But it didn’t become the cultural phenomenon WoW was. Even people I know that hated games played WoW.
There to me is a big difference between an amazing game that does a lot right, and being game-changing. Game changing for me means it changed the industry after it, but WoW was kinda the last of the big MMOs that were successful. Everything that came after it – with the possible exception of LoTRO – kinda failed on liftoff: Matrix Online, COH, Vanguard).
WoW by definition changed the industry, so much so that no other MMO that came after could succeed. The iPhone did nothing new, that is regarded as a game changer. Tesla is regarded as a game changer, despite the fact the lowly Nissan Leaf has sold significantly more electric cars than every Tesla model combined.
Game-changing refers to changes in the marketplace/industry as a result of a new product. WoW is the definition of this in games.
So, I’m going to differ with your opinion the iPhone did nothing new, since at the least it was the first fully-touch screen device and a phone that gave close to the full version of web sites on a mobile device. it’s also game-changing in the revolutionary sense that it’s pretty clear the phone market before iPhone, and after iPhone.
I don’t get quite the same sense of the pre-WoW and post WoW scene. EQ had pretty much zero questing, but DAoC had a lot of quests and little grinding. At least until Atlantis and you had to level your pants. it took until Wrath for Blizzard to really get the hang of zone quest progression.
I was thinking similar thoughts about MMOs after WoW. MMOs after have clearly succeeded. LotRO, SWTOR, TESO, and the Guild Wars games have all succeeded on some level. They aren’t WoW-level successes, but even WoW now isn’t a WoW-level success. I don’t think WoW’s launch did much to affect those games, other than being a progression of what things people liked/didn’t like about WoW. Where I do think WoW has changed MMOs are phasing, but again, well after launch when other MMOs were out.
In a lot of ways, WoW is still stuck in the past. It’s a past that works for it, but almost every MMO now has some sort of free-to-play model. WoW’s FTP is pretty gimped and stops at 20 anyway. I think every MMO out there you can get to max level without a subscription.
Where i think WoW didn’t seriously change at least my perception of MMOs wasn’t until 2011 when in patch 4.3 they introduced the raid finder. Up until then, WoW was sort of on the EQ model where you needed spam chat or be in a good guild to raid. I’m also a little surprised that no MMO I’ve tried has nailed the LFG/LFR tool the way WoW did. WoW at least tells you how long the average queue time was. This patch was also the one that introduced transmog. This is around 7 years after launch. And after peak WoW which was around the time between Lich King and Cata.
What I had thought would happen is WoW would be a rising tide that lifted all boats. People would decide they liked this whole MMO thing, and when they got bored with it might try LotRO. I don’t think that happened at scale, though.
The goal of my WoW example wasn’t to derail the discussion of this thread and just to make it clear, I’m not even suggesting Star Citizen will be some kind of new WoW. The point I was trying to make is that to be successful you don’t need to create a game that is EVERYTHING gamers could ever hope for. WoW succeeded due it’s polish and lessons learned from other MMOs, it wasn’t a huge step forward in regards to the mechanics or even technical details. It was an evolution of the MMO thanks to Blizzards money and thus resources.
Star Citizen doesn’t need to be this “super game” some people have in mind to be a huge (financial) success.
What they need to deliver is a solid sandbox that isn’t plagued by horrible bugs and technical issues and offers some good fun, nothing groundbreaking but enough for people to stick around.
That might not satisfy a lot of people but I’m very sure it will be enough to make Star Citizen a very successful game. That’s at least my humble prediction (btw I didn’t invest anything in SC nor do I plan to before a release version or at least a very solid pre-release version is available).
Well, to be fair, one of those people is Chris Roberts.
You’re way overthinking this Mark, and I think your history as a stuck in reviewer during the time frames your opinion in a way that’s completely different from that of most people. World of Warcraft is the MMO that made people play MMOs. Nothing before or since has come close to that scale. They did it so good that it broke the model for everyone else because unless you make it free to play now you are never going to get a playerbase big enough to keep your game going.
World of Warcraft is the very definition of a game changer as many Blizzard games have been before and after it.
It was such a long time ago, but I recall that WoW had a significantly larger ad campaign than virtually any other game I’d ever seen at that point, in terms of normal TV advertising not directly aimed at gamers.
