I mean, I've loved MMOs since I was little, but only if the combat was any good. Like, my issue with WoW now is that the classes went from 12-20 buttons to 3-5 buttons, and it's just mindless and boring. I like having combat that has me reacting rather than mindlessly rotating through buttons.
So I'll try and make a list of things (in order of importance) of what makes me like a game.
-
Fun, engaging combat / gameplay that isn't repetitive. I love platformers for this reason, and I loved WoW (up until WoD launched and made the classes braindead), Wildstar and GW2 for this reason.
-
Content that is fun, and can stand up to being run hundreds if not thousands of times without getting boring (raiding always did a good job with this one, as did WoW's PvP)
-
A good, well-written story.
-
A decent art style. I don't care if it's realistic or not, it just has to look good for the style it is, and show some effort.
-
Decent music / sounds.
-
Personality and characters I can like / dislike.
So, I played WoW for almost 13 years, right? I never really did much raiding or anything until Wrath (I started in Vanilla) because I just had fun playing the classes and leveling them up and trying them out. Once I hit Wrath, I had every class at max level, and would just rotate through them doing dungeons and puging raids. I'd do that until the WoD prepatch launched, and my favorite classes just weren't enjoyable anymore, and even the most "complex" class was mindless.
I LOVED the combat in GW2, and it's probably my favorite MMO combat, but there's just no real content for a gamer that likes a challenge. The game caters to casuals and social gamers, so there just isn't a lot to do for me. Fractals were fun, and the first couple wings of the HoT raid was fun, but there wasn't any progression, and I just ended up burning out.
I absolutely adored everything about Wildstar. The personality the game had, the awesome dev team, the combat was fun (the classes were a bit simplistic, but still fun), and the story was interesting and I always wanted to learn more about the Eldan. Then the whiny brats quit in droves, and the game had to go F2P. Shorly after, the game basically died off, and any real dev work was put on hold indefinitely. Not expecting the game to survive much longer.
I tried BnS and TERA, since they supposedly have good combat, but it was really repetitive for me, and the content was really easy, so I didn't stick around for long -- though it was fun at first, especially BnS.
FFXIV... I want to like it, but the combat just drives me away. The story is really good, the music is beautiful, the art is nice, and I love being a Lalafel, but it just isn't fun to play with that 2.5s GCD and absurdly simplistic rotations (even at high level).
I think I keep coming back to League because the gameplay is fun, and it's always different, even if I play the same champ every game. But the meta, and the fact that I don't enjoy ADCs, kind of makes me hesitant to play anymore.
