That's not true for a favorite game of mine for the first few hours I thought the game was ok and it wasn't going to be that great but in the end I just thought it was great
For me, these were: DMC 3, 4 & 5; Guild Wars 2; Hades (didn't get up for 2 freaking days after I sat down to play it); Dishonored; Shadow of Mordor; Dying Light. This was all useless information to you but hey🙈♥️
It is supposed to be the most curated part of every game, maybe together with the ending of single player games, so yeah, it should push you to want more
I love the fact that I can easily tell the timeline of any of Josh's videos' releases by just taking a glance at the patreon supporter list. You know it's older if you can still make out the names in it.
Something very important to keep in mind is the distinction between "I had fun with this game" and "This game is actually good" because those aren't the same thing.
While true fun should still be the most determining factor, because you will quit a game eventually if it isn't fun for you. Now what that fun looks like changes from person to person so different strokes for different folks. :)
Yep, i've played WoW and i'm sure the game has good quality stuff in it. But it's not fun for me like at all, i played it for like 10 hours because i paid for it otherwise i would have dropped it in the first hour. Especially When there's stuff like Base PSO2 around. New Genesis got a lot of problems atm with server issues but the game is also really fun for me.
Strangely, this is often not easy to convey. I have seen some people drifting in stupid discussions just because they told they had (more) fun with Dark Souls 2 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@frischifrisch6860 Dark Souls 2 has some flaws but it's nothing that ruins the game, people overreact sometimes and they always want to play an 10/10 masterpiece game all the time. Dark Souls 2 is a good game, not great like the first dark souls but still an good game especially compared to the shovelware souls likes that exist out there. It also was better than dark souls 1 in some aspects, like dual wielding being a thing and twin blades that were so fucking cool but they removed it in ds3 for some weird fucking reason. The only flaws i can think of that are the ones that don't make the game Great too is the bosses being quantity over quality, sometimes i was thinking: "Bruh this is just a normal encounter in a closed room"
Having fun and thinking a game is good are both subjective. They are tide together. If someone thinks a game is good but you think it is trash then you are both right. I don't know if you mean to say that a game being good can be objective but that's how your comment came off to me. There are no objective facts when it comes to liking or thinking a game is good. Some of the things in games that you might think make a game bad someone else may think are great parts of the game. And just because the majority opinion of a game is negative that doesn't mean the game is objectively bad either because what people want in games changes over time, by age, baste on country/states, and even your political/moral/religious views can influence your opinion. I see a lot of review channels trying to definitively state that the things that they don't like in a game makes it a bad game. When in reality it just makes it a bad game in there opinion. Just look at Asian country's. The types of games that are most popular there are often trashed by western reviews (JRPGs and Asian MMOs). But that's because the things in those games are not made for a western audience in mind most of the time. All entertainment is subjective and I wish people could see that.
As a game designer if your game takes 100 hours to get fun, then your game is bad. Your game needs to communicate to your players what it is, what to expect, and what's fun about it as soon as possible. That's part of designing a good game. Portal has you start with spatial puzzles and a funny yet sterile narrator. Mario starts with platforming, enemies, and powerups. Metal Gear starts with epic cutscenes, combat, and stealth sequences. If you've failed to capture the player and show them what's fun about your game in the first hour then you have no business expecting anyone to play further.
You get it. You design games so you have to get it. Most mmo players demand the 100 hour gameplay marker because they're invested in the game and want the review to be too.
He didn't say, all type of game, he choose to talk about an MMO, a type of game that have two parts, the leveling phase and the end game... So this guys say that in 1h he can actually tell you if the total game will be fun just by doing 1 phase of the game. Yes he can know if the leveling phase is fun, he can tell you if the quality of the game is ok, but MMO are not just leveling your character, at some point you gonna have to play what they call the end game, some game just put all effort in the end game because this is what you gonna do most, and this guys say that without doing it he can tell you what a game it's.
@@seb4sti4n666 it simply does not matter whether or not the endgame of an MMORPG is good or not if the first hour is so much of a chore that nobody wants to play through it. Think of it like a book. You need to grab your audience in the very first chapter. It doesn't matter how good your sudden plot twist partway through is. It doesn't matter how great the rest of the book is. If you cannot capture an audience early on then your game is bad at being a game.
@@BloodPatternBlue Not completely true. Take a game I really know about. Path of Exile. The game do not explain himself very good at the start, you have slow skill and it's really boring to play... But the game become way more fun when you start to get faster attack. Lets say you only play one hour of PoE! You gonna find this game very bad, graphic not so good, visual effect boring, slow... Because the start of the game is bad, but it become better the longer you play. Also the game got a lots of Wiki outside of it and a great community, but for someone who review it in 1 hour, this is a dog shit game. But for me who play more then 4000hours in it, it's a masterpiece that beat Diablo 3 easy.
There was a food critic at a local paper that revealed their process in an article. They would visit the restaurant 3x and order generally varied from the menu. One review in particular that I remember was comparing 2x similar restaurants and they said the food was slightly better in one but the ambiance was slightly better in the other, but that the differences were such that overall experience/enjoyment was equal. Just thought that was interesting considering your analogy.
See Old School Runescape as an example. Most high praise of it comes from people with either nostalgia or high play times (or generally both), but it does little to make a case for itself for new players, either by an objective or subjective standard. Runescape 3, while still being a game with clunky, dated mechanics, it at least attempts to make a case for itself up front, with a reasonable basic tutorial, consistent (though unnecessarily complex) UI, graphical consistency, and relevant music and sound design. I've tried playing both, but I can't see the case for committing to OSRS as someone who never touched Runescape in any way before 2019.
@@Syngrafer Wanting that is just dumb. Why do you want all the frontline devs to have a bad time? Their life depends on the game. Also, those are rookie numbers...
For the bad ones, not even that. For the good ones, still probably not even that. I remember my very first hit on an enemy in world of Warcraft hearing the noise of the bow creak, the rawr of the tiger as it aggro'd and the incredible atmosphere in teldrassil with the ambience and music that are still some of my favourite zones (rip tree). I was utterly hooked the moment u saw those first numbers pop up at the start of vanilla. You could just feel the polish that had gone into the combat and atmosphere, even if the servers were shitting bricks as more and more players joined wow, and there were plenty of weird bugs early on. The actual UI and core mechanics and classes and art style etc. Were all incredible. It's a massive shame wow changed how the numbers popped up... Using classicfloatingtext made it better but the game itself got so shite I couldn't bring myself to play it anymore in recent years... I was tempted by classic but they changed so much shit despite claiming they wouldn't and I also really didn't want to do that grind again at 60 then 70. Been there done that got my Hunter's tier 3 and tier 6 I cba doing it all over again but with a much more toxic community and with blizz changing things still for better or worse lol.
This is true not just for MMOs, but for SP games as well. After the intro/tutorial of Fallout 4, for instance, I knew for sure that I was dealing with a great FPS, but also with a _really_ terrible Fallout game.
@@toptiertech7291 depends on how you look at it. There are different themes, subgenres, combat styles, top down view, first person, third person. I wouldnt say Tibia is similar to WoW or runescape is similar to Destiny.
8:07 the idea to have to suffer for 10+ hours of agony to get to "the good bit" has always been very foreign for me. To stay with the restaurant example: you just have to eat the 5 litres of hot mayonnaise and crab juice before we give you the steak, but trust me, it's worth it.I cannot tell you why, you have to experience the mayonnaise.
"Here is a turd smothering on your face simulator MMO. New players get 100 golden corn coins as a start bonus. Play 1000 hours before you can call it complete shit. 125 days of 8 hour sessions, 7 days a week for 18 weeks straight. Work? Family? Life? How dare you! We put two whole days of development into making this game where you can do anything you want.* It's the new WoW killer."
@@JoshStrifeHayes How dare you. Super DooDoo Quest 2 is my favorite game that I've played for 13,000 years. You're just a casual who should go back to playing Skyrim 4 for the Wii U. You would know that the game gets good after the heat death of the universe if you kept playing until the end of time.
Ironically, some MMO's fall into the opposite spectrum, where the first dozen+ hours are great. Then the cracks that were well hidden or at least didn't seem as much of an issue in the beginning as they actually were, start to really show.
Age of Conan clearly put a ton of work into the tutorial island with full voice acting, engaging stories and nice pacing. Leave it for the main continent and voice acting drops off, quests turn very grindy and you end up having to grind to gain enough levels for the next bunch of quests etc. This when I played back before the expansion released that is.
@@nic6863 Completely agree - The only thing I did in that game was hit level 9 and then found a way to take over the gold bar market on my server and made more money than I'd ever need to have endgame gear. Couldn't convince friends or family to play it because they didn't want to be that far ahead and not be able to experience it.
No, it's not good. it's awful. Getting a good live-serviced game (including MMO) with a good 1-hour experience and without microtransaction or lootboxes is as difficult as getting isekai'd and making harem from there. In the reality, you should choose between "polished early experience with harsh business models" and "fun after at least several hours but without harsh monetization schemes"
@@surplusking2425 He never mentioned business practices, and it is pretty easy to find live-serviced games with a good 1-hour experience that can tell you how high quality a game is. If you want MMO's then Planetside 2 isn't bad. It fulfills all of the requirements listed, aside from possibly 4. There's a lot of things you can pay for, but the weapons, including the starter ones, handle well for what they are designed to do. Then the other weapons are more specialized for certain scenarios. You have Final Fantasy 14 that tells you within the first hour, "This is a heavily story focused experience with slower, tab targeting combat." This fact does not change from 1-90. If you want to leave the MMO bubble for a bit. You have games like Blazblue, Guilty Gear, Dota 2, League of Legends, and many other live-serviced games that can show their quality within the first hour. Even though in those games you will also spend thousands upon thousands of hours doing the exact same thing. (For reference, Guilty Gear XX Accent is still getting updates 20 years later with no additional monetization and no DLC, and Blazblue Centralfiction is still getting updates 5 years later with no DLC or micro transactions)
The design of most mmos completely baffles me, I get that they want to have fun end game activities to keep long term players invested. The issue comes from having to play for hundreds of hours to even get to the fun part. If the game doesn't get fun until I've played for that long why wouldn't I just go play a game that's fun right away and doesn't waste my time?
@@MasterOfSayajins I agree. my mother who taught for 30+ years before retiring a few years back always told me "A bad teacher tells students *WHAT* to think. A good teacher teaches students *HOW* to think."
