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Beating WoW At Its Own Game
The BBC has up a short piece on the hopes of game developers and investors to 'beat World of Warcraft'. Representatives for the upcoming Age of Conan, recently-released Lord of the Rings Online, and Star Wars Galaxies all discuss what it's like competing in a post-WoW world. Funcom game director Gaute Godoger has a point when he says, "The industry so needs competition to World of Warcraft ... We need other strong games that can make people understand that there's more to it than WoW." The article discusses some of the features each of these games offer that differ from WoW, and theorizes a bit on where the MMOG genre will go next.
The article refers to the Star Wars Galaxies updates as minor fixes and modifications that made players happier and expanded the player base. A simple check would have shown that after every major overhaul, experienced players left in droves and were replaced by noobs. Then to top it off it touts adding creature handling as a new feature (neglecting to add that it had existed long before, but they removed it). Surprising that SOE finally admitted maybe people liked raising animals, and put a feature people wanted in a game.
Yes, I rant, but being an avid fan of SWG before the Combat Upgrade, I can tell you that SWG is no longer the game it was. And then it was beaten while it was down with the New Game Experience which turned it into an action game instead of an RPG. Poor SOE, if you want to release a new RPG, do it. Don't replace what people were playing with something else, ESPECIALLY if they are paying a subscription.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
From the article:
How does this system eliminate grinding? It seems to me that it would exacerbate the grinding problems as players would grind even more in order to get the additional power and titles conferred by grinding mid-level mobs.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Star Wars Galaxies has gone from 'flawed, but promising' to 'what has science wrought?!' over the course of its existence, a stunning reversal of the usual trend to launch with missing content and patch in later, to launching with missing content and tearing most of what's left out later. Servers are ghost towns, good going there, guys.
Anarchy Online has had more ups and downs than a roller coaster (abysmal beta, spectacularly awful launch, promised lore/television/multimedia tie-ins that failed to materialize... and a free year of basic play offer to bolster subscription numbers), but at least Age of Conan has some interesting gimmicks planned for it.
WoW may be simplistic compared to its predecessors and competitors, but it's been as well-produced as any other Blizzard product-- that is to say, polished to an eye-searing shine. In order to pull the same thing off, their competitors will need to get out of the 'launch first, patch later' mindset, which will absolutely require the trust of the people that fund the projects. Without that element of risk-taking on their part, there's no way that any development team will be able to pull the same thing off. All of that development and polish takes time and effort, which are fueled by money... and the precedent of shipping something that runs, rather than something that shines is still much stronger than WoW's literally phenomenal success.
A massively multiplayer game needs to have numbers of players that are... massive. So dislodging WoW from the lead spot takes a lot more than just a great game, you have to reach those players. If there are 8 million subscribers on WoW then how many more are out there to be reached? The $15 or so per month doesn't sound like a lot to most of us, but that's on top of having broadband available, having a decent computer an having the leisure time to spend on a game. The claim that they're making Conan "for adults" sounds fine on paper but other adults think it's odd that I have the time to commit to World of Warcraft. Finding the millions of adults interested in spending the time and money on an immersive game is a huge challenge. It's a lot harder to do than getting people to read the original stories.
I wonder how the numbers of players they need compares to the readership for the works they're based on.
more of the same on Twitter.
Gah, I keep forgetting Meridian 59, which was 3D and predated Everquest by a few years. It was one of the few early MMOs I never played.
Anyway, Wikipedia has a good history of MMORPGs, although they only define three distinct generations. I think the popularity of games like Lineage and the visibility of games like SWG caused the WoW phenomenon, and should be seen as the fathers of the current generation of games.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
I see these games, with their bump-mapping, realistic shadows and high-poly models. One or two screenshots is all I need to know that I don't want to play them. Game designers need to realize that graphics are more about art than technology. I don't care how realistic the shadows are, if I'm forced to walk around in some drab, grey world, carrying generic swords taken out of some cheap Maya Model Pack.
The quality and imagination of the artwork in World of Warcraft is one of the main, and often-overlooked, reasons for its success.
I think you mean "simplified interface" so that anyone and everyone who even attempts the game discovers how easy it is to get started and gets hooked within minutes. I've met some handicapped players including one guy who was completely immobilized except for his head. Seeing his joy at playing UO was heart-wrenching. I'm quite certain he is playing WoW and enjoying it even more because it's so much simpler than UO. Whenever someone complains about a game being "dumbed down," I think of him.
Obviously, WoW is so dumb it attracted over 8 million people because it IS easy to play. The most amazing part of WoW, though, is even though it's easy to get started and continue to play in a casual manner, it can get as complicated as you wish and require a great deal of research, modification and time in order to complete the more challenging quests and instances.
