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The Quest To Build a Better Warcraft
Red Herring tackles the rush into virtual space, talking about the MMOG goldrush and the business consequences World of Warcraft has had on the games industry as a whole. Though sometimes it doesn't seem to fully understand the difference between a single player game and a Massive one, the article still touches on a number of important points. Lots of folks are looking to cash in on WoW's success, and they're importing or licensing every Massive game they can find to get on the bandwagon. "The problem is that no one knows what the next WoW killer will look like. Creating a hit video game, which combines strong characters, a compelling story, and top-notch production values, is part art and part inexact science. Making a hit game can be much more difficult than producing an Oscar-winning movie. After all, the hit video game must be compelling enough to keep players coming back for more." Even if a lot of their conclusions are odd, and they call Puzzle Pirates silly, it's worth a look. What do you think it's going to take to crack Blizzard's deathlock on the Massive genre?
WoW has some major weaknesses as well.
- 2 years in and they still dont have class balance, it looks like they never will.
- Deadend skill progression system
Unless youve played eve-online you probably dont appreciate how broken aspects of WoW are.
Have you actually ever played Guild Wars? Good, then have you ever thought about the difference in hardware compared to say a WoW or Everquest OR that MMOFPS planetside?
That is right. Guild Wars ain't all that massive.
Guild Wars has a couple of 3D chat rooms were players meet up but were NOTHING happens. From there extremely small groups of players head out into the game world that is unique for each group. This makes it a lot simpler to keep the world going serverside. You only need a machine capable of handling a handfull of players. Not a massive cluster capable of keeping thousands of players in the same space.
Guild Wars is a brilliant design but it ain't a true MMO, it is the reason why they don't need a monthly subscription fee but may it also be the reason why it doesn't equall WoW in its success?
Then there is another problem with Guild Wars. Even in its tiny gamespaces it suffers from some serious warping. Not that much of a problem with auto-targetted magic attacks BUT a real problem for a FPS.
The simple reason that FPS or for that matter direct combat has not made it big into MMO land is because the nature of beast doesn't lend itself to this.
And FPS players are cheap bastards. You expect a company to come up with hardware a great deal more powerfull then needed for WoW but also want it to be free.
You also over estimate the appeal of FPS. The simple fact is that WoW has shown the world that FPS just ain't popular. Just add up all the people that PAY for multiplayer FPS and then look at the 8 million PAYING subscribers for WoW.
I am not even sure that the number of free players of games like counterstrike can reach that number. But who cares anyway. You need paying customers. Not people who want everything for free.
Follow the money.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
So you like MMORPGs to be full of socially awkward losers with a ton of time and nothing else to do but grind away at a 'tough' MMORPG and a female population of 00000.000001? (.000001 refers to the person who hasn't removed there pants since they started playing the game and is no longer certain of it's sex). Thanks but I'll stick to WOW with it's population diversity and chat that doesn't 100% revolve around stats and loot.
Two tears in a bucket. Motherfuck it.