MMORPGs And Franchises

MMORPG.com has an interesting piece on major franchises and their relation to massive games. They take a look at the question of whether or not virtual worlds are appropriate venues for IPs. From the article: "It's precisely because of that 'famous world' that we run into trouble. The more famous it is, the higher the expectations that players put on it. This leads to the developers having less and less flexibility in the way that their world is built, the rules that they choose to use, and the content that makes the game interesting."

Comments

Re:MMORPGs and Franchises

[falcon5768]

no that figure was from Nov 05, it just so happens it roughly the same as their 04 figure. It is very popular, but the truth is there are a lot of sites that focus ONLY on FFXI that people dont go to those other sites (Alla is the only exception I can think of)

Killing Ifrit Somepage and the japanese based Mystery Tour are solely based around FFXI as well as the Alla forums which are always hopping with asshats.

Also there was a lot of buzz leading into the last expantion, and the buzz is picking up again for the April expantion comming out. If you really think about it, if you played WoW GW CoH or SWG you wouldnt think any other MMO existed, when the truth is there are well over 30-40 MMOs out there, with FFXI being the third largest not counting GW which most people dont count as a MMO (behind WoW and Lineage II another MMO people almost never hear about but had a playerbase rivaling WoW)