If there were more penalties, you'd have more people getting frustrated, giving up, logging off and canceling subscriptions. You wouldn't have nearly as large, varied or active the PvP community that does exist. I tried getting my wife involved in UO (pre-pvp consent) twice. Both times PKs ruined her experience and drove her away. I introduced her to WoW while I beta tested it and she's played constantly ever since. One more experience we get to share together.
There are enough penalties for death. You have to pay to repair your equipment, or if you cannot get back to your body (long distance, over active spawn, etc.) then you REALLY pay by rezzing at the graveyard and taking extra damage. Plus it's a penalty of time lost when you should be enjoying yourself instead of running back to your corpse.
That is the players' choice and the reason Blizzard introduced better items for casual players in Burning Crusade. (Plus that death penalty gets steeper.) Not everyone can commit the time or has the resources to run a raid, but I bet they would if they could.
There is absolutely no need to EVER grind in WoW. (**By "grind" I mean kill a monster for the sole purpose of experience gain.)
At launch there were 2500 quests per faction (Alliance, Horde); with BC I'd suspect it is now more like 5-6,000 per faction. My first character hit 60 within a few months (I'm a casual player who plays multiple characters at once) by only doing quests and running the instances associated with quests. There was never a point where I said "I'll go kill these wolves to gain my next level," it was always "Oh, look, I'll get my next level at my next quest turn in or while killing for that next quest."
Anyone who is "grinding" is ignorant of the available quests and simply doesn't understand how WoW is different from all those MMO's that came before it. For those that are ignorant, all it takes is a tell in the public channels asking "Where should a lvl xx go for quests?" I can reference the Prima strategy guide, wowwiki.com or any number of other resources if I cannot draw upon my own experience. There are so many quests, Blizzard had to up the quest log from 20 to 25 so people wouldn't have to do so much extra running back and forth. There is never any reason for a person's quest log to drop below 5 quests much less be empty.
By your definition of "truly great game," you just described Ultima Online as it existed in 1997-1999, and how the Felucca side of each shard still exists. I think most of us have grown beyond that.
By your complaints and suggestions I gather that you are an experienced gamer and one who participates in PvP. I've heard these same complaints from players over my 10 years of playing MMO's. Trust me, you are in the minority
I think the parent was talking about selling the license, not a character account. This touches back on my last point -- if you don't pay $50 for the box/license, you're less likely to maintain a subscription. $50 is paltry compared to two years of subscriber fees; the trick is to get them invested in their character(s) enough that they're hooked.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
So that's....4% fun maybe (if you enjoy ganking and being ganked, which I happen to enjoy both)? The only reason you hear about EVE Online at all is because the big corperations want newbies to lord over, so you hear a lot of 'word of mouth grassroots' exposure making it sound fun and like you do exciting fleet battles every single moment of your time ingame. Don't be fooled, EVE Online is not fun.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
and this probably isn't a good idea for those 'addictive' personalities right?
WOW Credit Card
too damned funny. But it really cements the notion that WOW is in it's own league among other games, no?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
I won't lie, the Linux and Mac gaming market just isn't there in force yet. However, I don't look at this as a hindrance to entering the market; I look at it as an opportunity.
Linux and MacOS is growing. Especially with Microsoft's feeble latest attempt at an operating system, I think that more and more people will be looking at it as a viable home computing platform. Those people are going to want games. There just aren't that many available yet, especially in the MMORPG market.
If I were an MMORPG developer, I'd be jumping on this chance. I'd use as many cross-platform libraries as I could, and that would be one of my major selling points: Whether you're using Windows, MacOS, or Linux, you can play our game. You might make a mediocre dent in the Windows market, probably trailing behind the 800 pound gorilla of WoW. But you would virtually own the MacOS and Linux market for these types of games.
As those markets continue to grow, so does your game, and the market for Windows-only games shrinks. Even Windows users may start preferring it because they can play with their friends who are using Macs and Linux boxes, not just the ones who are beholden to Uncle Bill. Also, as a development company, you gain experience at developing cross-platform games, so the games you come out with in the future will likely be better than other's who are playing catch-up to the new world of multiple OS's out there.
Personally, I think developing games only for Windows is a really bad business gamble. You're basically betting your financial future on Macs and Linux not gaining any market share in the future. I think that's extremely short-sighted.
Oh, and just as an added note, don't forget that in the case of an MMORPG, we're not talking about developing the whole game for multiple platforms, only the client. The primary function of these clients is simply to display graphical representations of network data efficiently and prettily to the user. A very powerful and popular cross-platform graphics library already exists (OpenGL) that will handle the lion's share of this work. In my opinion, if you're a graphics application developer and you're not using it, you're being pretty stupid. As for the back-end server software, unless you plan on selling it or otherwise distributing it, you're free to lock yourself into whatever platform strikes your fancy.
