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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.
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
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