@@SlaughtingIdiots Did you watch the whole video? He's talking about quality throughout the entire game being evident from the start. Not make the start good and the rest bad.
My GF and I have been playing MMORPGs together since we met at the release of Ultima Online. Yes about 25 years now! The ones we liked we played for between 1 and 5 years depending usually on the amount of original content and the content added just in time to keep us. LOL there were about a dozen of these good ones, but we tried twice that many that after 3 to 10 hours of play just didn't grab us. Amazingly we always agreed on which ones weren't worth playing. One of us would ask the other "Have you had any fun yet?" No real surprise, the answer was always "no". In the good games that we ended up living in that question wouldn't get asked , we were too busy having fun and rushing to get to the next thing in game. If you haven't felt euphoria after a few hours of play the game sucks. A hundred hours more play is not going to somehow make it fun.
@@v0idz_779 Not everyone want to be married, and is more than fine as a long term partner. After 25 years, the only difference is they don't have a tax benefit
"simping" is such a weird dumb word and I'll never understand how the internet comes up with so many words to denigrate being nice to people. You're allowed to like things, I promise
Its funny i had this conversation earlier today. And there is so many defenitions to simping i feel like at this point saying hello to a woman is borderline simping 🤣🤣
I really wanted to enjoy Wildstar, and everyone kept telling me it gets really good after 40 hours. I... shouldn't have to work for 40 hours to start having fun....
Wildstar, man what a short ride for me... We had a RL friend group pick it up on Day 1. About 5 of us started in the morning and about 2 others joined in after work. Server was not only full, but completely blocked new character creation on the full server. We 5 had to start again on an emptier server, so that 7 could play together. I've never burnt out so quickly on a game in all my life.
@John Houser Modern wow has the player start totally revamp! if you are new they really did a good job at introducing the wow experience plus the new lvl cap is 60! and is faster to level up right now. I wish i have time to play.
@@Melinoor But it does not change the fact that it's only about the endgame with lots of grinds (and time locked content). Actually I love playing wow until I hit level cap. Experience the story I want, get xp the way I want, take the time I want to get there. At cap you have these things to do daily/weekly, grind dungeons/pvp content, grind reputation, gold, whatever just for tiny parts of story or a nice transmog you want. Yeah that's what MMOs are as the devs can't create high quality content faster then players will consume it and that's also why I don't play them anymore.
Well my friend, the only think that says is that you are not made to play MMORPGs. It's not your type of game, thats all. If you want to play a game and have inmediate fun, go play FPS, console games, MOBAs, etc. MMORPG requires time, thats how they are made because they are supposed to be an adventure for players.
Great video. A couple of days ago I was just talking to a friend about how much it ruins immersion and the grounded feeling of a world inside an MMORPG when I can just phase through stuff. And I have a love-hate for those games that have insane jumping. It's so much fun, but at the same time, it also makes my character feel disconnected from the world it's in.
That restaurant analogy made me think of something that my mom said. In NYC, where she said, she told me that a bad restaurant in the city will almost never succeed because of the sheer amount of competition their is. This also reminded me of another thing she said to me; and that is that you will rarely, if ever see advertisements of good or great restaurants in NYC. A lot of it is spread through word of mouth.
That is true, a lot of the great restaurants do no need to spend on ads since 'everybody already knows it exist', and if you don't, then everyone will point you at it.
This is something my friend says all the time. We'll buy a game, play it for two hours, and when I say I'm gonna return it cause I'm not enjoying it he goes "but we've barely played it." This lead to arguments like "Yes, but I'm not enjoying it, and if we keep playing it I'm stuck with it." Or "How long do I have to not have fun before it counts then?"
mmorpg are alot like anime. you can usually tell by the end of the first episode wether you are going to like the anime or not. however; just because you like it does not mean its a good anime.
@@JoshStrifeHayes I watched most of that... mostly to laugh at it (not with it) But yeah the "usual" rule with anime is the first 3 episodes should tell you if you want to watch it or not (many many times less time is needed... heck I have dropped some in 5 minutes just based on the protagonists voice)
@@frecio231 I too have occasionally dropped an anime for a bad OP... Not very often though as it is easy enough to skip (especially when watching weekly) but I do sometimes wish every streaming service had a skip intro and skip recap button... Especially when binging
This happened with me on Gintama, I watched a few episodes, quit because I wasn't that much of a fan of it. But people told me it gets better so I tried to watch it again. I struggled through about 50 episodes, before I quit again, because it really felt like a chore. It did not get better, it was consistently the same quality, and it just wasn't for me.
You crushed it...I can't count how many times I've had arguments with people over other forms of media in regards to measuring objective quality. There are a staggering amount of people who don't seem to know what the term objective means, how an analysis can be conducted or a reasonable conclusion reached...and the majority of them seem to exist on Twitter lol
Like old proverb "You only need one leaf to know autumn had arrived." At the core, it is the sincere manner and effort that count. It reflects to the surface, those detail, art choice, game mechanics, game menu etc. Nowadays, many restaurants are clean ,good looking, having a fancy room design but their foods are terrible and expensive. At the end of the day, it is the actual content count and you can't judge only on the surface level. So I think those argument is partly correct.
I think this is opposite to the point the video is making though. He's saying you can tell a game is poorly crafted within a few minutes, I don't think he's arguing that just because the beginning of the game is good that it will guarantee quality the rest of the way through. But this is in response to people claiming he didn't play a game long enough to get to the good part, there's no contingent of commenters angerly telling him that a game he thought wasn't bad actually gets terrible later.
I wanted to add this: Warframe (a game I spent thousands of hours in) changes even its focus and tone after a while. In the first hour you won't get in touch with the limited slots in inventory, trading, very many mission types, weapons, creative and annoying mechanics and bugs. You dont get in touch with Bugframe, Grindframe and RNGesus. You wont get any more Step by Step Tutorial quests anymore. After an hour you also don't know that you have to wait three days to build a warframe in the forge. The game is so ridiculously extensive that you can't fully grasp even the idea or concept behind it in an hour. So even if you like the game in the first 2 hours, its very well possibly, that you start to hate it after 50.
Conversely, as someone who started just last year and made it to MR30, the early game can be overwhelming, missions super easy, incredibly light narrative, etc to the point I technically started two years ago but never made it past Venus until I tried it again. I obviously now really like the game, and technically the tutorial is good, but the game between then and Second Dream is super rough. To your point the game is also ever evolving and while mostly good it is hard for new players to really come to grasps with what they are actually starting. IMO push back on the complexity, tighten the narrative early on(Include Fortuna, We All Lift Together is great), and make the experience up to Mars reflective of the rest of the game and you'll keep many more players.
I played a total of 8hrs of warframe. I could not figure out what you even do in the game after the tutorial story. I did some missions, then I went to some open world area and 2 other players joined me for some reason and we just ran around mindlessly fighting things. I still don't understand what you're really supposed to do in the game. Grinding sure but there is no direction early on what you're even supposed to grind. I left that game very confused.
the problem is with mmos leveling is a thing so there are times that you dont have the full picture because your not leveled. if your level 15 and the max is level 100 its not fair to go im not having fun with my class all i do is spam 2 buttons, dude your 15 of course you dont have every ability thats just the nature of RPGS.
@@eztak. going use ff14 here as and example is the story good ehh reborn is decent but the dlcs are amazing is black mage a fun class ehh its kinda clunky for 1-59 at level 60 though you get fire 4 and suddenly all the clunk falls away the class makes sense you can fluidly form a rotation and you and if you had been paying attention on grinded up you fully understand how and when you should be using your ablility's you cannot get to level 60 quickly though you have to put up with those first 59 levels which are a chore.
This is true but you have to remember that the average player will stick around for about 1-2 hours. If your game doesn't draw in new players, your player base dies along with the game. It has to be good even at lower levels.
@@mikefarmer137 ok but lets be honest here the reviews that push the it has to be perfect from the start because that what is being pushed they want something like darksouls/skyrim take your pick of super popular single player game. ie look at this single player game look how fun it is doesn't spend time teaching you it spends it all on the story which is just not the reason people play and mmo, yes mmo players want a story but if all you have is your main story line then once you finish it there is no reason to play.
I think the only part of GOT that was disappointing is the battle of Winterfell and Daenerys attack on Kings landing. The battles were entertaining to watch but they really did not make sense from a tactical and philosophical perspective. I think the Nightking died to easily and it seems out of place for daenerys to suddenly want to massacre the population of King's landing when she spent the first few seasons trying to break the wheel and free people from Tyranny,
What a fantastic list of comprehensive points, I've been playing MMO games for nearly two decades and trying to judge them as I go. I'll be using this list from now on for certain.
I'm glad I've stumbled upon your channel. I have a feeling you're going to become big. You have really well thought out videos and ideas. This satisfies my need for "mmorpg content" and since I'm now in my 30s, I really appreciate the more mature & analytical perspective. Great content - keep it up! edit: OSRS for life
A quote I learned from a comedian some time ago: "They say you can't judge a book by its cover... but what else is the cover there for? What is the cover there for if not to give me some idea of what I'm going to be reading? It's THERE TO BE JUDGED!"
On topic of voice acting: SWTOR, hands down, has my vote for the best MMORPG on that. About 98% of quests is fully voice acted, including your own responses. Conversations are just fun to have.
yep, while i didn't stick with the game and eventually ended up with FFXIV as "my" mmo i was really impressed by the small amount of sith inquisitor questline i did.
Too many people can't separate quality from fun in their minds I've had a ton of fun in objectively bad games. I've played several very quality games that I quit bc I got no enjoyment from them. It's OK to enjoy a bad game, but recognizing its weaknesses is important, especially if you want to see it improve and grow
@@riotangel4701 People had fun in Fallout 76 from day one. No one sane will say it's objectively good game. Also, it goes for other media too: I enjoy anime and light novels that usually considered to be crap, simply because they get that one or two things I care about the most, right. Besides, there are movies that are good just because of how bad they are (like the legendary "The Room").
@@NaoyaYami This is a good point. I had a lot of fun playing Fallout 76 - because I played with friends. Even though we were often complaining about aspects of the game we continued because of each other - and there are good aspects to it. But the fact its got so many poorly conceived 'MMO-like' design choices really hurts it. It should have been a co-op experience with an open world mass player option for 'end game' with some genuine PvP or team based features. Instead its a weird mongrel where seeing other players is mostly just annoying - people shooting at you for no good reason, nukes going off nearly constantly, entire areas devoid of enemies because they're being farmed... Which frustrates me. Because there's a good game hiding in that mess. It shouldn't be an MMO, simple as.
