I tried every popular MMO. It did not go well.

MMORPGs are dying or at least that's what I've been led to believe based on all of the videos that get recommended to me about MMORPGs but why are they dying is it because MMORPG companies both old and new are using predatory micro transaction models that take advantage of players to ruin all semblance of game integrity yeah but it's also because there there are players coming to these other MMORPGs State for the natural burnout of veteran players hi I'm idle and as you can probably tell by my office I'm the newly elected president of MMORPGs so everything I say in this video including my opinions is factual and you cannot disagree MMORPGs are extremely complex and the rise and fall of their player bases can never be pinpointed to One Singular Factor but I do think that one thing over the course of many years has been a driver in the fall of MMOs new player experience remember 14 seconds ago when I said MMORPGs are extremely complex well they are to longtime players this complexity is the best part because it means hundreds of hours of content that usually reward you for your time investment but that means playing an MMO for the first time can feel like going to a friend's house who really loves board games and they plot a game with a full novel for an instruction manual and then they say don't worry it's simple let me explain but it's literally more complicated than Advanced calculus is this even calculus I don't no I'm the president of MMORPGs not math so I wanted to put my instinct about new player experiences to the test to do this I created fresh characters on three MMORPGs old school RuneScape World of Warcraft retail and Final Fantasy 14. all of which I have varying degrees of experience with I've played a ton of old school RuneScape and I've dipped my toes into wow classic but never retail and for Final Fantasy 14 I will be completely blind I've never even watched someone play it I'll be looking at each of these games in three key stages of new player experience to see how new player friendly they are and this should hopefully help me find out if MMOs are as much of a Walled Garden as they seem before we do that though let me make one thing very clear I am not reviewing these MMORPGs I'm not trying to invest tens or hundreds of hours to figure out which MMORPG is best I'm only looking at the first handful of hours that a new player will experience before deciding if they'll invest all that time so when I inevitably say something bad about your favorite MMO RPG just remember I'm bald use that as ammunition to really hurt me when you leave a comment if you wanted to design the next great MMORPG you'd need to learn a few things first like I don't know game development Southern New Hampshire University today's sponsor she has one of the largest online accredited degree offerings in the entire country and unsurprisingly the one that interests me the most is the game development program in this program you'll learn everything you need to know about game development from programming in languages like Java C plus plus C sharp just industry standard languages you'll also learn how to develop Dynamic gameplay experiences using Ai and physics engines and you'll also learn 3D modeling and texturing in game art software all these courses are taught by people who are or have been in the industry so you're getting first-hand knowledge but the best part of all of this is that snhu is radically Affordable it's online Ted to snhu.edu Idol there's a link in the description there you can learn more about the game development program and you can also see the average annual salary for a programmer so again click the link in the description if you want to learn more and thank you so much to snhu for sponsoring this video [Music] first impressions are extremely important in video games in a day and age where people like me can't get through a movie without Subway Surfers playing to the side it's crucial that the character creation opening cut scene menus are all easy intuitive and engaging if it's even a little difficult or annoying to get through these steps there's a really good chance you're going to lose a new player World of Warcraft is pretty straightforward you need to use the Battlenet launcher to run all of their games which can be annoying but there's very little friction in signing up and launching the game on your first launch you get a pretty badass opening cut scene of a battle between The Horde and the alliance it feels like this cutscene is really geared towards veteran players since I don't know who any of these people are except this lady I know who she is she's mommy but I get the feeling most of these people are important and they don't like each other and that's all that really matters I guess after that you're free to create a character hold on does that say dragonflight the opening cutscene is a battle for Azeroth okay that's a little confusing but since dragonfly is the latest expansion and it says dragonfly in the corner I guess I'll be playing dragonflight wow has always been known for its many races and classes to choose from and I gotta say it's pretty cool to see all the options here coming from a game like old school RuneScape which is literally the opposite it's an interesting mechanic to be faced with an important decision right off the bat I mean look at this you could be an undead Mage a dwarf