the end of August then you’ll get all the quest packs in the game for free, and the first four expansions are also available for 99 LP each (which you’ll earn within a couple of hours of playing). That lot should take you at least up to Rohan without having to pay a single penny, so, what, a mere few thousand hours of one of the most under rated (soloish) MMOs ever made? Highly recommended.

I'd love to still be playing LOTRO, but even though it's an ancient game, my laptop is crying even thinking about it.

It could do with a ground-up rewrite, but it’ll never get one. They did finally release an optional 64-bit client though which makes a big difference for some people, you select it in the options in the launcher. Might be worth giving it a go sometime. I do think it’s a great game still.

I can't remember what's included with the base game now, what I've already got, where I got up to, or anything. I think I did the first raid or two, and then was mainly playing solo/in little groups, and then just gradually dropped off altogether.

I do sort of miss it, and sometimes consider starting a new character (at whatever the jumping-on point is now), as it is a very satisfying loop, and I quite like the world/lore, but I haven't. Yet.

Warmind and Curse of Osiris are free at the moment, along with the base game. Thing is, all of those campaigns are going away along with the locations associated with them. This autumn they're getting rid of:
Mars
Mercury
Io
Nessus
Titan

The current season is all about those planets basically getting burnt off the map. They're bringing back the Cosmodrome from D1 with some polish on it and some new quests (as we as the old ones) and a new location called Titan. I have a feeling that Titan will probably be two locations in one same way Shattered Reef and Dreaming City was.

I tried to play Destiny, but I didn't understand a single thing that was going on. It was ages ago, so I can't remember the details, just the confusion. I was in a large room like a shopping centre. I didn't know if it was a shopping centre. It might have been a space station, or a spaceship, or a building on a planet. I didn't know why I was there. Sometimes I was on a planet shooting some aliens or something, but I didn't know why I was killing them, or what I was trying to achieve, or what they had done which made them deserve to die, or what their motivation was. I tried to read the dense lore, but it was completely impenetrable. Every piece of story referenced factions who were unknown to me and their deeds, which I didn't know about. I was expected to remember the names of factions, but their names were utterly, terrifyingly generic, so it was completely impossible. Destiny's storytelling is like one of those pictures that simulate the effects of dementia, where everything seems familiar, but there isn't a single recognisable object in there. I remember the shooting was very good, but I may as well have been shooting geometric shapes and being rewarded with flowers.

Spoiler - click to show A visual representation of Destiny's lore: