I have to chuckle everytime some wannabe "hardcore" gammer rants about how WoW killed the genre. WoW evolved the genre and set a new bar. Yes it's for casuals, but it added players to the mmo community player base which were never there. WoW evolutionized the genre by being innovative. Unlike following it's example, people try to copy it and just fail. An MMO is like a work of art, a copy is never as good as the original. WoW, Eve, and even Age of Conan now are all successful. This is because they all brought something new to the table. The only exception is LoTRO, which is succesful because of it's zealous and huge fan base. Don't blame WoW for cattering to casuals, blame the industry for not being able to draw in other customers and being to afraid to do something else.
I don't think WoW killed the genre. I think WoW caused widespread stagnation because no company is willing to finance something that isn't a lot like WoW, and no gamer who 'grew up' with WoW is willing to accept anything less than its level of polish.
Also, WoW did not evolve its genre by being innovative. WoW did literally nothing innovative throughout; basically what WoW did was take a boiled down essence of the good parts of previous MMOs, polish them up, knock off the annoying parts (crafting failure, XP loss, naked corpse runs) and replace them with easier, less-demanding, less-flexible versions of themselves.
Now, crafitng never fails, but if you played SWG back in the day, you have an understanding of how crafting can be. Having a few recipes that always come up with the same thing is okay. Having the ability to experiment and modify your crafting recipes until you come up with something unique and suited personally to your playstyle is much more rewarding. In SWG, you had to go far and wide to find the right materials to make your parts out of; in WoW, all you need are basic parts and, occasionally, an extra rare-drop item. Every time it's the same thing, which makes it dependable both in good and bad ways.
The ability to rez up at a graveyard for a short penalty, gear intact, is certainly a lot nicer to the player than making them run naked back to their corpse to get all their stuff before it rots. I don't necessarily advocate gear rot; I'd much rather have an XP and cash penalty that could only be replaced by getting back to my corpse intact. If Demon's Souls taught us anything, it's that a little tension and fear of loss can add a lot of spice to a game. My heart never pounds during raids in WoW. I'm just doing the mechanics and hoping everyone else does, too. With enough organization, you win. If you die, you're ready to try again in minutes.
There are a lot of things about WoW that make it easier to get into than other games. Lowbie players or people who aren't really interested in being challenged find a lot to love about World of Warcraft, and the fact that it doesn't require a lot from its players is a major part of its success. It's a social thing. You get in, you hang with friends, you run some content and win some leet purples, and then you hop off for the night. That's fine. Some folks are super hardcore, but really, the number of paying customers who -aren't- hardcore has got to be Northward of 98%.
A lot of WoW players I know are shocked when I suggest older, more demanding, or more nuanced games for them to play. Some of them even come to enjoy those games and seek out more. I'm not going to go so far as to say that WoW reads as Baby's First MMO, but in basic fact, everything about it is a sublimely safe bet, completely middle-of-the-road, and one hundred percent not even a little innovative.
Public quests were an innovation. WoW is a distillation. They took everything that makes MMOs compelling and easy to get really wrapped up in, then removed all the things that make them stressful, challenging, or unforgiving. Some of those things could be a bitch, yeah, but a little 'GOD DAMN IT' can make for some memorable experiences.
You know, like when your guildies cast Water Walking on you while you're falling down a huge shaft with water at the bottom. Lolsplat!
P.S., before folks jump on me about how phasing is an innovation, I absolutely agree, but I would contend that it is a largely-technical innovation, and furthermore one that took place after the game's subscriber base had already dwarfed every other pay-to-play MMO in existence. It was an innovation that helped WoW tell the story of each character with more punch, just because the pre-phase zones are so substantially different from the post-phase zones. Yes, Orgrimmar is broken at one point and in its phased state it gets rebuilt, and that's all very interesting, but at its core it's a separate instance that separates players who have yet to do Quest 1,535: Rebuilding Orgrimmar and the players who have already finished Quest 1,535: Rebuilding Orgrimmar. No great shakes. Not a new kind of content, just a noob zone with scenery and quests that undergo a change once the player has taken a certain specific action. Also, it's wholly nonpolarizing; I tend to doubt anyone would be -mad- about phased content.