@@NaoyaYami People had fun with fnaf: security breach! Was it made well? .... *Thinks about the mods that released within hours, the out-of-bounds tricks found in minutes, the number of glitches and AI workarounds that people created quickly* No. No it was not. It was not ready for release but people still enjoyed it, it just won't hold up long-term
Ho yea, i bought Horizon zero on pc 1 or 2 years ago everybody was saying it's incredible, after 2 or 3 hours in the opening I was so fucking bored with the gameplay
I just stumbled across your channel about an hour ago and you speak so much truth about mmos, that I feel it in my heart. Thanks for being an honest reviewer, and not someone who's more concerned about his sponsorships.
My general rule of thumb regarding MMORPG's is if the game doesn't manage to capture me within 10 hours then its not worth playing. I will give every game 10 hours, unless its so bad that i can't even get through the first hour that is
Time stamps (timestamps) : 00:00 Introduction and clarification. 10:32 1: Does it work? 11:25 2: Can I change the Resolution? 12:07 3: Can I change the Keybinds? 13:18 4: Graphical consistency and style 16:54 5: Sound and Audio Design 19:07 6: Voice Acting 22:52 7: The Tutorial 24:58 8: Physical objects having Physics 26:36 9: U.I. Quality and Scaling 28:23 10: Variations within the Game Style 30:06 Wrapping it up
The greatest piece of audio design I've heard in an MMO is at the end of the main plot of the base GW2 game, the part where you're protecting Trahearne as he does a ritual, and the gameplay seamlessly fades into the credits. It's... phenomenal.
I think it's muuch easier to figure out if a game is bad quickly. But if it's great might take longer. You could probably find out if the game is good / fine / okay for sure as well.
This is like the whole thing that happens in anime. Where people yell at other about making their mind up about an anime with in the first 2 episodes. But generally speaking that's enough of a watch to understand what kind of anime it is and if it's going to be something you'll like. Even if this isn't always 100% true. Exceptions exist.
Thank you for this comment! I found a pdf for this book and read it and it is really really interesting. Its like a mystery novel but dealing with how experts intuitively 'know' things
Asmon once said: "if you go to a restaurant and someone squats over your plate and you say 'hey, why are you gonna take a shit on my food?' they answer with 'how do you know it's shit if it didn't even come out yet?' " The moral is: *sometimes you don't need to taste it to know it's shit*
I thought he was gonna talk about game loops, but I do agree that all these elements are very important and great ways to judge the general quality of the game. Thanks for the vid!!
You are right about about certain tracks in Fiesta not fitting but many of them do. The track you used in this video has a nice beat and it honestly has a great "setting out on a new adventure" vibe to it.
@Roger Franz I don't think a player could gain access to or evaluate all aspects of an mmo in a few minutes. Some things like crafting, exploration and housing take a while to figure out and are often blocked behind a grindy leveling process or a paywall. I'm currently playing ESO and it took me a few days to figure out the antiquities system. I played Neverwinter and access to a second zone was denied until one had fully adventured in the first zone. I always found fishing to be boring in the games and in real-life but a lot of people enjoy fishing in NW and ESO.
“Ffxiv has excellent in game tutorial” maybe I’m thinking of the wrong things but as a huge fan of that game, the amount I’ve learned from the tutorials vs from word of mouth/ fan made guides is staggering.
the FFXIV ingame tutorials are, actualy pretty good for what they DO use them... Problem is there are a lot of things the tutorials just dont cover also limit break being explained mid dungeon and not being assigned to your hotbar automaticly at that point is wonky(was limitbreak part of your default hotbar? cant remember)
FF14 tutorial is werid, the game has your starter quests which are in my opinion rather bleh at teaching you how to play the game, the guild quests though are really good tutorials as they are tied to class mechanics and also help try to teach you your role better in mini partys (especally if your a tank) the real tutorials though are the ones the guy at the bar gives you which help you learn how to play in a party, and those are decent if mouthy. honestly though everything in the core game is easy to though now and alot of it is busy work, but then again it was also built to be a compleate game like 6 plus years ago and the devs look to be reworking it so its much less a grind. (I once speedran the msq on a fresh char and even knowing how to go fast, it took me 30 hours to finish RR, even before the dlc zones) now that being said, the sprout system at least takes alot of the frustrating parts of it. off and the comunity was really good at helping. so
That's true, i've gotten a lot of guidance from my friend's girlfriend. Though the little pop ups that show up and tell me about something are still just as helpful imo if we're just talking about core mechanics.
@@weberman173 lol no it wasn't. At least it wasn't for me iirc and that's how you get a bunch of sprout stories being like "my team told me to LB but I didn't have it on my hotbar/knew what it was-"
When it comes to Chinese food or Pizza here in the states, I want to see faded pictures of stock food in the windows, sticky floors, smells like grease and sweat, the person behind the counter screams "WHAT YOU WANT." in broken English, if it's a Pizza Place, I want futbol to be so loud on the TV I can't hear him screaming at me from behind the counter That's how you know it's good. If it's serving either of those and the place is clean and quiet, I'm gonna have my doubts stepping in.
"Does A and D turn or strafe?" is a silly issue IMO :D That bit, at least, is absolutely preferential, though the ability to rebind to user spec (and the ability to do so) is objectively important, you're right there.
Judging game after 1 hour is very valid because that's new player experience. What does player who just installed this game thinks, how confusing it is, how hard is it to pick up basics it matters
The problem with this theory is that it assumes the designers don't frontload a lot of the best content to draw players in, knowing that by the time players reach a hollow endgame they already have their money.
"You can't judge a game before you've invested X amount of time on it" when put into a different perspective is your mother saying: "You will like broccoli if you eat it enough times". Maybe so, but why should you suffer through eating it multiple times when you can just eat something else equally healthy instead.
@@hydrogamer471 Maybe it is false to you, we dont all look for the same thing... And reviewers are not looking for the same thing either... i bet your favorite movie have several bad reviews from reviewers that just did not like it because they are looking for other aspects.
@@Frostiedkdk I remember when Star Wars Episode 3 came out Critics roasted it, but I and all my friends loved it we stood in a loooong line, for hours and played board games on the sidewalk while we waited
Josh: What happens when a developer just adds music to a place without any care... well then you get this! Smashcut to An Ad: Finding stuff to do with your kids is hard
Man I would really love a podcast with you and nerdslayer, you guys are such pollar opposites, it's really fun seeing two very different opinions on so many topics about MMOs.
General rule of thumb in literature is that your book should grab the reader within the first page. If we can expect the first page of a book to be where the reader decides whether or not they want what is presented, I can't see why an mmo, which is just a different form of storytelling (with extra bits like mechanics and voice acting, and most of them have SOME sort of story, whether or not they get in-depth with it) shouldn't be able to have the same effect.
I know you have already made a video about Runes of Magic, but I still always have to think about the game whenever you do one of the "Worst MMO Ever" videos and also this video, because I think it is a good example of how a game can look like it has decent quality early on, (because it has) and become really poor quality later, just because the developers stopped caring and made much cheaper content in recent years than in the first few years of the game. The first continent has varied sprites and models, different music for different zones, very few bugs and decent storytelling. Then when you get to the later zones, there is no music, the monsters are just the same models as earlier monsters but with a different name, you can't play for an hour without encountering at least one bug... . I still love the game, but I think the initial gameplay is deceiving.
Add to that worse and worse monetization. They disabled buying item shop currency from other players, introduced gachas, even leveling zones relied more and more on upgraded equipment and each upgrade relied on item shop...
About key binding, I'll add that QUERTY is not the only one keyboard in the world. In France, where I live, we have AZERTY. Which means instead of WASD I use ZQSD. With WASD games, I can ONLY go backward and to the right....
Thanks for a very good video! I think what you're talking about could be applied in any domain. For example, I'm a software developer, and I can spot poor code very fast. I know what I look for. For example, if I see little or no documentation in code, that's a somewhat bad sign. If I see poorly formatted code, it's a really bad sign. I don't have to sift through every line of code to see if the quality is high or low. I don't have to see the software running to know if it will run well or poorly. The same goes the other way around, I can see pretty fast by watching a piece of software run, how the code is. I love the point you're making about whether the developers valuing the players' time. For me, it's a huge red flag if I find easily spotted (and easily fixable) bugs in game and other software. It tells me right away that the developers are lazy, and neither value their own time nor my time. When I develop software, I take a lot of pride in my work. I want all of my programs and websites to meet a high standard of quality, because I believe it signals to others what kind of person I am. People are rarely sloppy in one area but careful in another. You would rarely see someone happily presenting shitty work, but also never come to work late.
If people say you haven’t spent enough time to know, they aren’t saying it’s a flawed thought process… they are saying: I HAVE and you’re wrong BECAUSE you didn’t spend enough time. Still, highly analytical breakdown and logically seems legit, but sounds like a developer judging a game and not a player/fan.
the music thing you mention is why i'm so hooked on some games. and keep going back to older games like gothic for example. the feeling it gives is very important
Great video! Nothing like being a level 2 n00b and 90% of your screen is taken up by Cash Shop pop-ups or tutorials on lootbox/RNG mechanics and outdated or totally endgame mechanics, big red arrows pointing to the cash shop, and glowing buttons for your daily login loot that you wont need until endgame. Oh and did I mention that big sign pointing to the cash shop. "Please buy something. Our hamsters are too fat and gorged to run the wheel any more and We need new ones!!!" I feel like you can judge most MMOs by their Launcher alone. If it's riddled with Ads, the game is too. I've always been of the opinion that "I'd rather pay a monthly sub than play a f2p/p2w Cash Shop." At that point they're more worried about selling you a lot of somethings than providing you a game to play. Blah. Level boosts? That's fine. Cosmetic gear? That's fine. Selling actual gear with end-game stats etc? Nooope. /rant
Before osrs came out, and after EOC ruined RS2, I hadn't played in a long while. I heard the song Nightfall in a runescape video on youtube (which is my favorite song on osrs) and I literally teared up with nostalgia and the longing for the memories I had associated with the game. When osrs came out finally, I got to the login screen, heard the login music, along with the old school background on the login screen, and I got goosebumps. The music fills me with so many emotions I cannot put into words, that transports me to a place in time I loved. And the music in osrs obviously isn't made with high quality instruments and sounds, but they obviously took pride in writing and creating it. to the point you get a cape and rewards for unlocking all the music tracks in game. The audio, and even more so the music in a game is HUGELY important and is often overlooked by people that are okay with rushing out a sub-quality game. Maybe I feel so strongly becaue I'm a musician myself, but I'm sure even the most tone-deaf, average player can literally FEEL the difference while playing.