Paladin uh panda yeah okay yeah you could be a panda monk why not all these classes have little blurbs about them that only go into broad detail about the classes I think this is a good thing since when you're brand new getting flooded with minutia will usually only confuse you more I can't tell if it's overwhelming or exciting to have all of this choice so early on but I think I lean towards exciting the cool thing about World of Warcraft is you don't need to pay anything extra to create new characters so you'll have time to explore all of these different classes if that's what you want to do so the choice isn't quite as important as it might seem character customization is pretty straightforward and simple you have a few options but not too many it's fine overall World of Warcraft leaves a pretty good first impression a cool cutscene decent character creation I'm in Oscar runescape's first impression is a little different for any new player to RuneScape the first step is figuring out how to get to which version you want to play with World of Warcraft and World of Warcraft classic they're both in the Battlenet launcher so it's a little bit easier to get to them but old school RuneScape and RuneScape are using completely separate launchers old school RuneScape is probably a big enough name at this point where this isn't really an issue but I just thought it was worth mentioning to give myself as authentic of a new player experience as possible I will be playing on the official jagex client and not Rune light but since I'm trying to gauge how the game developers curate new player experiences using jagex's client just feels right after launching the game I'm struck straight into character creation no opening cutscene no other Frills just straight into name selection you know what I'm not mad about it so what if RuneScape doesn't give me a mommy it doesn't need one we will eventually be given a mommy though um anyway the lack of opening cut scene or story introduction actually works really well in runescape's case old school doesn't have an overarching story narrative that dominates the world it's made up of a lot of smaller stories that run concurrently with each other there's no narrative to be caught up on or introduced because that will happen naturally as you play it's really the difference between runescape's constant update model and Wow's expansion model as you start to come up with your name you'll be introduced to arguably old school runescape's best feature the music [Music] character creation is honestly pretty damn good especially considering it really hasn't changed since like 2004 is it anything super special no but you get enough option to make your character look however you want what really stands out to me about runescape's first impression is the Simplicity of it there's really no bells and whistles it's just straight into the game and this Simplicity is actually a good thing in my opinion the game at its core is really simple and I think that is a pretty big appeal for new players it'd be weird if there was this flashy opening cut scene and crazy character customization for a game that just isn't really like that Final Fantasy 14 on the other hand is the complete opposite I created my Square Enix account and launched the game and the first thing you do is choose the data center which is basically just a server your character will be on it doesn't give you a recommended server based on population ping or any other criteria so when I saw the list I was a little intimidated but after very bravely selecting a server a four and a half minute cutscene started to talk about the destruction of the entire world with all the knowledge I could ever need about the history of Final Fantasy 14 it was time to create my character and boy oh boy is there a lot you can do here it walks you through the creation and steps starting with race you can be pretty much anything in Final Fantasy 14 whoa hello you could be a human an elf uh a child when I play Final Fantasy and I play as a little boy that was good you want to hang out or do you want to just no I'm gonna oh Jason even picking what animations your character is doing you can finally final optimize your character's look and they let you change everything I mean just look at all of these options it's crazy and I'm not complaining more customization is almost always a good thing I mean you can even customize the character's voice this is by far one of the most involved character Creations I've seen in an MMO I mean it's one of the most involved character Creations I've seen in any game and it really just means you'll never see anyone who looks like you in the game world and that's pretty neat so with my character customized it's time to get into the oh I have to my character's birthday this has no impact on gameplay okay um I'll just pick a random day then well now we can get into the cilantro Patron deity this is no effect on gameplay I'll just go with the first one then thanks okay well now we can finally get into the computer starting class what the [ __ ] oh wait nope nope this one's actually important after finally solidifying every last detail about my character it was finally time to immerse myself in the game in what way should any MMO start if not with a foreign s are a hugely important part of the new planner experience not only is the tutorial going to give you crucial information about the core