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Throwing Out the Rulebook For MMOs

Posted by Soulskill on from the just-as-soon-as-i-collect-these-twenty-wolf-pelts dept.

MMORPG.com's Dana Massey asks about the possibility of throwing out the rulebook for MMOs, suggesting that the next blockbuster title in the genre will be one that ignores many of the features and conventions that have come to be standards over the years. Quoting: "Who said that MMOs require hot bars? Who proclaimed that it's not a proper MMO unless you have quests? Blizzard took a formula that almost all MMOs had been using for years and distilled it down to addictive perfection. Love or hate WoW, it's a polished, polished title. It's no coincidence that on hardcore MMO sites, like this one, WoW is not the most hyped or trafficked game around. It's not that it's bad, but veteran MMO players don't have the same love for it, simply because we've all seen some variation of it before. The WoW community has always been a bit apart from the larger MMO community. Based purely on the number of subscribers, WoW articles should statistically annihilate every other game on this site, but they don't. A huge percentage of people who truly love WoW, I've always believed, do not know or particularly care about this whole world of MMOs out there. They're WoW players and that's it."

2 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. WoW today is the AOL of the dial-up era... by volxdragon · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Pure and simple - the class and type of player it attracts is the same too. The high-end/hard-core doesn't exist the same way it did in previous MMOs. It's MMOs-for-dummies and that is EXACTLY why it is so successful.

  2. Re:Yah, no-one has thought of that before by Quothz · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    woe be to the man who tries to sell a product that people don't understand.

    Yeah, look what happened to Apple when they tried to radically change the interface on portable music players. Poor bastards.

    I agree with TFA. A few games've tried to do MMOs in fundamentally new ways. Look at the Kingdom of Loathing: While not anywhere near a WoW rival, it became successful enough to support a handful of full-time employees and has remained steady for years. You never know where a flash of inspiration will strike, and a lot of people spend a lot of time thinking about MMOs.