Some of my favorite MMOs I've played I really didn't like in the first hour. Some of the games I thought had a really good start never really gripped me for that long. You might be able to judge a game's overall quality in the first hour, but you can't judge how much fun you'll end up having with it in the end.
but if game is really boring from the start, you still wasting your time, you talk to much of that end game gamer, if game systems changes longer you play, that's poor design choice and shows clearly the developers don't care about new player experience
True, but in a genre with literally hundreds of games, that quality gate does a good job of eliminating the games that are likely to be the biggest wastes of time. Will I miss out on an amazing experience from some hidden gem? Possibly, but not likely. If a developer wants my attention, they should put their best foot forward up front - none of the things highlighted in this video are hard to do for motivated developers who want to see their games succeed.
@@Damaniel3 I think slow starts in the MMO genre are kinda inevitable, if there are RPG elements and a progression system then a game will always have a slow start.
i judge a game on how nice the menu buttons are to press. some have a clicking animation, and some come with a sound effect. some buttons feel flat, while others just feels nice to click on. idk if it's nostalgia but i really like any FF's menu selections; it just feels very 'affirmative when i press a button or choose a selection. the same logic applies to these buttons; if they spent the time designing a very satisfying button, they must have had the resources to really polish the game already and had extra time/resources to make this button
It's important to try the game yourself. You can watch millions of videos about a game, but your best thing to do is just play the game. I've found that most MMORPG reviews will ruin the experience because I already lived the starting experience.
"You don't need to watch an entire TV Show to know if it's good" Game of Thrones: *nervous sweating* "You can tell immediately Game of Thrones has good writing" Game of Thrones Season 8: *chuckles* I'm in danger
15:15 wow, you've mentioned having a car as a mount in a fantasy rpg before, but I didn't expect it to be in a game I ever heard of let alone played. smh
Makes me wonder how perception of these things may vary by in-game area, too. Like if you start in a fantasy zone, but a later zone is technologically advanced and has cars because of lore reasons, it makes sense to have a car as a mount; BUT, seeing a player with that mount driving around in that first zone would look pretty awkward especially if you're not yet aware of those later zones, lol.
Time Gating is another huge red flag I look for. Sometimes it isn't readily apparent at the beginning of a game, but anything designed to slow you down and eat Time for the sake of it tells me something. Either my time as a consumer is taken for granted, or there is a lack of content they are trying to stretch. Or that their income model requires as much engagement as possible from me and they are trying to find ways to force play time artificially.
Phenomenology explanation is fine, and a good point for setting up the video. I really don't agree with the restaurant example though. Restaurant ambiance etcetera however is not necessarily a good indicator of good food. I would even say that strong focus on ambiance, professional service etc is a good indicator of having bog standard food.
Quality is an incredibly hard aspect to judge. There are so many comparisons, expectations, demands and fans that can all skew an unbiased opinion. Also who's opinion is right? There are so many different types of people that want different things out of their experience. Not to mention how their current emotional feelings can effect their judgements. However I personally find that a good judgement to have is what you personally enjoy. This is why I think trying things out yourself is the most important test of quality, it bypasses other people's depictions and gets to what aspects matter personally to you. I try to judge something on it's own merits, since you can have fun in bad games and bored in good games. Some game do take longer than an hour to get a better judgement for since sometimes there is beauty to be found behind the ugly. Playing with other people can also shape and transform an experience too, since MMOs can produce random social elements if you seek out others to play with, I know many people just play for the socialising, with the game just being a medium to be around other people with. With many of these MMOs their time in the sun has gone, so that social aspect has died and much of that part of the game has gone with it.
Your block of text is not spaced, and that makes it hard to read and overwhelming. Therefore I'm not reading it, because that is a sign of low quality.
I have tried applying what I was able to from this to Pokemon Games, because I KNOW I like playing around in late game Pokemon games, and because the community argues a LOT about the games. They are on console, so, for example, keybinding and resolution don't apply to these. But I realized that for 2 out of the 3 recent pokemon games, I only go through the first hour because I KNOW what late and end game look like! Damn... small wonder there is so much arguing here! When the franchise started, the first hour was perfectly fine, but today, there SHOULD be better first impression for new players, I now think the whole thing only works because literally everyone know what late game Pokemon is!
and the whole "its much better with friends" comment I see now and again, just about everything is better with friends but just because its better doesn't mean its good, elite dangerous is much more enjoyable with friends and a decent ship, doesn't mean supercusing for 15 minutes of not-gameplay is objectively better just because your in a discord call/party chat with three buddies.
This made me realize how i found my new favorite game, guardian tales, from a simple seconds long video, which only showed the game's menu UI. You could obviously tell the devs put a lot of effort in the game just from how pretty such a minor thing looked
Bang on the money as usual, Josh! Seeing your comments about the importance of music/sound design here I wondered if you have ever thought about doing a vid on your favourite tracks from MMOs.
This video convinced me to subscribe after a month of watching your content. The way you breakdown principles of functional requirements, non-functional requirements and software QA for laypersons is fantastic. And that's saying nothing of the game design principles you highlight in all your content. Great stuff. BTW love the other channel too. Can't wait for more playthroughs and commentary on PS1/PC classics. Each video is a game design case study and nostalgia trip rolled in one. Keep up the good work.
Yeah.. there are people who just don't like video games in general and say every video game sucks in just 10 minutes of playing. And then there are people like Josh, who are actuak intellectual people who game and know if a game is shit or not the first 10 minutes.
![Runes of Tragic - The Dire State of Runes of Magic [MMOPINION]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/QMmSWOpm-wE/mqdefault.jpg)
![Runes of Tragic - The Dire State of Runes of Magic [MMOPINION]](/img/tr.png)
![Why do Gamigo kill MMO's? - [MMOPINION]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/CPZkfYWp9uo/mqdefault.jpg)
The first hour of a game should simply make the player go, "I want more of this."
That's not true for a favorite game of mine for the first few hours I thought the game was ok and it wasn't going to be that great but in the end I just thought it was great
That’s how world of Warcraft damn near ruined my life.
For me, these were:
DMC 3, 4 & 5;
Guild Wars 2;
Hades (didn't get up for 2 freaking days after I sat down to play it);
Dishonored;
Shadow of Mordor;
Dying Light.
This was all useless information to you but hey🙈♥️
Metal gear rising 5 minutes in
It is supposed to be the most curated part of every game, maybe together with the ending of single player games, so yeah, it should push you to want more
I love the fact that I can easily tell the timeline of any of Josh's videos' releases by just taking a glance at the patreon supporter list.
You know it's older if you can still make out the names in it.
Right? It’s so small and innocent. From before he said lol to the algorithm!
He had footage of Defiance. Sad doo rag.
You can't have an opinion because you didn't talk to every human in the world.
In Thrawn Ascendancy there is a race that acts exactly this way xD
@Quentin Styger same
@Ken Ne thanks I do love 7s
xd
@@7DragonEyes7 7 months
Something very important to keep in mind is the distinction between "I had fun with this game" and "This game is actually good" because those aren't the same thing.
While true fun should still be the most determining factor, because you will quit a game eventually if it isn't fun for you. Now what that fun looks like changes from person to person so different strokes for different folks. :)
Yep, i've played WoW and i'm sure the game has good quality stuff in it. But it's not fun for me like at all, i played it for like 10 hours because i paid for it otherwise i would have dropped it in the first hour. Especially When there's stuff like Base PSO2 around. New Genesis got a lot of problems atm with server issues but the game is also really fun for me.
Strangely, this is often not easy to convey. I have seen some people drifting in stupid discussions just because they told they had (more) fun with Dark Souls 2 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@frischifrisch6860 Dark Souls 2 has some flaws but it's nothing that ruins the game, people overreact sometimes and they always want to play an 10/10 masterpiece game all the time. Dark Souls 2 is a good game, not great like the first dark souls but still an good game especially compared to the shovelware souls likes that exist out there.
It also was better than dark souls 1 in some aspects, like dual wielding being a thing and twin blades that were so fucking cool but they removed it in ds3 for some weird fucking reason.
The only flaws i can think of that are the ones that don't make the game Great too is the bosses being quantity over quality, sometimes i was thinking: "Bruh this is just a normal encounter in a closed room"
Having fun and thinking a game is good are both subjective. They are tide together. If someone thinks a game is good but you think it is trash then you are both right. I don't know if you mean to say that a game being good can be objective but that's how your comment came off to me. There are no objective facts when it comes to liking or thinking a game is good. Some of the things in games that you might think make a game bad someone else may think are great parts of the game. And just because the majority opinion of a game is negative that doesn't mean the game is objectively bad either because what people want in games changes over time, by age, baste on country/states, and even your political/moral/religious views can influence your opinion. I see a lot of review channels trying to definitively state that the things that they don't like in a game makes it a bad game. When in reality it just makes it a bad game in there opinion. Just look at Asian country's. The types of games that are most popular there are often trashed by western reviews (JRPGs and Asian MMOs). But that's because the things in those games are not made for a western audience in mind most of the time. All entertainment is subjective and I wish people could see that.
As a game designer if your game takes 100 hours to get fun, then your game is bad.
Your game needs to communicate to your players what it is, what to expect, and what's fun about it as soon as possible. That's part of designing a good game.
Portal has you start with spatial puzzles and a funny yet sterile narrator.
Mario starts with platforming, enemies, and powerups.
Metal Gear starts with epic cutscenes, combat, and stealth sequences.
If you've failed to capture the player and show them what's fun about your game in the first hour then you have no business expecting anyone to play further.
You get it.
You design games so you have to get it. Most mmo players demand the 100 hour gameplay marker because they're invested in the game and want the review to be too.
He didn't say, all type of game, he choose to talk about an MMO, a type of game that have two parts, the leveling phase and the end game... So this guys say that in 1h he can actually tell you if the total game will be fun just by doing 1 phase of the game. Yes he can know if the leveling phase is fun, he can tell you if the quality of the game is ok, but MMO are not just leveling your character, at some point you gonna have to play what they call the end game, some game just put all effort in the end game because this is what you gonna do most, and this guys say that without doing it he can tell you what a game it's.
@@seb4sti4n666 i can tell you if it will be high quality, based on the first hour.