game mechanics but the way this information is presented can make or break whether a new player decides to stick around a bad tutorial can legitimately be worse than no tutorial at all it can bore confuse irritate new players and just drive them away completely especially because the amount of time you have to hook a new player is extremely short so you better not waste any time World of Warcraft and old school RuneScape opt to place new players in instance tutorials these are areas specifically designed as tutorials that you can't go back to after completing them Final Fantasy 14 on the other hand just plops you right into a starting town where you're surrounded by players both old and new listen I love tutorial Island and I always will but there's a reason it got replaced like 20 times in RuneScape 3. tutorial Island walks you through some of the basics of Skilling combat prayer some pretty crucial information for new player and I have no issue with what it teaches you but more so with the how it teaches you the entirety of tutorial island is just following arrows clicking on blinking icons and optionally reading a bunch of text dumps it just feels like a chore you need to get done and that's only hammered home by the fact that jagex literally puts a percent done meter at the bottom of the screen that just is there the entire time it really makes you feel like you're just really trying to speed through this to get to the main game I just think the whole tutorial could be done a little bit better if it was formatted as a quest that way you can learn not only about core game mechanics through the tutorial but also learn about questing because quests in RuneScape are pretty different than quests and other MMORPGs plus right now the way you learn about quests is through a guy just telling you about them which is kind of lame but at the same time if tutorial island ever changed the old school RuneScape player base would literally Riot so maybe we don't touch it or the warcraft starts you on a boat where you briefly learn about combat before getting Shipwrecked on exile's reach Exiles reaches an island where the tutorial will be taking place but it is not tutorial Island it's Exiles reach it's different Asos reaches a lot of the same issues as tutorial Island it feels very hand-holdy and I just have to mindlessly click on whatever some arrows are pointing to it also loves to repeat instructions that it already gave me oh what's that a new ability let me drag that onto my Hotbar oh what's that another new ability let me drive that under my Hotbar oh what's that another new ability let me try that on my Hopper the tutorial is formatted as a bunch of quests that you have to complete which I enjoy because it gives you tangible Milestones to hit throughout the first thing it has to do is just kill some murlocs to find supplies which is a very generic MMO Quest format but I don't what's that murloc doing God I I want to hear what he's playing progressing through the tutorial I learned more about combat combat and eventually I learn a little bit more about combat I don't know why blizzard thought I needed multiple sparring sessions to understand how combat works but thanks I guess the cool thing about exile's reach is there's side quests all throughout the island these side quests are totally optional but it makes it feel like a little bit more than just a tutorial section there's one side quest where you have to kill this big ass bear and you actually have to take the fight kind of seriously this fight is way better than the combat tutorials because it doesn't tell you what abilities to use you have to make decisions and kite and do damage at the right times it's the best part of the tutorial and it's not even required the main questline is a bit more straightforward it has you do normal MMO stuff like killing X number of mobs collecting X number of items or mounting an aerial assault in an army of ogres while Loosely Tethered to the helicopter constructed by a goblin you know normal stuff the tutorial ends at a high note by introducing you to a staple of World of Warcraft dungeons it walks you through the group finder and then you embark on a very small dungeon with two NPCs and one other player I got match up with a druid who clearly was more experienced than me he kept rushing ahead to speed through the dungeon and we didn't say a single word to each other so in other words it was perfect this dungeon is seriously such a cool way to cap off the tutorial not only does it make the story you've played through feel a little bit more impactful but it teaches you about one of the really important mechanics and wow no one wants to just read about how to go through a dungeon they want to play through it experience it in a safe low stakes environment and that's what this is Final Fantasy 14 takes the most unique approach of the three games by deciding to copy the Skyrim opening cut scene you are finally awake okay okay I mean they did make it a little different uh on a real note though the time for when I created my character to when I actually got to control my character was over 11 and a half minutes and this is what happened when I finally did get control wow really man can I just I mean it's just cutscene after cutscene with this game my God the Whiplash I got from playing RuneScape where cutscenes are rarer than a comment not accusing me of copying Jimmy to this where