Unless they're trying to gank lowbies. Phasing can protect you from 'world PvP', also known as getting pounced by folks 45 levels above you. So dickbags that like to one-shot new players will be a bit pissy about it, no doubt.
Originally posted by Loke666 Well, it is possible that a few junk games might have survived longer without Wow but I don't think it actually killed anything. It did hurt EQ 1 and 2 a lot but it never killed it. MMOs needs to be pretty bad to actually be killed by another name, most people mean a game that gets more player than Wow when they say Wow killer, few think Wow actually will be closed down in the next 5 years.
This.
In many ways the term "wow killer" has simply become slang for an upcoming game that will attract a lot of interest rather than a serious forecast of a massive change in game population. In many cases it is essentially hyperbole.
There aren't many who truly believe millions will jump ship overnight even if the game were the most amazing creation that mankind had ever set upon the universe. "WoW killer" is just a phrase that is part of the language of mmorpg hype. I never read too much into it.
WoW killed ffxi, or at least ffxi's potential. FFXI was released a few months before WoW came out. I was there from the start of ffxi and it was expanding population-wise exponentially and then all of the sudden this game called WoW came out, and everyone from my linkshell started checking it out. Population in ffxi slowly drained towards that new game.
FFXI remained viable and still is actually, thanks mostly to the asian population probably, but it certainly is nothing like it would've been if WoW hadn't come out at the time it did. I actually expect the same thing to happen to ffxiv when Star Wars comes out next year.
FFXI was released in 2002, WoW released in 2004. I played FFXI from released date and still play but also play WoW.
Most of the 20 or so members of my LS left because of the gil sellers, NM campers and inflated economy. A few left for WoW, some left to play The Matrix and some left because standing in Jeuno for an hour waiting for a mission or exp group took too much of their life.
edited to correct spelling
Thats why I ended up quitting FFXI. It took an hour or more just to find a group. And the fact that I had to be in a group to progress killed me. But i loved the game, and i went back afew times. I almost resubbed on my 360 afew weeks ago again actually.
WoW killed ffxi, or at least ffxi's potential. FFXI was released a few months before WoW came out. I was there from the start of ffxi and it was expanding population-wise exponentially and then all of the sudden this game called WoW came out, and everyone from my linkshell started checking it out. Population in ffxi slowly drained towards that new game.
FFXI remained viable and still is actually, thanks mostly to the asian population probably, but it certainly is nothing like it would've been if WoW hadn't come out at the time it did. I actually expect the same thing to happen to ffxiv when Star Wars comes out next year.
I'm gonna have to go out on a limb here and say that WoW had nothing to do with FFXI's stop-growth. You have to consider that WoW and FFXI are two wholly different -kinds- of games; they may be worth putting in different genres, they're so far removed. FFXI is hardcore. It isn't screwing around. Leveling is a lengthy grind, you -must- have guildmembers to run content, and it's unforgiving and difficult right down to how its magic regen works.
WoW, on the other hand, is simple to understand, easy to pick up and play, and you can hop in and feel good about yourself as soon as you're setting foot outside of Northshire Abbey. More people will play WoW because it's easier to play and more forgiving if you want to play yourself or with one other friend. Going out as a pair and hitting 60 with your spouse just doesn't happen in FFXI without three other folks; in WoW, it can, and easily, and you don't have to organize anything but when you and your sweetheart hop on. If you want to do more, you can. But you don't -need- to; in comparison, one is like playing in a well-written D&D campaign and one is like watching some TV with your friends.
You have to consider that WoW and FFXI are two wholly different -kinds- of games; they may be worth putting in different genres, they're so far removed.
