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

What about the rest of us?

[RichPowers]

You don't need FedEx quests, level grinding, and fairytales to have an MMO. All you need are lots of players interacting online. Yet for some reason the major studios don't get this. They feel that every MMO needs dumbassed level grinding, quests, etc. The same stuff we've seen over and over. There's no reason why a game as simple as Team Fortress Classic couldn't be an MMO.

WoW dominates the "traditional" MMO market right now. It's foolish to directly compete with WoW unless you have a strong IP, huge marketing budget, and gameplay that makes players to give up their WoW timesink for your timesink. Most startup MMO companies lack at least two of those things...

But you have a chance if you create an online game that appeals to other gamers. What do Half-Life 2, Halo, and Gears of War have in common? They're shooter games and they're best-sellers, yet no one has created a successful FPS MMO. That market is a potential goldmine...as long as devs steer clear of the traditional MMO crap.

Imagine a MMOFPS similar to Guild Wars. No monthly fee, but frequently-released expansions. There would be a co-op campaign where you and your party fight the baddies and advance through the game's storyline, all while gaining access to new weapons/skills. Add in some arenas for on-the-fly PvP combat, territorial conquest zones, and a some sort of guild structure. Now you've got yourself a game. Simplified, I know, but a competent studio could easily pull that off.

Re:What about the rest of us?

[code-e255]

Although some people don't like the leveling treadmill, all those artificial time-sinks keep the people playing for a long time, and that's what MMO companies want.

What would be so great about an MMO Half-Life or whatever? As far as I know, the HL dedicated server already allows you to create a server with hundreds of players, but either the server can't handle the load, or people's connections aren't good enough to make everything appear smooth. In RPGs it doesn't matter if you're lagging a bit, but in an FPS, even a slight bit of lag can make the game unplayable. Internet technology isn't quite mature enough for a "real" twitch-skill MMOFPS.

Also, imho, in FPS games can have too many players. If you've got too many people shooting rockets and sh*t all over the place in a very small area, the quality of gameplay just deteriorates as you don't really have much control over winning. And if you'd have huge outdoor maps like in PlanetScape, you end up with loads of bland, uninspired terrain and no real exciting maps like in traditional FPS games.

Re:Second Life

[TeraCo]

Sure, except there's no fucking gameplay in Second Life. I play WoW because I want to kill dragons with morons, if I wanted to stand around with morons I'd go outside.