I think that was a big part of the success.
There was an article on the front page from WoW launch written by Tom that pretty brilliantly laid out all the reasons for why WoW was revolutionary and a departure, and almost all of those reasons would come to underscore the game’s massive popularity and become adopted genre-wide. Everything from not having to camp spawns and just sit there for hours on end to having beneficial temporary effects (like stat gain potions) geared towards in-game time rather than real time were amazing developments. Hell, the notion that you could actually quest your way to the level cap was something completely new and different.
I mean, you can say that Company of Heroes did nothing that Dune II didn’t already do…but don’t ask me to buy into that line of thinking.
They did TV, but that was actually after the game was available for quite awhile. Again, it’s the one game we’re all still paying to play (well, I am anyway… more for my sons than for me…) all these years later. Think about that for awhile. $15 a month is still demanded by Blizzard for a game that’s going on 13 years old.
It’s crazy talk to say that WoW was not an immediate game changer when it launched. The difference between WoW and the other MMOs at the time was epic. I remember when WoW launched and it absolutely sucked all the air out of the room for the other MMOs that were in development.
It’s hard to really judge a lot of WoW, since it started so long ago, and evolved so much over time. Like PvP for instance… I seem to recall that being way simpler, or maybe even non-existent when WoW started?
I have to admit though, I never really got into WoW. I’ve played it of course, it just never totally consumed me. I had kind of gotten past the ratkiller experience in much earlier MMO’s (going back to games like Gemstone), and at some point I came to the realization that it was just kind of a neverending loop that never went anywhere, and then the MMO kind of lost its appeal to me.
I had been writing about games for a little bit at the point that WoW was in closed testing. I get an invite in a few months before open beta. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that initial experience. The only other thing to come close was my first time playing EQ or maybe the first time you really experience VR games with touch controls.
How did this thread turn into a discussion about WoW? What did I miss?
So, you and @DaveLong may have hit on something. MMOs are one of those things you never forget your “firsts” by the time WoW launched, I was a pretty grizzled MMO veteran. EQ for me was the real game changer. It was the first game that truly felt like I was living in a virtual world. Similarly, Morrowind was the first game I felt like that in a single-player game.
For me, it was easy to see where WoW was a derivative work. While EQ was influenced by DIKUMud and Meridian59, the name “EverCrack” was well-deserved.
WoW for me obviously got a lot right. It was a big success, but seeing the works before it (EQ and DAOC, and I think SWG pre-dates WoW, but my memory is fuzzy on that), I could see the logical progression. Maybe I’m the MMO version of the music lover who saw that Zeppelin was the merging of blues music and I had followed the influences heavily before then.
What I do think at launch WoW did that helped its success where two things: It ran on damn near any computer, and it had a Mac client.
It definitely depends on ones history. Being a EQ diehard when WOW came out my reaction was it was a “easy EQ”. I think Star Citizen will end up like a Vanguard, tons of hype, lots of assets made but a scaled down version of the game released to the public. I loved Vanguard, even in its buggy and uncompleted state, probably my 2nd favourite MMO after EQ.
I managed to avoid being very sucked into all this MMO nonsense you young’uns are all so fired up about (I played a couple of those terrible F2P things and they were … not ultra bad but pretty bad) so now I’m scared that one day I’m going to be at home and realise I can download and play this WOWser thing for free and proceed to be deleted from the real world. Probably Forever. All because of the Star Citizen thread ;)
“I thought I would be safe browsing the space games threads but noooo the mmo drug pushers are EVERYWHERE!!!”
To be fair, there’s not much to be said about Star Citizen that wasn’t already said. At least for now. ;)
This discussion about WoW in relation to its predecessors might actually deserve its own thread, though. Although I think the discussion would benefit from focusing less on the term “game-changer”, because I get the impression that @Mark_Crump has internalized a different meaning than that of his objectors.
WoW wasn’t my first MMO. In fact, I mentioned EQ in the same paragraph. I went on several planes raids with my druid. Before that I played UO and Dragon Realms.
I was saying that when I first played WoW it felt special, not that it was my first time with MMOs
Asheron’s Call FTW. That is all.