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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2902 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 19, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I think what made original WoW so great is that the races/classes neatly represented the divisions of fantasy. Dwarves for LOTR-inspired fantasy, the undead for horror/grim fantasy, the medieval-themed human storyline for medieval fantasy, etc etc. This meant they by playing a new race or class, you were actually exploring a new major division of the fantasy genre, and thus a new and distinct aesthetic mode. The expansions kind of ruined this, as did “every race can play ever class!” silliness. Future MMORPGs should focus on this aspect, representing the entirety of fantasy through divisions involving race/class/region.

One of WoW's features was that it was a place to hang out online. You could gather friends and have an epic adventure together going through a rich open world. But it moved away from that. They couldn't solve the latency issues from having too many people in big outdoor battles. They couldn't solve the zone resource scaling issues where zones are either empty or too crowded.

Instead they decided that the open world wasn't important and switched to building mechanically complex battles in instances.

Now you can gather all of your friends in discord voice chat without having to play the same game. There's less need of a hang out game with a bunch of stuff to do in it.

Perhaps the future of MMOs is for small groups of people to use AI tools to develop elaborate Minecraft mods & worlds that other players can enjoy.

Now you can gather all of your friends in discord voice chat without having to play the same game. There's less need of a hang out game with a bunch of stuff to do in it.

I mean, you can. But doesn't it help to have some sort of common activity to bring people together? As an adult I find it really rare that other adult friends would just spontaneously call me up on discord "just to hang out." Made even more complicated by all the different discord servers, so you have to agree on whose server it is, which sort of puts them in charge.

I thought they were all just knockoffs of LOTR. the humans are like the Gondorian high men, and the elves are like the Rivendell or forest elves. Or even more so, it's like the 70's/80s ripoffs of LOTR like Dragonlance, Sword of Shannara, Mithgar, Riftwar, etc.

In some sense all of modern fantasy is just a knockoff of LOTR. In fact, I share the conviction that Tolkien invented the whole genre of fantasy, among other things by creating a unified imagery of elves and dwarves that was assimilated in more or less unchanged form into almost all later fantasy works.

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