@@seb4sti4n666 it simply does not matter whether or not the endgame of an MMORPG is good or not if the first hour is so much of a chore that nobody wants to play through it.
Think of it like a book. You need to grab your audience in the very first chapter. It doesn't matter how good your sudden plot twist partway through is. It doesn't matter how great the rest of the book is. If you cannot capture an audience early on then your game is bad at being a game.
@@BloodPatternBlue Not completely true. Take a game I really know about. Path of Exile. The game do not explain himself very good at the start, you have slow skill and it's really boring to play... But the game become way more fun when you start to get faster attack. Lets say you only play one hour of PoE! You gonna find this game very bad, graphic not so good, visual effect boring, slow... Because the start of the game is bad, but it become better the longer you play. Also the game got a lots of Wiki outside of it and a great community, but for someone who review it in 1 hour, this is a dog shit game. But for me who play more then 4000hours in it, it's a masterpiece that beat Diablo 3 easy.
I like that this list could be applied to basically any game, not just mmos.
@@thebeezkneez7559And not even just visual media, media in general.
@@rosalindcormier4384 And not just media, everything that humans can like or disilike.
@pyrophoric and not just everything humans like or dislike....oh wait I think that is it😂
There was a food critic at a local paper that revealed their process in an article. They would visit the restaurant 3x and order generally varied from the menu. One review in particular that I remember was comparing 2x similar restaurants and they said the food was slightly better in one but the ambiance was slightly better in the other, but that the differences were such that overall experience/enjoyment was equal. Just thought that was interesting considering your analogy.
Once you have a thousand hours into a game, then you've no doubt become emotionally attached to it, and can no longer make an unbiased assessment.
See Old School Runescape as an example. Most high praise of it comes from people with either nostalgia or high play times (or generally both), but it does little to make a case for itself for new players, either by an objective or subjective standard. Runescape 3, while still being a game with clunky, dated mechanics, it at least attempts to make a case for itself up front, with a reasonable basic tutorial, consistent (though unnecessarily complex) UI, graphical consistency, and relevant music and sound design. I've tried playing both, but I can't see the case for committing to OSRS as someone who never touched Runescape in any way before 2019.
@@Damaniel3 thats a bad example
I have around 5000 hours in World of Warcraft and I want to see it crash and burn.
(I see your point.)
By that logic, you can't judge a book if you only just opened it...
@@Syngrafer Wanting that is just dumb. Why do you want all the frontline devs to have a bad time? Their life depends on the game.
Also, those are rookie numbers...
On point as always. I played at least 30 of different mmo's and I know what to look for. Usually just hour or two lets me decide if its worth it.
For the bad ones, not even that. For the good ones, still probably not even that. I remember my very first hit on an enemy in world of Warcraft hearing the noise of the bow creak, the rawr of the tiger as it aggro'd and the incredible atmosphere in teldrassil with the ambience and music that are still some of my favourite zones (rip tree). I was utterly hooked the moment u saw those first numbers pop up at the start of vanilla. You could just feel the polish that had gone into the combat and atmosphere, even if the servers were shitting bricks as more and more players joined wow, and there were plenty of weird bugs early on. The actual UI and core mechanics and classes and art style etc. Were all incredible. It's a massive shame wow changed how the numbers popped up... Using classicfloatingtext made it better but the game itself got so shite I couldn't bring myself to play it anymore in recent years... I was tempted by classic but they changed so much shit despite claiming they wouldn't and I also really didn't want to do that grind again at 60 then 70. Been there done that got my Hunter's tier 3 and tier 6 I cba doing it all over again but with a much more toxic community and with blizz changing things still for better or worse lol.
This is true not just for MMOs, but for SP games as well. After the intro/tutorial of Fallout 4, for instance, I knew for sure that I was dealing with a great FPS, but also with a _really_ terrible Fallout game.
The opening for LOTRO lets you know immediately it has good writing/story content.
Just wondering. 30 MMOs? Are they not all pretty much just the same game?
@@toptiertech7291 depends on how you look at it. There are different themes, subgenres, combat styles, top down view, first person, third person. I wouldnt say Tibia is similar to WoW or runescape is similar to Destiny.
8:07 the idea to have to suffer for 10+ hours of agony to get to "the good bit" has always been very foreign for me.
To stay with the restaurant example: you just have to eat the 5 litres of hot mayonnaise and crab juice before we give you the steak, but trust me, it's worth it.I cannot tell you why, you have to experience the mayonnaise.
"Here is a turd smothering on your face simulator MMO. New players get 100 golden corn coins as a start bonus. Play 1000 hours before you can call it complete shit. 125 days of 8 hour sessions, 7 days a week for 18 weeks straight. Work? Family? Life? How dare you! We put two whole days of development into making this game where you can do anything you want.* It's the new WoW killer."
You know the insane thing?
Someone, SOMEWHERE, will defend this game.
BDO?
@@JoshStrifeHayes How dare you. Super DooDoo Quest 2 is my favorite game that I've played for 13,000 years. You're just a casual who should go back to playing Skyrim 4 for the Wii U. You would know that the game gets good after the heat death of the universe if you kept playing until the end of time.
@@BigPuddin cringe
Ironically, some MMO's fall into the opposite spectrum, where the first dozen+ hours are great. Then the cracks that were well hidden or at least didn't seem as much of an issue in the beginning as they actually were, start to really show.
Champions online springs to mind.
Age of Conan clearly put a ton of work into the tutorial island with full voice acting, engaging stories and nice pacing. Leave it for the main continent and voice acting drops off, quests turn very grindy and you end up having to grind to gain enough levels for the next bunch of quests etc.
This when I played back before the expansion released that is.
Elder Scrolls Online in a nutshell
@@nic6863 Completely agree - The only thing I did in that game was hit level 9 and then found a way to take over the gold bar market on my server and made more money than I'd ever need to have endgame gear. Couldn't convince friends or family to play it because they didn't want to be that far ahead and not be able to experience it.
I was doubtful at first but those criteria are actually really good. I'm thoroughly convinced and now know what to look for. Thanks!
Glad it was helpful!
No, it's not good. it's awful. Getting a good live-serviced game (including MMO) with a good 1-hour experience and without microtransaction or lootboxes is as difficult as getting isekai'd and making harem from there. In the reality, you should choose between "polished early experience with harsh business models" and "fun after at least several hours but without harsh monetization schemes"
@@surplusking2425 World of Warcraft isn't, nor Guild Wars 2, or even Genshin Impact.
@@surplusking2425 He never mentioned business practices, and it is pretty easy to find live-serviced games with a good 1-hour experience that can tell you how high quality a game is.
If you want MMO's then Planetside 2 isn't bad. It fulfills all of the requirements listed, aside from possibly 4. There's a lot of things you can pay for, but the weapons, including the starter ones, handle well for what they are designed to do. Then the other weapons are more specialized for certain scenarios.
You have Final Fantasy 14 that tells you within the first hour, "This is a heavily story focused experience with slower, tab targeting combat." This fact does not change from 1-90.
If you want to leave the MMO bubble for a bit. You have games like Blazblue, Guilty Gear, Dota 2, League of Legends, and many other live-serviced games that can show their quality within the first hour. Even though in those games you will also spend thousands upon thousands of hours doing the exact same thing. (For reference, Guilty Gear XX Accent is still getting updates 20 years later with no additional monetization and no DLC, and Blazblue Centralfiction is still getting updates 5 years later with no DLC or micro transactions)
@@suspecthalo A mature answer, I applaud you, I usually just see people insulting people in the comments that just go "no this is bad".
The design of most mmos completely baffles me, I get that they want to have fun end game activities to keep long term players invested. The issue comes from having to play for hundreds of hours to even get to the fun part. If the game doesn't get fun until I've played for that long why wouldn't I just go play a game that's fun right away and doesn't waste my time?
Bingo that’s the whole point of the video. If a game isn’t good at getting you invested quickly then it’s not good at doing what it’s supposed to.
You know I don’t even like MMOs but it’s fun to listen to you talk about what’s passionate to you
Same
Josh i gotta say the world would be a better place if there were more teachers like you. The way you define and explain things, is amazing. Thank you
its simply satisfying, when people explain detailed but plain enough for everybody to understand
@@MasterOfSayajins I agree. my mother who taught for 30+ years before retiring a few years back always told me "A bad teacher tells students *WHAT* to think. A good teacher teaches students *HOW* to think."
This should be mandated viewing for every employee of every game company.
Pls dont i still hope that therell be a company that creates a good game and not a player grab with features and sellingpoints
If a game isn't good in the first hour, then it's not good. Like any medium, capturing an audience is essential, as games need to be designed to sell.
@@SlaughtingIdiots Did you watch the whole video? He's talking about quality throughout the entire game being evident from the start. Not make the start good and the rest bad.
@@BloodPatternBlue aahahah no
@@SlaughtingIdiots did you forget to watch the video?
My GF and I have been playing MMORPGs together since we met at the release of Ultima Online. Yes about 25 years now! The ones we liked we played for between 1 and 5 years depending usually on the amount of original content and the content added just in time to keep us. LOL there were about a dozen of these good ones, but we tried twice that many that after 3 to 10 hours of play just didn't grab us. Amazingly we always agreed on which ones weren't worth playing. One of us would ask the other "Have you had any fun yet?" No real surprise, the answer was always "no". In the good games that we ended up living in that question wouldn't get asked , we were too busy having fun and rushing to get to the next thing in game. If you haven't felt euphoria after a few hours of play the game sucks. A hundred hours more play is not going to somehow make it fun.
In all genuineness - this story just warms my heart.
Mate have you thought about proposing yet? I mean 25 years is a long ass time
@@v0idz_779 Not everyone want to be married, and is more than fine as a long term partner. After 25 years, the only difference is they don't have a tax benefit
@@DidntExpect mmmh wasn't expecting that
@@DidntExpect I didn't expect you here
Sounds like I’m simping but you’ve become my favorite MMO reviewer without a doubt.
Hooray! Took me a while to find my style but I'm happy we got here. I hope we can keep this channel rolling :D
@@JoshStrifeHayes please don’t stop these are addicting to watch!
@@garr_bear_gummy8811 aiming for 2 vids a week and a stream on saturday, glad you're enjoying the stuff :)
"simping" is such a weird dumb word and I'll never understand how the internet comes up with so many words to denigrate being nice to people. You're allowed to like things, I promise
Its funny i had this conversation earlier today. And there is so many defenitions to simping i feel like at this point saying hello to a woman is borderline simping 🤣🤣
"The good bit" is supposed to be the whole game.
exactly! a 5 Hour solid game is better than a 50 Hours boring experience with rare decent moments
I really wanted to enjoy Wildstar, and everyone kept telling me it gets really good after 40 hours. I... shouldn't have to work for 40 hours to start having fun....
