Are mmorpg's too similar?

I was thinking the same thing. With the number of MMORPG's out there, your bound to find some that are very similar, you'll even find some games that a rip-offs or imitations of other games on occasion.

 

I don't think it has as much to do with similarity as it as to do with desensitization. MMOs exploded because they offered us something that was completely unique and that people had never experienced before. In this day and age, they have just lost their novelty. Even games that offer creative worlds, excellent combat, top notch graphics etc. aren't doing as well as they should. Every MMO needs a basic skeleton that is more or less the same, but we can say the same thing about any other genre like shooters or strategy games. Once you play enough of them, the basic formula starts to become evident.

 

Well no wonder many games feel similar, it is because they are often almost a copypaste of each other. Look how many WoW clones have appeared after a huge success of WoW.

I know it's no secret WoW has taken many things from EQ 1 but anyway we need more niche games and not WoW/EQ clones. For example SWTOR seemed like a cool game to me but I couldn't play it past beta because it was basically a WoW in space.

 

I'll agree that many MMOs are quite similar. However, they're different enough that they're not quite the same. STO's experience is quite unique from that of GW2 and LoTRO. But I've never actually played WoW so I can't comment on similarity between that and any other MMO.

 

I do think they are. Why? Because in my opinion everybody wants to follow World of Warcraft's scheme. You have a character, you customize it(optional for some games), you level up (always a must), you go in different dungeons and receive different gear depending on your level and other factors such as race, class and etcetera. That's not always bad though, as sometimes you don't feel like a complete noob when you start a game for the first time and you already know how it works. Perhaps they do it like this just to make games more user-friendly, I don't really know.

 

I think out of 100 mmorpg there is like 90 of them that are alike. There are a lot of of them and all of them are similar except for the very few.

 

Well most of them follow the same template and not only they are the same genre of game but are thematically same as well (medieval fantasy). There are ways to move around that constraint but most devs go the safe route and most MMORPGs end up feeling very similar.

 

I believe most MMOS are very similar, since a majority of them are fantasy based MMO, and some of the game dynamics and interfaces are similar to other games.

 

Pretty much, but there's not much else you can do. Things like WoW basically perfected the MMO formula, and showed us basically what is, and what isn't supposed to work in an MMO. Understandably so, since Blizz had more than a decade.

It got popular for a reason, and most people aren't really trying to "copy it", it's just that there's nothing else that works so well. You can implement a bold new idea, and have people complain that it doesn't look "WoW" enough, or that it's too confusing. On the other hand, if you go with the tried and true, you end up being accused of making a "WoW clone", even if WoW essentially took its ideas from games that came before.

 

Yes, they are getting too similar. But I think the main problem is that many companies just want to make the "WoW killer", so they just try to copy WoW and add a few new things.
I really wish they would stop doing that. That's why I like EVE so much.

 

I would have to agree that the games are similar but only because it seems like that. For example after World of Warcraft was released, there was a bunch of games that were released after that only copied the style of WoW. That being said, there's always that one game out of the bunch is unique and special. It depends what game you're talking about.

 

I think the main issue is that every MMO is trying to catchup to or exceed World of Warcraft. They set the standard for what an mmorpg looks like, so developers have the choice of trying to catch up to that standard and make it better, or to completely deviate from it and do something different.
To be honest though, I think we have a nice variety of MMOs to choose from these days, WoW, Guild Wars 2, SWToR, and FFXIV are all very different from each other, for example.

 

I don't play ass much MMOs as I used to, but from the F2P ones I have played they seem to copy each other they just change the character development and gameplay a tad.

 

I personally have a thing where I don't really like playing two different MMO's at the same time, because I like to dedicate all of my available time and energy into one particular game, however like all genres of gaming, MMO's do have similarities in gameplay mechanics and that's no surprise, just look at FPS for example. The problem is, there has been a sort of standard bar set for what an MMO should be like, how it should look, how it should be played, how it should progress, and pretty much every developer team that has tried to deviate from the norm too much has failed, leading into a sort of lockdown fear in the industry.

 

i feel like they are, level up and start a new character blah blah blah

 

They're very similar in terms of mechanics for the most part. The biggest draw I've found for different MMOs is the lore and the PvP system. If an MMO does both of these things very well then I'm usually going to try it out. The problem is that for the most part lore is hidden behind a sea of crappy and lazy gameplay. They spend so much time making the game, but somehow the quests are almost always the same. Fetch quests and kill X amount quests. Hopefully that trend changes in the future.

 

I don't think so. A lot of MMORPG put other details in the spotlight. If you compare the successful MMORPG, they are all different. Maybe the bad ones tried to copy the good ones.

 

They are simmilar but its unavoidable. Its like asking are all RPGs simmilar? Yes! You level skills/characters/spells etc and advance through the story in a nutshell aand every MMO or solo RPG is like that and its a winning scheme. I think its a great foundation and trying to be too different is the main problem for the games these days.

 

Most MMORPG's feel very similar to me. It doesn't seem like developers want to take any risks so there's not much reason to play more than one MMORPG.

 

Well its basically an online RPG, I dont really know how could you make it much more different than the current scheme. If you change it too much you would probably not be in the same genre anymore.