Sorry to nitpick but even after reading what you said there is no way those two games are worth putting in a different genre. They are still very much part of the same genre. They are both MMORPG's and both are even so called themepark MMORPGs. There are games with far more differences that still get grouped under the MMORPG banner. It's like saying a F1 simulator and an arcade type f1 racing game aren't both racing games. I can still enjoy both even if I have a preference and there is no way they aren't both the same genre. That being said I still see it possible for the posters comments which you addressed to be valid as your only real arguement was they are too different.
To avoid nitpicking, I should probably modify what I said up there. They're in the same genre, it's true, but the players that they attract and the gameplay behaviors that they emphasize are vastly different. FFXI is, by its design choices, more suited to hardcore gamers than casuals. They're a much, much smaller audience, and if casual folks were dealing with FFXI's systems because they had friends and guildies there, they may very well have been happy to find something less demanding and more relaxed in WoW.
Even if they're both MMOs, they are both very different from one another. Folks who love WoW and play it for hours a day might find themselves bored with FFXI, and folks who play tons of FFXI and have a solid linkshell and lots of playtime might find WoW as dull as a post. Both viewpoints are valid, but frankly the folks who like WoW's style are a more common personality type. There aren't a lot of hardcores out there, and most folks who want to hop online and play a game with friends aren't interested in being challenged.
So I guess the entire point here is that WoW presented an easier-to-handle, more relaxed alternative to a lot of FFXI's players. Most folks would jump on that alternative, statistically speaking, and many did.
when WoW came out, EQ was getting dated, DAoC had lost its way, and the new mmorpgs coming on the horizon FFXI, AC2 and EQ2 had problems in some way. Only AC2 I think had the potential to be better and have more players but it borked that with 'little stuff' like chat not working for months,(can you imagine that happening in WoW?), as well as a confused design. Uncertain if Earth and Beyond WoW might have had an impact on, or Horizons.
FFXI is console based. Many Japanese players have consoles but no home computers. They can't switch to WoW if they wanted to. Many of FFXI's American players are in the same boat. . EQ1 lost about half it's subs, around 250,000 players, to WoW in a few months time. . SWG was losing 10,000 subs a month to WoW, they implemented the NGE . When WoW released DAoC implemented the Catacombs expansion, an expansion that many say ruined that game.
With the near constant talk about the mythical "WoW Killer" I began to wonder what MMOs have been killed by WoW.
My question is of all the MMOs to open _prior_ WoW how many of them have closed down because WoW came out? If you can think of any then my follow up question is did it fail because of WoW or because of something the developers did/didn't do? (i.e. just poor game design/implementation)
I'm submitting that even with all the records set by WoW and its huge popularity that it didn't "kill" any game that came out before it and people should stop using the term "WoW Killer". Because while WoW, like every game, will eventually lose popularity, but the concept of any single MMO coming out and taking so many subscribers away from WoW that Blizzard will have to shut it down is pretty absurd.
WoW did not kill any specific MMO so much as it is in the process of killing the entire genre.
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do. Benjamin Franklin
I don't think WoW really killed any other MMO. I feel this way because in my experience, most of WoW players early on were first time MMO gamers. They didn't know what it was like to have freedom of a huge open world and ability to make a character without class based molds and real risk vs. reward like we did in Ultima Online or EQ. If they would of, then I doubt they would of lasted much longer than myself.
Comments
I don't think WoW killed the genre. I think WoW caused widespread stagnation because no company is willing to finance something that isn't a lot like WoW, and no gamer who 'grew up' with WoW is willing to accept anything less than its level of polish.
Also, WoW did not evolve its genre by being innovative. WoW did literally nothing innovative throughout; basically what WoW did was take a boiled down essence of the good parts of previous MMOs, polish them up, knock off the annoying parts (crafting failure, XP loss, naked corpse runs) and replace them with easier, less-demanding, less-flexible versions of themselves.
