I think there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Or simply put, there'll come a time where the quantity vs quality problem starts to rear its head.
As a WoW vet with a fair number of raiding hours under my belt, as well as a Guild Wars player, MMOs by design kill story, immersion, and serve as a time sink.
When you have a setting that is persistent, and meant to be played by thousands of people daily, well, there's not much you can do to influence the story. Most of the time we're looking at setpieces that are played out to you, but that's it. You can't even have cutscenes that much; the time sink part (which I'll get to) means the majority of players will be rushing past "pointless" story bits to get to the next part for LOOTZ (or whatever end-game carrot).
Immersion takes a backseat too, because things like idiots, griefers, and again, people who want to just roll past the end-game content will have such nice conversation with you, like "HI CAN I HAS 5G PLZ I NID NEW BOOTZ" or "we gg to do AOJ, PKZ, DNT, LF2M PST". Plus you'd also be in a hurry most of the time anyway, lest your guild leaves you behind.
The above two happen because MMOs are designed as time sinks. The reason being, since they're open to everyone (who can pay), it'll mean there'll always be a good proportion of the crowd who have nothing better to do with their life and play the damn thing 6-12 hours a day. That also means content producers have to keep churning out stuff to keep the playerbase occupied. Since most developers aren't going to keep pace, what happens most of the time is that mechanics are put in place to prevent the players from advancing too fast. Things like 3 drops for a group of 25, each having 12 slots to gear up with, and good luck in advancing in the end-game if you don't gear up otherwise.
I think I didn't quite state the real problem of MMOs, and is that it really is that first M in MMOs. When it's "Massive" it means "mass populace", which in turn means you attract a fair share of idiots and other people you wouldn't want to associate yourself with in real-life. Even if you don't group with them, the majority of the playerbase is likely to drag the game down in a direction you don't want, hence the lack of story, immersion, and the game being such a time sink. Sad but true.
Edit: Bioware's still working on The Old Republic. I'd like to see if they can carry out the "story" part successfully. Part of me is skeptical. Guild Wars did try to have some story elements (not very good, but it's still there), but it's skipped through all the time if you're not among the first wave of players.
Modifié par yslee, 02 avril 2010 - 03:47 .
Retour en haut
).
Of course the endgame raids takes some time while all the 10/25 player learn what to do and able to do it, but with 2-3 raid evenings (3 hours gameplay) you can "gear up" easely for the next tier. Not fully but who cares? You only need that much to be able to work ahead. And on the long run (nex expasion) all the fancy epics will mean nothing, but a little bonus in the next leveling session. Leveling in a good mmo is not that different than a single player rpg (maybe the only thing that if you killed the dragon, it will be there again after some time 
