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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."
OK, this is a tricky one. On the one hand, new MMORPGs are only generally going to succeed if they can draw in an audience from outside of the existing MMORPG player pace. With the amount of investment needed to get anywhere in a MMORPG, most players tend to stay loyal to a single game for a long time and getting them to switch is hard. Franchises are a great way of doing this.
On the other hand, a rigid franchise doesn't always sit well in an open ended context. Galaxies, in particular, suffered from being squashed into a particular spot in a particular, well developed time-line. Basic changes that were needed to make the gameplay work clashed with the requirements of the franchise.
Personally, I think the best balance occurs when you get a reasonably open-ended franchise, which sets the scene and brings a fan-base with it, but has no particular plot committments. Final Fantasy XI and World of Warcraft are probably the best examples and are, of course, among the most successful MMORPGs around.
Okay, I read the article, expecting them to mention World of Warcraft at some point. It's based on some very popular IP, being the whole Warcraft universe (the subject of 3 RTS games already, and a number of novels). But they didn't. That's just a huge oversight.
Yeah, the Warcraft universe isn't comparable to Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter, since they came from different media, but you can't argue that the Warcraft IP didn't exist or that it wasn't very popular. Yet Blizzard found a way to keep the lore intact AND build a hugely successful MMORPG at that.
-- jchenx
So this is the excuse that's being spread around the industry relating to the failure of SWG? That it was such a well-known franchise that customers had unrealistically high expectations and this led to its failure?
Oh yea, very high expectations of a MMORPG that wasn't fundamentally changed and nerfed every few months. It's undoubtedly because of Star Wars' fame that players such as myself had such high expectations from the game: that it WORK; that it make sense to play it.
Puleaze.
It's all about the gameplay. The big companies still haven't figured out yet that most players really don't give a shit about derivative work. Granted, if you stick "The Matrix" on some title, there is a set amount of dingleberry-brained consumers who will buy it, but a MMORPG doesn't live by those rules in the long run.
Some good points about WoW have been made already. But, there is one reason and one reason only that WoW is huge: no pre-released, rush-to-meet-it launch deadline. And as far as I know, Blizzard has never done this. What do they do instead? They say "It'll be out when it is done. Not a day before." This attitude is what makes their games so fun. They actually make it good before they release it.
:) WoW itself had good base mechanics upon release, but only a small number of classes (rogues, shamen, mages) were polished enough to make it through the first year without a significant revamp of their spell lineup and mechanics. Warriors, priests, paladins, hunters, warlocks and druids all had their talents and/or spells heavily reworked over the last year. Priests are due for a full reworking with the next patch, though they received new spells (per race) that were significant enough for me to consider them a reworked class (I have two level 60 priests, so I know of what I speak :) ).
Welllll, I wouldn't say never
Also, don't forget how righteously unplayable WoW was due to server and network problems in the first 2 months' of release. In that time, Blizzard issued nearly a month's worth of game credit due to lag and crash problems. I'd venture to say that a good deal of this would have been avoided with a longer beta test cycle involving much more stress testing. As it was, the Stress Test Beta (STB) only illuminated that there were significant problems with play server to item DB server transactions and with lag in heavily populated areas. They may have done some tweaking between STB and release, but those problems continued to plague the game past release, and still crop up in numbers today (witness the instability on Medivh during the AQ event - 7 crashes, 5 of them due strictly to players mobbing a single zone, not due to new mob interaction).
In short, while Blizz does tend to take their time, they released WoW in late Nov. '04 to meet the Xmas '04 rush, and it caused problems.
RW
Thank's to Sony's creative "Station Pass" subscription system, they can fudge the statistics on all their MMORPGs and other games. With a station pass, you have access to SWG and EQ and EQ2, so depending upon the whims of their public relations department, they can attribute EQ2 customers as SWG subscribers. IOW, SWG subscriptions are growing in leaps-and-bounds*.
SWG was an awesome game at first. They killed it by changing the rules too many times. Shouldn't it be common sense that if you have something popular that a lot of people are enjoying, you can add to it, but don't drastically change it. SWG managed to survive one drastic change. The fanbase was up in arms, but gave them the benefit of the doubt. But then what do they do? Less than a year later they do another change that's twice as drastic. From a gameply perspective, the game isn't even hardly recognizeable. Removed all of the classes and skills and replaced them with something different, made huge changes to the combat system, then sat around wondering why everyone left. And people left. They left in droves, and it's now just a shell. The poster child of how not to run a mmorpg.
If WoW did something similar, it would be a disaster. Thankfully, they're probably not that stupid.
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