Wildstar, man what a short ride for me... We had a RL friend group pick it up on Day 1. About 5 of us started in the morning and about 2 others joined in after work. Server was not only full, but completely blocked new character creation on the full server. We 5 had to start again on an emptier server, so that 7 could play together. I've never burnt out so quickly on a game in all my life.
@John Houser Modern wow has the player start totally revamp! if you are new they really did a good job at introducing the wow experience plus the new lvl cap is 60! and is faster to level up right now. I wish i have time to play.
@@Melinoor But it does not change the fact that it's only about the endgame with lots of grinds (and time locked content). Actually I love playing wow until I hit level cap. Experience the story I want, get xp the way I want, take the time I want to get there. At cap you have these things to do daily/weekly, grind dungeons/pvp content, grind reputation, gold, whatever just for tiny parts of story or a nice transmog you want. Yeah that's what MMOs are as the devs can't create high quality content faster then players will consume it and that's also why I don't play them anymore.
Well my friend, the only think that says is that you are not made to play MMORPGs. It's not your type of game, thats all.
If you want to play a game and have inmediate fun, go play FPS, console games, MOBAs, etc. MMORPG requires time, thats how they are made because they are supposed to be an adventure for players.
@@johnmaco Gotcha.
On reading title: 'What, 1 hour? Who is this guy?'
On hearing accent: 'Ah, a professional.'
I literally lol’d reading this. Thanks :)
ruclips.net/video/Wsi1IbjPAkM/видео.html
Great video. A couple of days ago I was just talking to a friend about how much it ruins immersion and the grounded feeling of a world inside an MMORPG when I can just phase through stuff. And I have a love-hate for those games that have insane jumping. It's so much fun, but at the same time, it also makes my character feel disconnected from the world it's in.
Its fun, thats true, but immediate 'fun' at the cost of immersion or game integritt means it isnt sustainable
That restaurant analogy made me think of something that my mom said.
In NYC, where she said, she told me that a bad restaurant in the city will almost never succeed because of the sheer amount of competition their is.
This also reminded me of another thing she said to me; and that is that you will rarely, if ever see advertisements of good or great restaurants in NYC. A lot of it is spread through word of mouth.
That is true, a lot of the great restaurants do no need to spend on ads since 'everybody already knows it exist', and if you don't, then everyone will point you at it.
I wish word of mouth was a viable travel path in other media as well.
This is something my friend says all the time. We'll buy a game, play it for two hours, and when I say I'm gonna return it cause I'm not enjoying it he goes "but we've barely played it." This lead to arguments like "Yes, but I'm not enjoying it, and if we keep playing it I'm stuck with it." Or "How long do I have to not have fun before it counts then?"
Phenomenology.
!
mmorpg are alot like anime. you can usually tell by the end of the first episode wether you are going to like the anime or not. however; just because you like it does not mean its a good anime.
Spot on.
I watched all of 'Gibia', its awful, but was a fun adventure.
@@JoshStrifeHayes I watched most of that... mostly to laugh at it (not with it)
But yeah the "usual" rule with anime is the first 3 episodes should tell you if you want to watch it or not (many many times less time is needed... heck I have dropped some in 5 minutes just based on the protagonists voice)
@@fatrobin72 I've dropped some Anime for the opening (Tokyo ghoul)
@@frecio231 I too have occasionally dropped an anime for a bad OP... Not very often though as it is easy enough to skip (especially when watching weekly) but I do sometimes wish every streaming service had a skip intro and skip recap button... Especially when binging
This happened with me on Gintama, I watched a few episodes, quit because I wasn't that much of a fan of it. But people told me it gets better so I tried to watch it again. I struggled through about 50 episodes, before I quit again, because it really felt like a chore. It did not get better, it was consistently the same quality, and it just wasn't for me.
You crushed it...I can't count how many times I've had arguments with people over other forms of media in regards to measuring objective quality. There are a staggering amount of people who don't seem to know what the term objective means, how an analysis can be conducted or a reasonable conclusion reached...and the majority of them seem to exist on Twitter lol
Like old proverb "You only need one leaf to know autumn had arrived."
At the core, it is the sincere manner and effort that count. It reflects to the surface, those detail, art choice, game mechanics, game menu etc.
Nowadays, many restaurants are clean ,good looking, having a fancy room design but their foods are terrible and expensive. At the end of the day, it is the actual content count and you can't judge only on the surface level.
So I think those argument is partly correct.
There is also a proverb which says "One swallow does not make spring."
I think this is opposite to the point the video is making though. He's saying you can tell a game is poorly crafted within a few minutes, I don't think he's arguing that just because the beginning of the game is good that it will guarantee quality the rest of the way through. But this is in response to people claiming he didn't play a game long enough to get to the good part, there's no contingent of commenters angerly telling him that a game he thought wasn't bad actually gets terrible later.
I wanted to add this:
Warframe (a game I spent thousands of hours in) changes even its focus and tone after a while. In the first hour you won't get in touch with the limited slots in inventory, trading, very many mission types, weapons, creative and annoying mechanics and bugs. You dont get in touch with Bugframe, Grindframe and RNGesus. You wont get any more Step by Step Tutorial quests anymore. After an hour you also don't know that you have to wait three days to build a warframe in the forge. The game is so ridiculously extensive that you can't fully grasp even the idea or concept behind it in an hour. So even if you like the game in the first 2 hours, its very well possibly, that you start to hate it after 50.
Conversely, as someone who started just last year and made it to MR30, the early game can be overwhelming, missions super easy, incredibly light narrative, etc to the point I technically started two years ago but never made it past Venus until I tried it again.
I obviously now really like the game, and technically the tutorial is good, but the game between then and Second Dream is super rough. To your point the game is also ever evolving and while mostly good it is hard for new players to really come to grasps with what they are actually starting.
IMO push back on the complexity, tighten the narrative early on(Include Fortuna, We All Lift Together is great), and make the experience up to Mars reflective of the rest of the game and you'll keep many more players.
I played a total of 8hrs of warframe. I could not figure out what you even do in the game after the tutorial story. I did some missions, then I went to some open world area and 2 other players joined me for some reason and we just ran around mindlessly fighting things. I still don't understand what you're really supposed to do in the game. Grinding sure but there is no direction early on what you're even supposed to grind. I left that game very confused.
"It gets good later" is just another way of saying "Yea, the majority of the game is bad but this one part isn't"
the problem is with mmos leveling is a thing so there are times that you dont have the full picture because your not leveled. if your level 15 and the max is level 100 its not fair to go im not having fun with my class all i do is spam 2 buttons, dude your 15 of course you dont have every ability thats just the nature of RPGS.
@@aikidodude05 if the game is good you are going to have fun on lower levels, if you are not having fun on the lower levels, the game is not good
@@eztak. going use ff14 here as and example is the story good ehh reborn is decent but the dlcs are amazing is black mage a fun class ehh its kinda clunky for 1-59 at level 60 though you get fire 4 and suddenly all the clunk falls away the class makes sense you can fluidly form a rotation and you and if you had been paying attention on grinded up you fully understand how and when you should be using your ablility's you cannot get to level 60 quickly though you have to put up with those first 59 levels which are a chore.
This is true but you have to remember that the average player will stick around for about 1-2 hours. If your game doesn't draw in new players, your player base dies along with the game. It has to be good even at lower levels.
@@mikefarmer137 ok but lets be honest here the reviews that push the it has to be perfect from the start because that what is being pushed they want something like darksouls/skyrim take your pick of super popular single player game. ie look at this single player game look how fun it is doesn't spend time teaching you it spends it all on the story which is just not the reason people play and mmo, yes mmo players want a story but if all you have is your main story line then once you finish it there is no reason to play.
A great mmo needs an attractive beginning part, an enjoyable journey to the end game, and an amazing end game.
"Game of thrones gets better"
After the last 2 seasons I beg to differ.
its got a bad endgame.
I was thinking the same thing ha ha
It went downhill after season 4
Bell curve.
I think the only part of GOT that was disappointing is the battle of Winterfell and Daenerys attack on Kings landing. The battles were entertaining to watch but they really did not make sense from a tactical and philosophical perspective. I think the Nightking died to easily and it seems out of place for daenerys to suddenly want to massacre the population of King's landing when she spent the first few seasons trying to break the wheel and free people from Tyranny,
What a fantastic list of comprehensive points, I've been playing MMO games for nearly two decades and trying to judge them as I go. I'll be using this list from now on for certain.
I'm glad I've stumbled upon your channel. I have a feeling you're going to become big. You have really well thought out videos and ideas.
This satisfies my need for "mmorpg content" and since I'm now in my 30s, I really appreciate the more mature & analytical perspective. Great content - keep it up!
edit: OSRS for life
A quote I learned from a comedian some time ago: "They say you can't judge a book by its cover... but what else is the cover there for? What is the cover there for if not to give me some idea of what I'm going to be reading? It's THERE TO BE JUDGED!"
On topic of voice acting: SWTOR, hands down, has my vote for the best MMORPG on that. About 98% of quests is fully voice acted, including your own responses. Conversations are just fun to have.
Look at the voice acting cast for eso.
Look at the voice acting cast for eso.
yep, while i didn't stick with the game and eventually ended up with FFXIV as "my" mmo i was really impressed by the small amount of sith inquisitor questline i did.
Too many people can't separate quality from fun in their minds
I've had a ton of fun in objectively bad games.
I've played several very quality games that I quit bc I got no enjoyment from them.
It's OK to enjoy a bad game, but recognizing its weaknesses is important, especially if you want to see it improve and grow
Case in point: *Dead by Daylight*
@@riotangel4701 People had fun in Fallout 76 from day one. No one sane will say it's objectively good game.
Also, it goes for other media too: I enjoy anime and light novels that usually considered to be crap, simply because they get that one or two things I care about the most, right. Besides, there are movies that are good just because of how bad they are (like the legendary "The Room").
@@NaoyaYami This is a good point. I had a lot of fun playing Fallout 76 - because I played with friends. Even though we were often complaining about aspects of the game we continued because of each other - and there are good aspects to it. But the fact its got so many poorly conceived 'MMO-like' design choices really hurts it. It should have been a co-op experience with an open world mass player option for 'end game' with some genuine PvP or team based features. Instead its a weird mongrel where seeing other players is mostly just annoying - people shooting at you for no good reason, nukes going off nearly constantly, entire areas devoid of enemies because they're being farmed...