it's just 20 minutes of straight cutscenes to start was wild when you can finally get full control and freedom with your character you'll be starting on a sort of tutorial questline this lady mother mother wait a second this game gives me a mommy too anyway back to mother about to mommy she gave me the tutorial questline that required me to do three pretty simple tasks but first she made fun of my name like what the [ __ ] did I do to you it also really feels like these mini in-game cutscenes should have voice acting but they don't so it's just kind of Silent like I said before this tutorial doesn't take place in a new player only Zone you'll be surrounded by both new and veteran players which I really like as far as I'm concerned the faster you can get a new player into the main Game World the better and having experienced players who might be able to offer help to new players could be a really great experience for those new players look at this cool social interaction I got to have with a player who also happened to be new you can tell because they have a little leaf icon next to their name a person can I wave slash wave I can wave and they wave to me what the [ __ ] are they doing what the hell is all this stop that stop no no stop doing that okay I know what you're thinking damn that's impressive that you knew how to emote just like that you must be so smart but that's where you're wrong luckily for me there's a quest that teaches you how to emote by dancing in front of the sad girl whose parents just died so remember how I criticized the osrs tutorial for having too many Tech stumps you had to read through to learn about some mechanics well that's all Final Fantasy is it's just text dump after text dump after text dump I mean holy cow and being a normal human being I skipped through all of that maybe I'm not the best person to be reviewing new player experiences this meant I had no idea that equipment like armor and weapons goes to a completely different inventory than your normal inventory I turn in a quest and I got a brand new pair of pants which I just couldn't wait to equip but my little caveman brain just couldn't figure out where it went for the record you have to press Ctrl I to open the secret equipment inventory so you're welcome Tech stumps are unfortunately how you also learn about one of the coolest mechanics in Final Fantasy 14. despite having to pick a starting class of character creation you aren't locked into that class for the entirety of your character like in World of Warcraft you can train literally anything your abilities and skills are going to be based off of what you have equipped and that's awesome it's like the way RuneScape works but on cocaine it's such a cool mechanic but I didn't love just reading about it it would have been so cool to have a section of the tutorial questline that rewards me with a new weapon and then presents me with a challenge where I need to use a different set of skills than my starting class so I can tangibly see how this mechanic works and have fun playing with it because you know it's a game I wanna I wanna play the game but as long as I'm playing Final Fantasy 14 I guess I'm gonna have to learn how to read so kind of sucks you follow this tutorial questline and get fed little chunks of information from time to time but you can really do whatever you want in the game at this point there's no solid introduction to combat but you get the hang of it just from doing some side quests around town one thing I'll say though is that I found this town extremely confusing the map in Final Fantasy 14 is broken up into sections and you go from one to the other and there's little loading screens when you look at the map of the town and game it has these like long corridors and for some reason I could not wrap my head around traversing this area the map interface in World of Warcraft was great because it had the quest log built in next to the map with very clear labels for quests my aforementioned tiny caveman brain had so much trouble figuring out the labels and areas in Final Fantasy 14 I swear I spent half my time questing just looking at the map since Final Fantasy 14 doesn't really have like a part end to its tutorial I'm just gonna go into the next section I don't have a transition it [Music] thank you first steps is what I'm calling the section of the game that happens right after the tutorial how does the tutorial section prepare you for the main game are you still Guided by some sort of mechanic or have the game developers just left you entirely defend for yourself in this whole new world I've already talked about how Final Fantasy 14 doesn't have a tutorial with a hard end but it does have a way of easing you into the rest of the game achievements after playing the game for only a little bit you'll naturally unlock at least one achievement which at least for me had me interested in what else I could achieve I found the achievements page and it was full of things to do ranging from way out of my level range to extremely obtainable goals and I think it's great for me as a new player to see things that are in the near term and long term like when you walk around RuneScape for the first time and you see someone with a skill cape and you find out that you can get 99 in some skills it's not something you're gonna do anytime soon but it's just cool to see what could become of your character the normal life