Now, crafitng never fails, but if you played SWG back in the day, you have an understanding of how crafting can be. Having a few recipes that always come up with the same thing is okay. Having the ability to experiment and modify your crafting recipes until you come up with something unique and suited personally to your playstyle is much more rewarding. In SWG, you had to go far and wide to find the right materials to make your parts out of; in WoW, all you need are basic parts and, occasionally, an extra rare-drop item. Every time it's the same thing, which makes it dependable both in good and bad ways.
The ability to rez up at a graveyard for a short penalty, gear intact, is certainly a lot nicer to the player than making them run naked back to their corpse to get all their stuff before it rots. I don't necessarily advocate gear rot; I'd much rather have an XP and cash penalty that could only be replaced by getting back to my corpse intact. If Demon's Souls taught us anything, it's that a little tension and fear of loss can add a lot of spice to a game. My heart never pounds during raids in WoW. I'm just doing the mechanics and hoping everyone else does, too. With enough organization, you win. If you die, you're ready to try again in minutes.
There are a lot of things about WoW that make it easier to get into than other games. Lowbie players or people who aren't really interested in being challenged find a lot to love about World of Warcraft, and the fact that it doesn't require a lot from its players is a major part of its success. It's a social thing. You get in, you hang with friends, you run some content and win some leet purples, and then you hop off for the night. That's fine. Some folks are super hardcore, but really, the number of paying customers who -aren't- hardcore has got to be Northward of 98%.
A lot of WoW players I know are shocked when I suggest older, more demanding, or more nuanced games for them to play. Some of them even come to enjoy those games and seek out more. I'm not going to go so far as to say that WoW reads as Baby's First MMO, but in basic fact, everything about it is a sublimely safe bet, completely middle-of-the-road, and one hundred percent not even a little innovative.
Public quests were an innovation. WoW is a distillation. They took everything that makes MMOs compelling and easy to get really wrapped up in, then removed all the things that make them stressful, challenging, or unforgiving. Some of those things could be a bitch, yeah, but a little 'GOD DAMN IT' can make for some memorable experiences.
You know, like when your guildies cast Water Walking on you while you're falling down a huge shaft with water at the bottom. Lolsplat!
P.S., before folks jump on me about how phasing is an innovation, I absolutely agree, but I would contend that it is a largely-technical innovation, and furthermore one that took place after the game's subscriber base had already dwarfed every other pay-to-play MMO in existence. It was an innovation that helped WoW tell the story of each character with more punch, just because the pre-phase zones are so substantially different from the post-phase zones. Yes, Orgrimmar is broken at one point and in its phased state it gets rebuilt, and that's all very interesting, but at its core it's a separate instance that separates players who have yet to do Quest 1,535: Rebuilding Orgrimmar and the players who have already finished Quest 1,535: Rebuilding Orgrimmar. No great shakes. Not a new kind of content, just a noob zone with scenery and quests that undergo a change once the player has taken a certain specific action. Also, it's wholly nonpolarizing; I tend to doubt anyone would be -mad- about phased content.
Unless they're trying to gank lowbies. Phasing can protect you from 'world PvP', also known as getting pounced by folks 45 levels above you. So dickbags that like to one-shot new players will be a bit pissy about it, no doubt.
What MMO did WoW kill? That's easy. Asheron's Call 2.
Next question?
"There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
This.
In many ways the term "wow killer" has simply become slang for an upcoming game that will attract a lot of interest rather than a serious forecast of a massive change in game population. In many cases it is essentially hyperbole.
There aren't many who truly believe millions will jump ship overnight even if the game were the most amazing creation that mankind had ever set upon the universe. "WoW killer" is just a phrase that is part of the language of mmorpg hype. I never read too much into it.
Thats why I ended up quitting FFXI. It took an hour or more just to find a group. And the fact that I had to be in a group to progress killed me. But i loved the game, and i went back afew times. I almost resubbed on my 360 afew weeks ago again actually.