Well, let's see who they mention there:
- Funcom: makers of Anarchy Online, launched as the buggiest pile of shit in recorded history. Read the reviews on Something Awful, and know that they're actually going soft on it. The game was actually buggier than that. Also bear in mind that that's not at launch, that's after Funcom had been given more time to fix it, and had proclaimed it 110% fixed and working as intended. Yet people fell through the ground and/or started swimming in the ground, enemies attacked through walls, enemy melee attacks had longer range than a sniper rifle, doors were a swirling graphics error, balance in _all_ aspects was a sick joke, crashes and disconnects were common, getting trapped in scenery was also common, missions were randomly generated crap from the same template (e.g., you actually had to kill everyone in a "stealth" or "infiltration" mission to get the token), etc, etc, etc. It says something about the kind of people who'd proclaim that to be working as intended.
Heck, even the whole freaking factions were so messed up that faction 1 got more money and better equipment, faction 2 just got shafted, and faction 3 didn't even have a shop above newbie level. How's that for balance? Imagine joining, say, the Horde in WoW and discovering that your side doesn't even have more than the newbie areas in the game.
So basically forget these guys, they just _can't_ design a competitor to WoW. All they can do is hope that someone else comes along and kills it.
- SWG: it stayed afloat at all because of being a merchandising exercise (you know, like putting Darth Vader's head on a t-shirt: you hope people will buy it just because it's official merchandise), _not_ because of having good design. It was the game that was awaited by _millions_ of SW nerds like it's the second coming of Obi Wan, and it just managed to disappoint almost all of them. Either right away, or in the many changes, culminating with the NGE that turned the whole game into a whole other _genre_. Among many other sins.
And reading TFA just reminds me of another thing: the team also always had a thorough contempt for the players, and had no qualms with making excuses or telling outright lies. And I see it continues to this day. E.g., now they're introducing pets as some exciting brand-new feature... never mind that it was there before they removed it in the NGE, pissing off everyone whose class had been eliminated. E.g., claiming that reducing the classes was because of noticing what players do and want is... rich. It's like claiming that you kicked someone in the balls because he obviously wanted that. E.g., the excuse that they were the first and that excuses their mistakes... no it doesn't. There were things known not to work long before, some since the time of MUDs, the SWG team just chose to ignore everything. And at any rate, by the time they did some of their biggest blunders, such as the NGE, that was already after a decade of MMOs. They simply didn't have that excuse any more. Etc.
At any rate, to return to the main idea: everyone who is still there, is there because it's SW. _Not_ because the SWG team can design a good game.
- Turbine: Well, these guys did make Asheron's Call, which was rather popular at one point. (Even if mainly due to being the place where you won't get ganked instantly like on UO.) So at least at one point they did have the mojo to challenge the kings of the hill.
Then they seem to have forgotten how.
AC2 was a flop, and its long list of mistakes could make a case study in how _not_ to go about designing a MMO. It seemed to actually go out of the way to be the opposite of what the players wanted in at least two dozen aspects, or at least miss the mark by a mile. Thoroughly clueless game design.
D&D Online was a thoroughly mediocre and uninspired game, which again managed to miss the mark of everything that most players want in a game. Not even a case of trying to innovate and happening to get it wrong, but just getting it wrong with
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If you knew anything about Funcom you'd know that WoW only exists by their courtesy (since WoW uses instancing, which didn't exist pre-AO), and that Age of Conan will hardly be WoWConan. For one thing, the combat is real-time action, not EQ-like keyboard whackamole, there is no auto attacking (so it's like Oblivion or Mount & Blade in terms of combat), it has a single player campaign up to level 20, it's violent and geared towards adults due to the nature of Robert E. Howard's writing (decidedly NOT like WoW, which mind as well just be named Candyland).... The list goes on, and basically all of AoC is defined by the fact that they aren't making an EQ-like (WoW etc.). Considering Funcom is the only company that has innovated in MMOGs in the past 10 years, I doubt very much that AoC will be anything close to WoWConan (dunno if it will be successful, but one thing is sure: it will actually have gameplay, unlike WoW(and by extension, all EQ-likes)). Likely we'll see Blizzard cheaply ripping off AoC for their next game, like they did with AO (instancing) and EQ (all the rest of the so-called "gameplay").
I read an article a year or two ago about a study a group did regarding shopping. Turns out, getting "stuff", even though we're buying it ourselves, gives us an empirically observable "high". I would imagine that getting virtual "stuff" likely results in the same sort of chemical reaction.