I probably hoped for more Hellgate type of ARPG instead of just running and gunning as with Defiance. Maybe HG:L was just that... who knows, but personally I'm looking for something that looks and feels more like PoE than Disney/Korean sweethearts.
Ag I don't know, maybe I'm still making up my mind where I want to play to feel that mass multi player instead of single loneship. \
Currently neither Rift or GW2 is doing it for me. Not sure with what that leaves me with and it is probably for the best to try a few out and decided afterwards which is kinda appealing to awesome. I guess in the end this has a lot to do with "gamers fatigue" as I've been hopping around my single player titles for a while now without actual commitment. Maybe there just hasn't been something that I truly find amazing or worthwhile.
Maybe I'm just being too full of shit
Yea, i know that feeling , i think alot of us MMO'ers are having that fatigue. So single player games are feeling lacking and empty , and the big MMOs have become single player / instanced / solo games with alot of mundane grind . The group content tends to be limited to a rather unsocial "dungeon speed run". So i'm still waiting for a good open world MMO that encourage interaction on more than just grouping for a dungeon.
I've found myself intentionally going for these oddball MMOs (if you can call them that) , because the mainstream MMOs makes me feel fatigued the moment i run up to the quest giver who wants me to kill 10 foozles. Rift also died very quickly on me after the expansion, i was all hyped for it, but 2 levels in and i was feeling grind and a total lack of purpose. GW2 also died on me relatively quickly, the moment i felt i was just going through the motions i knew it was time.
Some players speculate a big problem with the Rift expansion was the size of the new continents. Where original Rift had these small, highly populated themed zones, the expansion had huge rolling landscapes and open spaces. The result is, you run around there and see no one, it's totally empty and you kinda loose motivation to progress. It also didn't help that time to kill 1 mob was super slow, so you are literally spamming the same ability for 1 minute...gets old fast.
Either way, Defiance does give me some of that social feeling , the world is small enough that you are guaranteed to find players wherever you go. Everything is in the open world and you see all the players on the mini map (i.e. if you're driving you can see there's a player nearby and can drive over and see what they're doing). However, in terms of true social interaction, Defiance isn't there. There's a few people blaring on the voice chat, but for the most part there's no one chatting in some region chat (no "barrens chat") , something i kinda miss in this game. It still prefer this way of "grouping" , i've done quite a few quests with random players in the areas and you do end up doing the odd "thanks" and "hi" .
So i'd go as far as saying if you played Borderlands and felt it would be so much cooler if you were busy doing a quest out in the open and ran into another real person, then Defiance scratch that itch. But just like Borderlands, the game isn't going to scratch the itch very long.
Neverwinter in contrast, doesn't have a true open world, so there everyone will most likely be living in the chat screen and you won't ever see them until you specifically group up with them. You will see players in the main city, but that's it.
So it's all very tricky to get the best combination of a feeling of "social" and still get an immersive game.
