The Other Worlds Shrine

Your place for discussion about RPGs, gaming, music, movies, anime, computers, sports, and any other stuff we care to talk about... 

  • Summoners War Chronicles and other similar wannabe MMORPG mobile

  • Because playing them is not enough, we have to bitch about them daily, too. We had a Gameplay forum, but it got replaced by GameFAQs.
Because playing them is not enough, we have to bitch about them daily, too. We had a Gameplay forum, but it got replaced by GameFAQs.
 #173145  by Don
 Sat Nov 12, 2022 1:50 pm
So I played SW: Chronicles since it's actually on Steam, and in the lines of the Genshin Impact clones it seems to be one of those quasi open world MMORPG wannabes. Problem is that the controls are designed for mobile so good luck trying to actually target anything or select something effectively even on PC let alone on the actual mobile games. Now from what I understand Genshin is some kind of Waifu collector with an optional world to do something so maybe people don't care if the gameplay is just bad since that's not where the actual draw is. But it's not like any game that puts on a bunch of Anime girls wearing next to nothing can be a Waifu collector like FGO that subsists on nonexistent gameplay. In this case Summoner Wars you're summoning mostly monsters anyway and I don't think anyone's going to shell out a lot of money because Ifrit looks hot, not to mention SW in general is a relatively wholesome even when you do have humanoid characters.

So it makes me wonder, does all these mobile games developers and players just have collective amnesia and forgot that WoW and FF14 exists? And even if you refuse to shell out $15 a month for an actual quality MMORPG, do they also forget that there are literally tens of F2P MMORPG that are all pretty well designed and well tested? Why are we trying to replicate WoW like gameplay on mobile where you don't have a keyboard or a mouse in the first place? Do they really think you can get really good at swiping to match what you can do on PC? And what about the players? Do they just forget that they played functional MMORPGs in the past so they settled for far inferior ones? Yes, a few of those have pretty good graphics like SW or Tower of Fantasy but I think we're way past the days where some random Anime cel-shaded graphic is enough as a feature.

And why doesn't mobile games even try any innovation as opposed to just keep making inferior MMORPGs? For example I think if you do something like the story raid against Revan in SWTOR, where all your AI friends are super genius and super strong and cooler than you, but since they don't know how to step on the marked circles on the ground you have to be there to order them around. But they'll handle stuff like offtanking/offhealing and pretty much anything else you expect a real player to do in a raid like a champ. In fact you have to try really hard to get your self killed no matter how weak you are because your AI allies will pretty much always taunt Revan off you and heal you back up before you die. This is actually necessary so that you can watch which colored circles pops up that you're supposed to step in without worrying about being slapped by the boss and die because your healer is slacking. Now this battle is basically meant to be that you can't lose, so your allies are way too strong overall, but you can do a scaled down version such that your NPC helpers (got to have some of them in any MMROPG like games because you can't possibly find enough players always) can pretty much always handle any reasonable requirement other than the one the game is trying to test, whether it's stepping out of void zones or chasing down adds or whatever.

In general I don't think badly of mobile games even if they're quite predatory, but I think in the realm of MMORPG they literally set the industry back. If FF14 and WoW suddenly disappeared, I think we'll end up with scholars doing equivalent of the fiction 'ancient technology is far superior to modern' when they rediscovered that WoW was like a game that existed 15 years ago.