WoW: Expanding the MMO market, or destroying it?

See, this a problem with companies throughout the software industry though, not just in games. They don’t want to have to spend money to make money. So they look for other ways…

I don’t want to talk about that, but the point is that ranged combat done right isn’t about making it twitch. It’s about incorporating core gameplay elements like “cover” and arcs of fire.

Hell, even FPS games are now trying to get those right. See Gears of War and its focus on cover.

I played Auto Assault. The only reason I paid for a second month was because I forgot to cancel before the end of the first.

There was nothing there to convince me to keep playing. The world looked bland: I saw brown plains, more brown plains, and still more brown plains. The things I was doing were tedious and boring. There was nobody to talk to. It, quite simply, wasn’t any damned fun.

You know one reason why fantasy MMOs are the ones that succeed? Because they’re the only ones that look good! If I’m going to be spending a huge chunk of time living in a virtual world, I want it to be one that isn’t relentlessly grim and depressing. WoW’s setting may be cliched to hell and back, but Ironforge is a damned cool place to be. Auto Assault had nothing like that.

Worse, it had no sense of place. While the newbie quests in AA and WoW are superficially similar, WoW’s send you to recognizable places. “The far side of that frozen lake.” “The cave that I saw earlier.” And when you get to a new zone, it feels entirely different. Getting to see a new zone is one of the big rewards in WoW, since each one feels different from the last.

So, yeah, Auto Assault failed. It failed because it wasn’t any good. It took the worst aspects of WoW, bolted them into a setting they weren’t suited for, and wrapped it in a drab, uninteresting setting.

Great points. Once I ran out of new AND different zones to explore, I felt like I had done all there was to do. However, WoW’s are so large, varied, and distinct that you enjoyed finding out stuff about each while you were there and that takes a considerable amount of time. Landmarks in space, for example, would be much more diffcult to produce.

Mechwarrior Online 3025 was a couple of really great steps in the right direction. Add a character creation screen, customizable mech paintjobs, places to congregate with your House/Clan before and after missions and it’d have kicked major ass. Even futhering the tactical nature of the combat by making the targetting and damage more deliberate, and more viable to retreat out of an ugly situation like in the books (where mechs savaged by fire can pull out even with extreme damage to be repaired later) would lead to interesting and less twitchy play.

it of course went down with the rest of EA’s online gaming site. Oh well.

Well, to play devil’s advocate, it’s hard to say, “Blizzard could sell anything!” when basically all they’ve done for the last decade has been Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft. And most of their earlier games are hardly bestsellers: Blackthorne? Lost Vikings?

I do agree that (A) fantasy lends itself better to melee-combat-oriented games than scifi does, which seems a better fit for MMORPGs; and (B) fantasy is generally more popular with women than scifi is and thus will always draw more women, all other things being equal.

Have you ever tried any of those MMORPGs that are popular in South Korea?

Because I am thinking that, yes, millions of Koreans can be very, very wrong.

EDIT: To draw on some old marketing words of wisdom: “People will eat shit sandwiches for as long as there is nothing else for them to eat. As soon as they have a good burger, though, they will no longer want shit sandwiches.”

Moral: MMORPG designers need to learn to make better burgers than Blizzard or get outta the sandwich business.

[And now I’m hungry.]

“Well, to play devil’s advocate, it’s hard to say, “Blizzard could sell anything!” when basically all they’ve done for the last decade has been Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft. And most of their earlier games are hardly bestsellers: Blackthorne? Lost Vikings?”

Then, no. Now, yes. They’ve climbed to the top and earned the goodwill of the marketplace, so they can box up anything now and sell it. They can do that at least once. They put out a crappy game and the marketplace will remember that too and probably punish them for it, but they have earned a lot of trust at this point.

Blizzard clearly understands this too, since they take the time and expense to polish their games unlike just about any other PC game publisher.

I admit it, I still get a warm fuzzy feeling when I see how many people genuinely liked 3025, even considering that what was playable was 10% of what was intended. Goes to show we didn’t waste two (or in some cases, five) years of our lives.

You would not believe the hell that project went through to get it to the state you saw it in. The very idea of the game was doomed and cursed from the start. Lots of really good ideas and basic design behind it, that definitely needs to be implemented sooner or later, but it really needs to be done as something OTHER than a Battletech game, to break the jinx.

Or not developed by/for EA. :P

I’m not particularly a fan of EA’s business practices, but 95% of the damage that project suffered was the studio’s missteps, not EA’s.

I just like to blame EA for everything… it’s much easier that way.

I mean, at this point in my MMO playing (and I’ve been playing online stuff for a long time), if I’m not looking over my shoulder all the time while leveling, if I don’t have to fight off gankers to complete quests, if I’m not always having to be aware that the “other side” might kill me, I don’t want to play.

This has never been an issue for me* since I come to WoW from single player RPGs where “pve” is all that there is. While the PVE content (outside of some instance fights and occasional tough quests) isn’t particularly challenging, I do find it mentally engaging (with the exception of out-and-out farming, which is tedious unless you put on some nice music and get into a sort of trance state, in which case it’s actually not a bad way to veg out). In fact, when I first started playing WoW I played it either as a single player game (and found it ferociously addictive as such), or as a co-op game with a couple real-life friends (a la Champions of Norrath etc.). Only later (with excessive PUGging) did the massively-multiplayer aspect even make itself apparent to me as more than just a matter of atmospherics. And to this day the multiplayer of WoW is very much a double edged sword for me: sometimes I don’t want to be bothered by whispers from people on my friends list; I find much of the player base in general to be painfully immature and annoying; and when I play on pvp servers a single bad ganking can ruin my whole session, because it’s like downshifting from 5th gear to 1st. WoW has served to remind me, vividly, why I am in general a retiring and socially reticent person.