Which frustrates me. Because there's a good game hiding in that mess. It shouldn't be an MMO, simple as.
@@NaoyaYami People had fun with fnaf: security breach! Was it made well? ....
*Thinks about the mods that released within hours, the out-of-bounds tricks found in minutes, the number of glitches and AI workarounds that people created quickly*
No. No it was not. It was not ready for release but people still enjoyed it, it just won't hold up long-term
Ho yea, i bought Horizon zero on pc 1 or 2 years ago everybody was saying it's incredible, after 2 or 3 hours in the opening I was so fucking bored with the gameplay
I just stumbled across your channel about an hour ago and you speak so much truth about mmos, that I feel it in my heart. Thanks for being an honest reviewer, and not someone who's more concerned about his sponsorships.
My general rule of thumb regarding MMORPG's is if the game doesn't manage to capture me within 10 hours then its not worth playing. I will give every game 10 hours, unless its so bad that i can't even get through the first hour that is
A good MMORPG will go, "what... I've already played ten hours??"
Agreed.
I don't even have to be complety enamoured, but I need to at least not be feeling 'meh' or bored to give any game more than a day.
Time stamps (timestamps) :
00:00 Introduction and clarification.
10:32 1: Does it work?
11:25 2: Can I change the Resolution?
12:07 3: Can I change the Keybinds?
13:18 4: Graphical consistency and style
16:54 5: Sound and Audio Design
19:07 6: Voice Acting
22:52 7: The Tutorial
24:58 8: Physical objects having Physics
26:36 9: U.I. Quality and Scaling
28:23 10: Variations within the Game Style
30:06 Wrapping it up
Oddly enough the guitar example really makes me think about my own auditions as an actor
The greatest piece of audio design I've heard in an MMO is at the end of the main plot of the base GW2 game, the part where you're protecting Trahearne as he does a ritual, and the gameplay seamlessly fades into the credits. It's... phenomenal.
Josh, you deserve much more recognition, I hope you continue to grow and prosper. I've been binging your videos for like a week now:)
Ah I still remember that moment 16 years ago when I first entered Stormwind and then that epic music started playing.
Same, but for me it was Ashenvale. It gave me chills and made me feel like I was in a mystical area. Music makes a game!
I think it's muuch easier to figure out if a game is bad quickly. But if it's great might take longer. You could probably find out if the game is good / fine / okay for sure as well.
This is like the whole thing that happens in anime. Where people yell at other about making their mind up about an anime with in the first 2 episodes. But generally speaking that's enough of a watch to understand what kind of anime it is and if it's going to be something you'll like. Even if this isn't always 100% true. Exceptions exist.
I tend to stick with the 3 episodes rule. But I won't go any further if it doesn't grab me.
There's a great book on the topic called Blink. It's about this very topic but making judgments within a blink of an eye.
Ill have a look for that, thank you for the recommendation
Thank you for this comment! I found a pdf for this book and read it and it is really really interesting. Its like a mystery novel but dealing with how experts intuitively 'know' things
Asmon once said: "if you go to a restaurant and someone squats over your plate and you say 'hey, why are you gonna take a shit on my food?' they answer with 'how do you know it's shit if it didn't even come out yet?' "
The moral is: *sometimes you don't need to taste it to know it's shit*
I thought he was gonna talk about game loops, but I do agree that all these elements are very important and great ways to judge the general quality of the game.
Thanks for the vid!!
You are right about about certain tracks in Fiesta not fitting but many of them do. The track you used in this video has a nice beat and it honestly has a great "setting out on a new adventure" vibe to it.
I think I could decide in five or six hours but an experienced MMO gamer or expert could probably evaluate it in an hour.
@Roger Franz I don't think a player could gain access to or evaluate all aspects of an mmo in a few minutes. Some things like crafting, exploration and housing take a while to figure out and are often blocked behind a grindy leveling process or a paywall. I'm currently playing ESO and it took me a few days to figure out the antiquities system. I played Neverwinter and access to a second zone was denied until one had fully adventured in the first zone. I always found fishing to be boring in the games and in real-life but a lot of people enjoy fishing in NW and ESO.
“Ffxiv has excellent in game tutorial” maybe I’m thinking of the wrong things but as a huge fan of that game, the amount I’ve learned from the tutorials vs from word of mouth/ fan made guides is staggering.
the FFXIV ingame tutorials are, actualy pretty good for what they DO use them...
Problem is there are a lot of things the tutorials just dont cover
also limit break being explained mid dungeon and not being assigned to your hotbar automaticly at that point is wonky(was limitbreak part of your default hotbar? cant remember)
FF14 tutorial is werid, the game has your starter quests which are in my opinion rather bleh at teaching you how to play the game, the guild quests though are really good tutorials as they are tied to class mechanics and also help try to teach you your role better in mini partys (especally if your a tank) the real tutorials though are the ones the guy at the bar gives you which help you learn how to play in a party, and those are decent if mouthy. honestly though everything in the core game is easy to though now and alot of it is busy work, but then again it was also built to be a compleate game like 6 plus years ago and the devs look to be reworking it so its much less a grind. (I once speedran the msq on a fresh char and even knowing how to go fast, it took me 30 hours to finish RR, even before the dlc zones) now that being said, the sprout system at least takes alot of the frustrating parts of it. off and the comunity was really good at helping. so
That's true, i've gotten a lot of guidance from my friend's girlfriend. Though the little pop ups that show up and tell me about something are still just as helpful imo if we're just talking about core mechanics.
@@weberman173 lol no it wasn't. At least it wasn't for me iirc and that's how you get a bunch of sprout stories being like "my team told me to LB but I didn't have it on my hotbar/knew what it was-"
Depending on the type of game i usually can tell by the 2nd hour or earlier if theres no cutscenes
It takes 1000 hours to experience everything in a game. It takes 1 hour to decide if you want to experience it.
Your description of a bad restaurant are the telltale signs of the best food stops in America.
When it comes to Chinese food or Pizza here in the states, I want to see faded pictures of stock food in the windows, sticky floors, smells like grease and sweat, the person behind the counter screams "WHAT YOU WANT." in broken English, if it's a Pizza Place, I want futbol to be so loud on the TV I can't hear him screaming at me from behind the counter
That's how you know it's good.
If it's serving either of those and the place is clean and quiet, I'm gonna have my doubts stepping in.
Yeah. If place has a dude that just stands near the enterance then it's probably selling overpriced bland food
"Does A and D turn or strafe?" is a silly issue IMO :D That bit, at least, is absolutely preferential, though the ability to rebind to user spec (and the ability to do so) is objectively important, you're right there.
it took asmongold an hour and a half to get through the runescape tutorial lul
I think he just dragged that out because he could, the guy knows mmos and he knows how to entertain.
@Hatwox Dude
asmongoloid likely takes an hour and a half to tie his shoes, before giving up and letting stream chat tie them for him
@@cashnelson2306 Link to that tutorial thingy?
Strife hit it on the head, the guy entertains. He drags a lot of things out for more content and to farm Pepega Clap
No key remapping is probably the primordial sin of games.
Having an azerty keyboard is a nightmare when the games don't bother with remapping.
I love how he had an OSRS clip, the OSRS launcher, the Runelite Launcher - AND - the RS3 launcher. Oh, and the OSRS world map.
Can never have too much RS
I never know quite what mood I'll be in, but it's likely going to involve some form of Runescape.
Judging game after 1 hour is very valid because that's new player experience. What does player who just installed this game thinks, how confusing it is, how hard is it to pick up basics it matters
22:16 "if you One Piece, you must prepare for waa"
Lol
The problem with this theory is that it assumes the designers don't frontload a lot of the best content to draw players in, knowing that by the time players reach a hollow endgame they already have their money.
"You can't judge a game before you've invested X amount of time on it" when put into a different perspective is your mother saying: "You will like broccoli if you eat it enough times". Maybe so, but why should you suffer through eating it multiple times when you can just eat something else equally healthy instead.
that is a false equivalency
@@hydrogamer471 No it really isn't LOL
It just admitting that the "first *** hours of the game is _bad_ "
@@hydrogamer471 Maybe it is false to you, we dont all look for the same thing... And reviewers are not looking for the same thing either... i bet your favorite movie have several bad reviews from reviewers that just did not like it because they are looking for other aspects.
@@Frostiedkdk
I remember when Star Wars Episode 3 came out
Critics roasted it, but I and all my friends loved it we stood in a loooong line, for hours and played board games on the sidewalk while we waited
So ACCURATE!, and even fun to hear all of this, it's actually nice to know I'm not alone when thinking about these facts.
Josh: What happens when a developer just adds music to a place without any care... well then you get this!
Smashcut to An Ad: Finding stuff to do with your kids is hard
Man I would really love a podcast with you and nerdslayer, you guys are such pollar opposites, it's really fun seeing two very different opinions on so many topics about MMOs.
You put so many references to Fiesta that I am cannot wait to watch it! Btw. I love your worts mmo serie.
Oh the fiesta premier is tonight, god it was such a bad game.
Glad you're enjoying the videos :D
General rule of thumb in literature is that your book should grab the reader within the first page. If we can expect the first page of a book to be where the reader decides whether or not they want what is presented, I can't see why an mmo, which is just a different form of storytelling (with extra bits like mechanics and voice acting, and most of them have SOME sort of story, whether or not they get in-depth with it) shouldn't be able to have the same effect.
I know you have already made a video about Runes of Magic, but I still always have to think about the game whenever you do one of the "Worst MMO Ever" videos and also this video, because I think it is a good example of how a game can look like it has decent quality early on, (because it has) and become really poor quality later, just because the developers stopped caring and made much cheaper content in recent years than in the first few years of the game.
The first continent has varied sprites and models, different music for different zones, very few bugs and decent storytelling. Then when you get to the later zones, there is no music, the monsters are just the same models as earlier monsters but with a different name, you can't play for an hour without encountering at least one bug... .
I still love the game, but I think the initial gameplay is deceiving.
You're right.
The music, god the ambient music from the ystra highlanda was just beautiful.
Add to that worse and worse monetization. They disabled buying item shop currency from other players, introduced gachas, even leveling zones relied more and more on upgraded equipment and each upgrade relied on item shop...
@@Gnidel wait they disabled buying diamonds from other players? I haven't played in many years, but that's surprising
@@PhenomRom Yep. We still ended up buying them from other players using gifts. However it was not safe and prone to scams.
