Dear stagnant MMO market...

Xenorus

...and developers looking to enter this very stagnant market.

The MMO market used to be a wonderful innovative place where people got what they expected and all was well. This isn't actually true, but in the early days of this type of gaming, the magic and wonder of banding together with random people to fight monsters kinda glossed over many issues with the genre. Games like Lineage 2 were big players, the grind was awful, but nobody cared.

Nowadays things are almost always overhyped, released with gamebreaking bugs, or just not well received at all. People love to attribute blame to this, and there are lots of great targets to blame, including other players, the developers, the publishers, World of Warcraft and so on.

I see the problems in a much simpler way, its pretty much two sides of a coin, and you have to take your pick. Big titles seem to come in 2 flavours:

Vanilla: We made world of warcraft but with a twist (a very common complaint on here). This is usually done because investors see WoW and see how much money it's making, the problem is you are competing with the biggest selling MMO and money spinner of all time. Everything you can do they can do better, and you can best your as your "twist" on the title will be assimilated, refined, and polished to a state far better than you managed. The collective gravity of 12million other people will almost always attract people better than you can.

Frog liver and beetroot icecream: This is the second flavour, a lot of people love this flavour. It sounds really weird doesn't it? The problem is these developers start out with 2 crazy combined flavours (ideas) and they then look to refine them into something palatable, and clever. The issue is, many people want something different so badly, you could hand them "Yellow snow" and they would eat it, tell you it was absolutely delicious and demand you do not change a thing. This is basically the hardcore market. They are terrified of the game having any "wow-esque" features and want to to succeed so badly, they ignore the glaring flaws, tell the developers its great and support it in its crippled state until launch. These games ultimately only retain small support and though some people genuinely enjoy the game, too many people feel so strongly about it that they have to justify and defend everything about it which is hugely offputting.

You do get the various inbetween states that please abolsutely nobody at the moment, and get very little attention, which is depressing because this is where the next decent title will come from. Many "Vanilla" players want a more challenging and demanding experience, a lot of hardcore players are probably willing to sacrifice a few thing for a better supported game. This middleground has more potential than the other two, and just needs the right game and funding to take off.

Personally when I look at the market, I just can't see it going anywhere but down, there is nothing exceptional standing out for me. I like the look of TERA, but I doubt it will be anything special at all. I just wish people would stop supporting every game that isnt WoW as though it's some sort of hero rising up to kill WoW. Its like people forming a line to fight off some demon. The townspeople cheer each one on, and buy him armour, a sword and a shield, only to watch him fail and get horribly injured. Eventually when an actual heroic knight comes along with the training skill and his own equipment, then people of the town are so fed up with failures, they tell him to fuck off, because they don't care anymore.

I hate the fact games promise feature that cannot deliver on, and put so much emphasis on them as well. I would love to see a basic release with this stuff worked on and added as a patch or expansion. I mean, imagine if darkfall had released a few years ealier, had promised half the features and delviered almost all of them in a near perfect state. They could have released 2 expansions with the others added in as "incredible new features" and generated far more money.