Spot on Mister
That is the weakness of mmorpg in general. Because it is role-playing of a character in a story.
The story always has to end somewhere.
And that is a problem when incorporating a story in an online game. Devs will always need to keep it fresh. By extending it further and further, the story loses its value, not unless it is directed to a certain goal or conclusion.
Like for example, one piece goal is to find the one piece, naruto’s story is about the journey of the boy naruto, bleach story is about uhhh… (that is some weeb example)
Anyway you get the idea. But that is why they invented something like the “episodes” and “expansions” (or dlc if you like). The thing is, episodes are more like the continuation of the story because it is usually very short and less content, while expansion is like a new story with massive content. Most free to play games adopt this “episode” method (it is cheaper/low cost).
And yep, in today’s mmos end game is what matters, its like the waiting area to the next patch. People are so thirsty for content that they finish the game in less than a week.
That is why they put a lot of restrictions in their game, e.g. fatigue system (in tos case: tickets/vouchers) RNG, number of entries, more gears and etc. Because you can’t just add 10 more levels every time a player reaches the max.
The era of level up with low rate is over. It is not only time consuming, most people nowadays like to see their progress. So they divide the time needed to level up by one, to the time needed to farm 4-10 pieces of equipment. It does look rush, in an rpg perspective. Because the story is tied to the level not to the gear, and to a players perspective, new story = new content, new content = new gears.
The thing with Lost Ark is, it was made using unreal engine 3. It is pretty much hype everytime unreal engine releases its update, because of their graphics overload. When it was developed, there are tons of people who anticipated it, and now, they are finally able to play it.
Yep, graphics my friend, just like aesthetics in tos is very much personal preference. It does not make the game any better than any other.
The level of technology to make an open world or segragated zones in an mmo is quite high, you must have a high capacity server, to load all that details by mere seconds. Otherwise the server will be overloaded, resulting in lag. Just like how it lags when ram is consumed by high memory applications. You see, the budget on the game wasn’t that big, but it is decent, and then they used nexon as publisher, feels like a scam. But thanks to that, it got the publicity it needed.
And its also true, it defeats the meaning of the acronym MMO, when the game activities revolves around instanced dungeons. Then they lower the number of participants in GTW and limit the number in guild raids for stability. When the focus of an mmo should be social interaction, how does it feel to play with the same 4 people for the rest of the game. You join a guild and they still play with each other.
