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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?
I'm not sure I'd call WoW's game engine 'second to none'. It has numerous technical issues that continue to haunt it even today, and judging from the very odd occurances of things that were working fine suddenly going buggy on an update that didn't touch anything that should have been related I wouldn't put much stock on it's code being very clean either. Basically, it's power has come at costs in other areas.
Mostly agree with you but two points.
- Not sure what the Mac Client has to do with anything. Your parened comment seemed to imply that Mac opinion has some sort of importance in the gaming world. I'm assumed I'm misintepreting the comment cause that's just silly. Like it or not, PC's still dominate the game world and we don't really care what mac players think about the 10 or so games they have access to (that are worth a crap). Now, that said, it doesn't HURT to have a mac client, but it's mostly irrelevant to the final success of WOW.
- LOTR will fail not because it's not 'real' (are you serious?) It will fail cause the UI is like 5 years behind the curve. Why you think people won't play a game because the travel distances aren't accurate is beyond me.