Indeed that is the case, the way you build community is to make it not fucking optional.
Dungeon finder that gets you into a group and conveniently into that dungeon? Nope, do it yourself by chatting with people and finding a guild, clan, whatever that suits your needs.
Map markers that show you outright where to go and what to do? Nope, figure it out yourself or ask someone who may know.
Allowing crafting to have a good place In the sandbox by making it valuable and requiring several different professions to get to the good stuff? Yes please.
Don’t Introduce NPC’s that allow you to circumvent the need for other players.
Make it inconvenient to transfer items between your characters on the same account or multiple accounts of the same person. The original mail delay in WoW between characters did exactly that.
Ensure that direct trade is always better than using a big market place.
And that is just off the top of my head. Building good community happens when it’s needed and there are consequences for being an ass. Back then you couldn’t just find a new group of people on the server you were on. Of you were an ass to everyone you would end up on ignore lists and make your own life so much harder. At the end of the day community only works if there is a need for community.
That is what happens when the thing that matters to everyone is to get stuff done and fast. The general difficulty got adjusted to the point where people never have a reason to cooperate in the open world, crafting got relegated to the side lines and is usually not worthwhile enough and even then people would rather have alternative characters that do the few dependencies there are instead of relying on someone else. or there is an NPC that solves that issue outright. Then there are the tools that automate finding a group for the things where you absolutely need a group and you bet no one interacts in those groups… Oh no, it’s rush to the end cause everyone got different things to do including so many daily quests. No time for even banter.
You want community? Great, slow down the game and see if that helps. Sure you may loose players that way that liked the pure convenience but if players find that they have time they may just start interacting.
Me personally, well I stopped playing MMOs entirely simply because the magic that was community got killed off exactly like that. Why play in an otherwise boring and dead world when the big promise of the genre is to play in a shared world WITH other players.
Well. All I want is more of that thing the first game did. Not some bog standard Ubisoft formula that they have been too afraid to deviate from for so long now.
Sure apparently IIRC Michel ancel was not easy to work with. Not that I would know since I didn’t work with that guy. But who knows what is true when said dev left ubi stating that the company sucked now… I suppose the truth is somewhere in between, he didn’t want to conform that much to the safe Ubisoft formula and Ubisoft inausted that he did.
Man I remember when they took risks and put out actual good games instead of the same old safe and non risky rehashes that they do now.
Enduring commitment… To whom? Certainly not the franchise, otherwise it wouldn’t take that long, absolutely not the players since they keep ignoring what they actually want out of a prequel or sequel for that franchise. The shareholders? Doesn’t that kind of require to you know… Release a product? Which more or less only leaves one option. Enduring commitment to not knowing what the heck they are doing.
I don’t own either current gen consoles. But I do have a rather up to date PC. I don’t have any current gen consoles when I owned some before (360, PS4) because I don’t like how they handle those consoles. I don’t run windows anymore because I disagree that MY PC that I built is somehow Microsoft’s property if I use their software. I used to be a Halo fan but ever since Halo 4 the series has been rather… Mediocre and I just don’t have time for sub par experiences. In fact I have not touched any AAA titles in so long because they have all been overly save and boring.
I don’t hate every big company making games,in fact I miss the old Ubisoft from the early 2000s or valve or blizzard (save of a few things) or…
Either way, the market isn’t infinite and at some point keeping the existing player base is probably a good idea. So is not pissing of customers with practices that are predatory. Ultimately wild uncontrolled growth is also known as cancer.