About key binding, I'll add that QUERTY is not the only one keyboard in the world. In France, where I live, we have AZERTY. Which means instead of WASD I use ZQSD. With WASD games, I can ONLY go backward and to the right....
Nice topic. Nice breakdown. I admire your confident expression of critical thinking. Personally I either like a thing, or I do not like a thing.
Thanks for a very good video! I think what you're talking about could be applied in any domain. For example, I'm a software developer, and I can spot poor code very fast. I know what I look for. For example, if I see little or no documentation in code, that's a somewhat bad sign. If I see poorly formatted code, it's a really bad sign. I don't have to sift through every line of code to see if the quality is high or low. I don't have to see the software running to know if it will run well or poorly. The same goes the other way around, I can see pretty fast by watching a piece of software run, how the code is.
I love the point you're making about whether the developers valuing the players' time. For me, it's a huge red flag if I find easily spotted (and easily fixable) bugs in game and other software. It tells me right away that the developers are lazy, and neither value their own time nor my time. When I develop software, I take a lot of pride in my work. I want all of my programs and websites to meet a high standard of quality, because I believe it signals to others what kind of person I am. People are rarely sloppy in one area but careful in another. You would rarely see someone happily presenting shitty work, but also never come to work late.
Love the video, perfectly helps me evaluate how I can increase the enjoyment of my free time
Glad it helped Dennis :)
Every time he talks about key binding in all the videos I've seen he mentions strafe and I chuckle to myself because "hehe john strafe hayes"
that pun should not have been good, but it was, and for that I curse you to end every sentence with a pun
Lmao meanwhile in Tekken 7 we don’t even have a tutorial
Kazuya, forward jump, spam O, spinning whirlwind kicks of death, win.
80% just hit random keys hahahah
who needs tutorial for this
@Professional Chav You're greatly overestimating the Tekken playerbase... Josh's strat will easily take you to yellow ranks lmao.
If people say you haven’t spent enough time to know, they aren’t saying it’s a flawed thought process… they are saying: I HAVE and you’re wrong BECAUSE you didn’t spend enough time. Still, highly analytical breakdown and logically seems legit, but sounds like a developer judging a game and not a player/fan.
You’re a freaking genius Josh, seriously
I'm jusy a guy who plays games. :)
games can be very good learning tools , if only more game devs understood this...
the music thing you mention is why i'm so hooked on some games. and keep going back to older games like gothic for example. the feeling it gives is very important
Great video!
Nothing like being a level 2 n00b and 90% of your screen is taken up by Cash Shop pop-ups or tutorials on lootbox/RNG mechanics and outdated or totally endgame mechanics, big red arrows pointing to the cash shop, and glowing buttons for your daily login loot that you wont need until endgame. Oh and did I mention that big sign pointing to the cash shop. "Please buy something. Our hamsters are too fat and gorged to run the wheel any more and We need new ones!!!"
I feel like you can judge most MMOs by their Launcher alone. If it's riddled with Ads, the game is too. I've always been of the opinion that "I'd rather pay a monthly sub than play a f2p/p2w Cash Shop." At that point they're more worried about selling you a lot of somethings than providing you a game to play. Blah. Level boosts? That's fine. Cosmetic gear? That's fine. Selling actual gear with end-game stats etc? Nooope. /rant
Before osrs came out, and after EOC ruined RS2, I hadn't played in a long while. I heard the song Nightfall in a runescape video on youtube (which is my favorite song on osrs) and I literally teared up with nostalgia and the longing for the memories I had associated with the game.
When osrs came out finally, I got to the login screen, heard the login music, along with the old school background on the login screen, and I got goosebumps.
The music fills me with so many emotions I cannot put into words, that transports me to a place in time I loved. And the music in osrs obviously isn't made with high quality instruments and sounds, but they obviously took pride in writing and creating it. to the point you get a cape and rewards for unlocking all the music tracks in game.
The audio, and even more so the music in a game is HUGELY important and is often overlooked by people that are okay with rushing out a sub-quality game. Maybe I feel so strongly becaue I'm a musician myself, but I'm sure even the most tone-deaf, average player can literally FEEL the difference while playing.
Some of my favorite MMOs I've played I really didn't like in the first hour.
Some of the games I thought had a really good start never really gripped me for that long.
You might be able to judge a game's overall quality in the first hour, but you can't judge how much fun you'll end up having with it in the end.
Very true
but if game is really boring from the start, you still wasting your time, you talk to much of that end game gamer, if game systems changes longer you play, that's poor design choice and shows clearly the developers don't care about new player experience
indeed, a game should be enjoyable all the way through, not just at the start or at the end
True, but in a genre with literally hundreds of games, that quality gate does a good job of eliminating the games that are likely to be the biggest wastes of time. Will I miss out on an amazing experience from some hidden gem? Possibly, but not likely. If a developer wants my attention, they should put their best foot forward up front - none of the things highlighted in this video are hard to do for motivated developers who want to see their games succeed.
@@Damaniel3 I think slow starts in the MMO genre are kinda inevitable, if there are RPG elements and a progression system then a game will always have a slow start.
i judge a game on how nice the menu buttons are to press. some have a clicking animation, and some come with a sound effect. some buttons feel flat, while others just feels nice to click on. idk if it's nostalgia but i really like any FF's menu selections; it just feels very 'affirmative when i press a button or choose a selection. the same logic applies to these buttons; if they spent the time designing a very satisfying button, they must have had the resources to really polish the game already and had extra time/resources to make this button
It's important to try the game yourself. You can watch millions of videos about a game, but your best thing to do is just play the game. I've found that most MMORPG reviews will ruin the experience because I already lived the starting experience.
"You don't need to watch an entire TV Show to know if it's good"
Game of Thrones: *nervous sweating*
"You can tell immediately Game of Thrones has good writing"
Game of Thrones Season 8: *chuckles* I'm in danger
15:15 wow, you've mentioned having a car as a mount in a fantasy rpg before, but I didn't expect it to be in a game I ever heard of let alone played. smh
Makes me wonder how perception of these things may vary by in-game area, too. Like if you start in a fantasy zone, but a later zone is technologically advanced and has cars because of lore reasons, it makes sense to have a car as a mount; BUT, seeing a player with that mount driving around in that first zone would look pretty awkward especially if you're not yet aware of those later zones, lol.
@@BlueSparxLPs Especially that weird flamingo disco mount thing.
Time Gating is another huge red flag I look for. Sometimes it isn't readily apparent at the beginning of a game, but anything designed to slow you down and eat Time for the sake of it tells me something. Either my time as a consumer is taken for granted, or there is a lack of content they are trying to stretch. Or that their income model requires as much engagement as possible from me and they are trying to find ways to force play time artificially.
I judge it based on whether you can walk or not. >.>;
Hard to get immersed into an MMO if you can't even chill and just walk, to me!
Phenomenology explanation is fine, and a good point for setting up the video. I really don't agree with the restaurant example though. Restaurant ambiance etcetera however is not necessarily a good indicator of good food. I would even say that strong focus on ambiance, professional service etc is a good indicator of having bog standard food.
Quality is an incredibly hard aspect to judge. There are so many comparisons, expectations, demands and fans that can all skew an unbiased opinion. Also who's opinion is right? There are so many different types of people that want different things out of their experience. Not to mention how their current emotional feelings can effect their judgements. However I personally find that a good judgement to have is what you personally enjoy. This is why I think trying things out yourself is the most important test of quality, it bypasses other people's depictions and gets to what aspects matter personally to you. I try to judge something on it's own merits, since you can have fun in bad games and bored in good games. Some game do take longer than an hour to get a better judgement for since sometimes there is beauty to be found behind the ugly. Playing with other people can also shape and transform an experience too, since MMOs can produce random social elements if you seek out others to play with, I know many people just play for the socialising, with the game just being a medium to be around other people with. With many of these MMOs their time in the sun has gone, so that social aspect has died and much of that part of the game has gone with it.
Your block of text is not spaced, and that makes it hard to read and overwhelming. Therefore I'm not reading it, because that is a sign of low quality.
I have tried applying what I was able to from this to Pokemon Games, because I KNOW I like playing around in late game Pokemon games, and because the community argues a LOT about the games. They are on console, so, for example, keybinding and resolution don't apply to these. But I realized that for 2 out of the 3 recent pokemon games, I only go through the first hour because I KNOW what late and end game look like! Damn... small wonder there is so much arguing here! When the franchise started, the first hour was perfectly fine, but today, there SHOULD be better first impression for new players, I now think the whole thing only works because literally everyone know what late game Pokemon is!
I think once you level and get a basic rotation; If combat is fun then it can be decent, if not don't worry about finding the rest out.
and the whole "its much better with friends" comment I see now and again, just about everything is better with friends but just because its better doesn't mean its good, elite dangerous is much more enjoyable with friends and a decent ship, doesn't mean supercusing for 15 minutes of not-gameplay is objectively better just because your in a discord call/party chat with three buddies.
This made me realize how i found my new favorite game, guardian tales, from a simple seconds long video, which only showed the game's menu UI. You could obviously tell the devs put a lot of effort in the game just from how pretty such a minor thing looked
Bang on the money as usual, Josh! Seeing your comments about the importance of music/sound design here I wondered if you have ever thought about doing a vid on your favourite tracks from MMOs.
Runes of magic has an incredibly good soundtrack
This video convinced me to subscribe after a month of watching your content. The way you breakdown principles of functional requirements, non-functional requirements and software QA for laypersons is fantastic. And that's saying nothing of the game design principles you highlight in all your content. Great stuff.
BTW love the other channel too. Can't wait for more playthroughs and commentary on PS1/PC classics. Each video is a game design case study and nostalgia trip rolled in one. Keep up the good work.
Correction: Game of Thrones does absolutely NOT get better as Time goes on :D
GoT was a bell curve, got good to the middle the back down to the end.
They ran out of ideas for the subsequent expansions/DLCs.
I originally started this channel because you did a 'worse mmo' on my favorite game... and I still enjoyed it.
22:15 If you want peas, then you must prepare for WAAAGH!!!
Da boyz is eatin gud tonight dey iz!
Lol
Yeah.. there are people who just don't like video games in general and say every video game sucks in just 10 minutes of playing.
And then there are people like Josh, who are actuak intellectual people who game and know if a game is shit or not the first 10 minutes.
Brilliant video as always josh!
Glad you enjoyed it! Thanks man :)