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?

Comments

Re:"Warcraft" is not a MMORPG. Warcraft is an RTS.

[Cornflake917]

Unless youve played eve-online you probably dont appreciate how broken aspects of WoW are. Please, for all of us, just shut the fuck up.

I played both WoW and Eve for extensive periods of time. Eve is really great if you're a hardcore RP'er and want to make your own corporation. Other than that it's a horribly boring game. Eve is ten times more broken then WoW. The T2 market is a mess, invention is worthless, pvp combat involves 90% waiting around doing nothing, major gui bugs, gate queues, boring mission system, I can keep going. If anything it's other way around. You can really see that Blizzard puts in alot more effort in to their game then CCP.

Oh and you want to talk about balancing in Eve? Don't make me link all the "Nerf Amarr", "Boost Minmatar" and all the other threads involving balance between the races.

Each class in WoW is totally unique, with competely different sets of abilities and each require totally different play styles. To make all 9 classes perfectly balanced is asking way too much. However, they are always tweaking the builds and making the balance better. Regardless, every single class is useful in some way.

Your play style in Eve, regardless of ship or situation, is turn on tank-modules/speed boosters, maintain optimum range, hit f1-f8. Yet there are many ships in Eve that are just completely useless. The "priest/healer" type ships are hardly ever seen in combat.