The more I think of it, I may be one of those people for whom the “multiplayer” aspect of this particular MMO isn’t even the main selling point. I think I engage with WoW as a gigantic single player RPG that has a lot of the finely-honed psychological hooks of the Diablo style games, as well as a massive world a la Oblivion/Morrowind. (It scores lower in terms of writing/story, but I have always ranked story as a secondary concern in CRPG design.) The occasional co op sessions of instance runs, or the ability to chat with friends from time to time, are icing on the cake. Maybe this aspect of it helps to account for its broader mainstream appeal; or maybe I’m just a freak.

*I guess I haven’t been playing MMOs for as long, though.

WoW’s setting may be cliched to hell and back, but Ironforge is a damned cool place to be.

Very true. Still my favorite single “virtual location,” topping other contenders like Nyleve’s Falls in Unreal or Ald Ruhn in Morrowind.

They did genero fantasy but they did genero fantasy with style to burn.

By the way, those who keep saying that WoW made the MMO market broader for everyone are other devs who work for other game companies who still desperately hope there is still some space for them, basically trying to save their asses at least on a conceptual level.

Trying to be non-belligerant because they know they cannot compete.

All the sweet talking you have in interviews is just simple, pure hypocrisy.

My (probably unqualified) opinion is that WoW is killing the MMOG market. Partly this is because, as a polished product, it drastically raises the bar for entry into the traditional MMO space. I suppose non-traditional MMOs might stand a chance, but publishers don’t like to fund non-traditional designs.

  • Alan

Heck, I agree with HRose’s first post!

As others have stated, the recent releases have been rubbish. On top of that for me what gets me going is player control. Raids, grinds, dungeons, arena PVP - meh. I want ownership! That’s why I loved UO, Neocron (way underated) and I adore EVE.

Maybe I’ll get that in Pirates of the Burning Sea (anyone had a go yet??) or in Star Trek Online, or Stargate Online - but nothing recently has hit the nail on the head.

…actually, thinking about it… I love NOT having raid content. In EVE there’s not really much content like that (complexes don’t count - who wants to lose those items!) … and not having raid content means I don’t have to commit hours to doing them. I can make a bit of cash, get in a scrap, or not log in. My skills are still improving, I’m still having fun. Hmm…

Oh my. I didn’t realize you could be so funny!

— Alan

Well said; I think you’ve described an importance niche in WoW’s playerbase. Makes sense to me. I’m the other way around, I guess. I only play pretty much in groups or in duos/trios, and almost never by myself.

I don’t think a game can have the power to destroy the genre it’s in. If someone makes a deeper, more complex game that is interesting enough - people will come. Drawing attention to the market can really only serve to expand it - and the reason you don’t see people moving to other MMOs is because there’s no innovation at all, they’re all World of Warcraft/EQ copies - to the letter, except with lower budgets and are pretty much worse in every way. Who would switch from one, well-budgeted grindfest to a crappier one?

I find it useful to look at:
http://www.mmogchart.com/

While it’s all either estimates or numbers from financial statements (rather than straight from the horsies’ mouths), you can glean from the 70,000 to 700,000 chart that there are plenty of MMO’s doing fine, while at the same time seeing that most of the bigger names took a huge tumble as WoW rose in popularity.

I don’t know that it means much. It may just mean WoW is cannibalizing players who had been playing other MMOs. I don’t think that kills the market, but it doesn’t grow the market either. Short of interviewing all 8 million WoW players, I don’t know any way to discern whether the game’s really growing the MMO market by attracting people who didn’t play them before – or if it’s just slowly sucking away players tired of the X number of other medieval-y mmorpgs out there.

Supporting 8 million (or whatever it is now) players worldwide is a capital expense nightmare (servers and 24 hour support staff don’t grow on trees) that I don’t think many companies other than Blizzard could financially do, no matter how much subscription fees are ringing in the coffers.

For now, my take is WoW’s success gives other mmorpgs a benchmark (an impossible-for-anyone-to-reach benchmark, realistically speaking, but a benchmark nonetheless), and has raised interest in the genre on the whole. If it reaches the point where WoW has 16 million players and all the other major mmorpg developers give up on the marketplace, well, THEN I’d say it has destroyed it because it would’ve become the Ma Bell of mmorpgs. :)

As far as anyone matching it in popularity, I don’t think just doing “a better grindfest” will do it. Blizzard’s name is box office magic, as is its general “polish,” and I don’t think an mmorpg by another dev can match those two key factors. It could look like it (see Mythic’s Warhammer), it could duplicate its gameplay, it could do any number of things just like it or claim to improve on it, I just don’t think people would flock to it in the same crazy numbers without the Blizzard name.

I played WoW for 30 days and never had any desire to play it again. I could name 100 reasons I didn’t like it, why it frustrated me. However, several million people disagree with me, so who am I to pontificate? :)