I'm gonna have to go out on a limb here and say that WoW had nothing to do with FFXI's stop-growth. You have to consider that WoW and FFXI are two wholly different -kinds- of games; they may be worth putting in different genres, they're so far removed. FFXI is hardcore. It isn't screwing around. Leveling is a lengthy grind, you -must- have guildmembers to run content, and it's unforgiving and difficult right down to how its magic regen works.
WoW, on the other hand, is simple to understand, easy to pick up and play, and you can hop in and feel good about yourself as soon as you're setting foot outside of Northshire Abbey. More people will play WoW because it's easier to play and more forgiving if you want to play yourself or with one other friend. Going out as a pair and hitting 60 with your spouse just doesn't happen in FFXI without three other folks; in WoW, it can, and easily, and you don't have to organize anything but when you and your sweetheart hop on. If you want to do more, you can. But you don't -need- to; in comparison, one is like playing in a well-written D&D campaign and one is like watching some TV with your friends.
Sorry to nitpick but even after reading what you said there is no way those two games are worth putting in a different genre. They are still very much part of the same genre. They are both MMORPG's and both are even so called themepark MMORPGs. There are games with far more differences that still get grouped under the MMORPG banner. It's like saying a F1 simulator and an arcade type f1 racing game aren't both racing games. I can still enjoy both even if I have a preference and there is no way they aren't both the same genre. That being said I still see it possible for the posters comments which you addressed to be valid as your only real arguement was they are too different.
To avoid nitpicking, I should probably modify what I said up there. They're in the same genre, it's true, but the players that they attract and the gameplay behaviors that they emphasize are vastly different. FFXI is, by its design choices, more suited to hardcore gamers than casuals. They're a much, much smaller audience, and if casual folks were dealing with FFXI's systems because they had friends and guildies there, they may very well have been happy to find something less demanding and more relaxed in WoW.
Even if they're both MMOs, they are both very different from one another. Folks who love WoW and play it for hours a day might find themselves bored with FFXI, and folks who play tons of FFXI and have a solid linkshell and lots of playtime might find WoW as dull as a post. Both viewpoints are valid, but frankly the folks who like WoW's style are a more common personality type. There aren't a lot of hardcores out there, and most folks who want to hop online and play a game with friends aren't interested in being challenged.
So I guess the entire point here is that WoW presented an easier-to-handle, more relaxed alternative to a lot of FFXI's players. Most folks would jump on that alternative, statistically speaking, and many did.
Interesting discussion. Thanks for keeping it mostly civil
when WoW came out, EQ was getting dated, DAoC had lost its way, and the new mmorpgs coming on the horizon FFXI, AC2 and EQ2 had problems in some way. Only AC2 I think had the potential to be better and have more players but it borked that with 'little stuff' like chat not working for months,(can you imagine that happening in WoW?), as well as a confused design. Uncertain if Earth and Beyond WoW might have had an impact on, or Horizons.
FFXI is console based. Many Japanese players have consoles but no home computers. They can't switch to WoW if they wanted to. Many of FFXI's American players are in the same boat.
.
EQ1 lost about half it's subs, around 250,000 players, to WoW in a few months time.
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SWG was losing 10,000 subs a month to WoW, they implemented the NGE
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When WoW released DAoC implemented the Catacombs expansion, an expansion that many say ruined that game.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
WoW did not kill any specific MMO so much as it is in the process of killing the entire genre.
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
Benjamin Franklin
WoW was indirectly responsible for the mutilation and slow death of SWG.
I don't think WoW really killed any other MMO. I feel this way because in my experience, most of WoW players early on were first time MMO gamers. They didn't know what it was like to have freedom of a huge open world and ability to make a character without class based molds and real risk vs. reward like we did in Ultima Online or EQ. If they would of, then I doubt they would of lasted much longer than myself.