cycle of an MMORPG once you've finish a tutorial is to do every single Quest you can until you need to grind to do more quests and that's usually a fine progression but having this Achievement System to give me a motivator outside of just trying to make all the exclamation marks over people's heads go away it's just really cool plus I am a man-child so a little pop-up congratulating me makes me feel pretty good but here's the best part sorry I'm yelling and I'm standing because I'm excited now the game will even give you this little pop-up over here that tells you about achievements that you're close to completing so you're always motivated about something near term and that's just a great idea good good good I listen I just had coffee I'm sorry this is once you start exploring the world of Final Fantasy 14 you'll just naturally run into new mechanics like Fates which are basically mini world events that you get rewarded for completing based on how much work you put in Fates and other world mechanics and I'm sure I haven't discovered yet are the perfect example of not everything needing to be explained in a tutorial the feeling of running randomly into a fate and trying to figure out what it was was awesome because the stakes on this particular one were low and it gave me a chance to learn the mechanics of it by playing through it it made the world feel alive and it made me feel like I was discovering it but this is also what makes designing a good tutorial so hard you want to cover everything a player needs to know but you don't want to spoil the whole adventure and on top of that you have to make it into interesting basically what I'm saying is if any game developers are watching this I don't envy you you're doing great keep it up the main quest storyline will also introduce you to some other mechanics like these instant fights with level syncing this means you can't just side quest your way to max level and then one shot the entire main storyline it'll bring you back down to whatever level it was designed for wait a minute oh yeah there's voice acting now why is there a voice acting all of a sudden Final Fantasy 14 is kind of weird to look back on and retrospect because there's clearly so much depth to this game but there's not really a whole lot of time invested in teaching you about that depth I really don't think it's reasonable to expect any new player to just read a bunch of text and memorize it like it's some sort of exam the basic quest line does serve as a decent sort of tutorial but the ease at which you can go off-road from that questline both intentionally and unintentionally in my case means you can get lost in the deep end pretty quickly but at least Final Fantasy 14 is one cohesive experience unlike World of Warcraft I have never been more confused than I was after finishing the World of Warcraft tutorial I a blood elf Mage was immediately brought to the capital of The Horde and put in front of Sylvanas AKA mommy from earlier you might remember her for you know I was sent on a diplomatic mission to recruit this nation of pyramid people to the horde's cause and I was deemed the champion of the horde what me the champion of the horde I just got here literally five minutes ago I was leaving an island where the only thing they referred to me as was recruit so all of a sudden I went from a low ranking nobody to instantly one of the most important people in a war I know nothing about you remember when I got confused about which expansion I was playing earlier when it said dragon flight in the corner but played the battle for Azeroth cutscene well it turns out I'm playing through battle for Azeroth and that's a shame because I paid for the dragonfly expansion after someone told me it would be the best experience for new players so naturally I thought maybe I picked the wrong option somewhere along the way and I made a new character a human Rogue this time I had the choice of going back to exile's reach or going to the human starting zone Alwyn Forest I assumed by choosing Elwyn Forest as my starting zone instead of the tutorial I would be in dragonflight and that's where I had gone wrong before but no I don't know for sure since I don't really know anything about the World of Warcraft expansions but I'm pretty sure I was put back into cataclysm which is foreign expansion so basically I'm really [ __ ] confused I think at this point it just makes sense to press forward though and make another character and go back to exile's reach since I really didn't like the Mage anyways this time after the tutorial I'm not told I'm the champion of the horde I'm actually the champion of the alliance so making three characters wasn't a waste of time anyway it turns out you have to play through battle for Azeroth if you're a brand new player no matter what but that's okay because it was made clear to me nowhere this coming started in a whole series of quests that basically played out as a single player RPG removing me from all other players entirely right off the bat in these quests I have to do a lot of different stuff like escaping from prison escorting this drunk guy kidnapping kids wait that can't be right oh my god listen I can excuse kidnapping kids but an escort Quest this early into the game should be illegal this whole experience is such a mess though narratively I get Whiplash since the tutorial and the main game could not possibly feel more separate from each other I get that not everyone plays these games for the story but a cohesive story or at least one that ramps up a little better than This lends itself to cohesive gameplay I'm not doing any starter quests that ease me into the more advanced mechanics or harder fights than I would have faced in the tutorial when I get to the mainland I'm thrust into high stakes instance quests that follow the story of something I know nothing about oh wait no actually there was this one quest to learn about how to use the micro transaction shop so then that was a starter Quest I've really never felt so disjointed going from a tutorial to a main game experience before yeah I mean I've had moments where I don't know what to do after a tutorial like when I was a kid playing RuneScape for the first time and after I got plopped under the mainland I was just told to play the RuneScape tutorial section would hold your hand every step of the way and then like a dad teaching their young child to ride a bike would just let you go and if you're going to crash and burn you were going to crash and burn maybe I shouldn't have kids but in 2022 Jag exchanged all of that with a new update called Adventure paths this is their Earnest attempt to make the new player experience as smooth as possible but did it work I don't know I've never tried them so let's find out I'm not a new player to old school RuneScape at all but I will do my best to put myself into the shoes of someone who's never touched old school RuneScape just give me a second here I'm not a virgin I'm not a virgin I'm not a virgin I'm not a virgin Adventure passer introduced to you right after hitting the mainland if you said you were a brand new player back on tutorial Island my man Adventurer John with very normal facial hair will introduce you to two pads gatherer and combat and I have to say this is awesome I thought Adventure paths were just going to be a list of quests that you should do or something of that nature that's probably because I thought Adventure Pass was the same thing as the activity advisor this little orb next to the mini map that if you click on it is very much just a list of quests but no it's actually completely different Adventure Pass are much more involved and have a reward system so you have a real motivation to go for these goals the rewards won't progress your account much faster than if you ignored them completely but that's not really the point they show you what the upgrade path for items is they teach you the basics of training combat better than tutorial Island does and it really sets a new player up with the fundamentals as they find the groove of gameplay like getting five attack on a new character is a pretty simple normal thing to do but when I get to go claim a steel long sword which is a pretty great upgrade this early on it really adds new motivation and it makes me want to keep playing and I'm saying this as a veteran I genuinely felt excited also when you complete a path you get this fun pop-up just like when you get an achievement in Final Fantasy 14 and let's just say I was a fan Adventure Pass don't really continue much Beyond The Gatherer and combat paths but I would like to see them extended to the main game and maybe to incorporate doing some quests I think it's one of the best new player mechanics jagex has ever come up with basically I give them 10 out of 10 idle points which I've decided we're doing now I guess Adventure paths are just a really great way of smoothing out that experience from tutorial to main game they removed that moment of now what that can be present with so many people when you're just plopped into this massive world that has been growing for 5 10 15 20 years in the case of a lot of these MMOs now and it's a part of the new player experience that I feel is the most often overlooked it's a moment that leads so many players to just close the game from decision paralysis or boredom and they'll never reopen it MMORPGs have the highest barrier to entry of any video game genre that means this genre needs to work harder than any of the other genres to convince these players it's worth the time investment and the truth is for World of Warcraft Final Fantasy 14 and even old school RuneScape if I wasn't making a video about the new player experiences there were moments in all of them where I probably wouldn't have kept playing but explaining the fundamentals in an entertaining way and using systems like Adventure Pass to get players into the core gameplay Groove is a great way to get those players investing the first 10 20 50 hours before we finally have our hooks in them and they become forever addicted to this genre and then they can join our cult and finally understand why we're so mentally ill [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Idyl

Views: 362,724

Keywords: old school runescape, osrs, runescape, runescape 3, old school runescape osrs, world of warcraft, mmo discussion, mmorpg, josh strife hayes, mmopinion, wow classic, wow, final fantasy 14, ffxiv, ff14, online rpg, rpg, world of warcraft classic, new player, MMORPGs, New Player Experience, Gaming, Online Games, Beginner's Guide, Game Mechanics, Character Creation, Gameplay Tips, Adventure, Class Selection, Crafting, Group Content, Raids, Dungeons, Strategies, Fantasy Races, pve, pvp

Id: KAUbnlwMkLw

Length: 30min 40sec (1840 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 11 2023