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Will Wildstar be a success?
LifeIsShort13
Member Posts: 3
When you talk about a MMORPG being successful you have to compare it to the only succesfull MMORPG which is WoW. Either you like it or not you have to admint that it did something that nobody else has done after them.
Everything that I am going to talk about is in regard of the westerm MMORPG community and market. In Asia and especially in South Korea where 2 out of 3 people are gamers, where they treat their professional gamers like superstars and where NCSoft was born, things are so different that their standards don't apply here in the West. Games like Lineage, Lineage 2, Tera, Aion, etc, are judged of how they performed here in the West.
The thing is that WoW came out when the MMORPG industry was way different than it is today. Games back then were way more hardcore and unforgiving towards the player. Despite the fact that Vanilla WoW was more hardcore than WoW is today, it was still way more casual that the rest of the games of it's time and it kind of invented handholding. I am not saying that it is a bad thing, it revolutionized the whole leveling process and made it way more accessible towards the masses while still retaining the fun factor. It was the next logical step in the MMORPG's evolution and if Blizzard hadn't done it somebody else would have. It took a whole genre of games that were catered towards a small hardcore percentage of the gaming community and managed to make it appealing to the whole of it.
Now the problem with WoW is that it has stalled for the past 5-6 years, it hasn't done anything groundbreaking to renew itself. Every two years it releases the same template of an expansion (new race or class, higher level cap, and another series of raids and gear tiers). It pulled in the large casual crowds but also the hardcore gamers, with the years it has shorten the gap between them. The casual gamer of 2014 is way more experienced than the casual gamer of 2004-2005, but WoW for the sake of subscriptions is still getting dumbed down. They did it in the past and it succeeded but it won't ever succeed again because they "transformed" the whole MMORPG playerbase. The other problem with WoW is that it has grown old, even if it innovates itself it will still be the equivalent of the action figures that you played with as a kid, at some point you grow out of them.
They had this successful business model that worked perfectly for them and they managed to earn colossal profits, they find that trying to tinker and change the formula of their game too drastically is way too risky. And I understand that from a business perspective. Blizzard wants profits. So why risk innovating and spending resourses for research and development on WoW and either keep it alive for another 2-3 more short years or on the other hand kill it before it's time. Blizzard knows that doing nothing different than before will still make them money while WoW is slowly dieing.
In 2003 there where like 8 MMORPGS you could chose from, after years of watching Blizzard thrive, other companies also wanted to dip their hands in the honeypot, around 30 to 50 MMORPGS came out in 2013 of which only 2-3 where probably made by large companies. Most of them die months after release. They have ALL taken stuff from WoW (the same way WoW took from EQ and small stuff from other MMORPGS through the years), they have all tried to put in some minor innovation and they have all failed. Others try to go down the opposite path, to be nothing like WoW and they also fail miserably. Don't get me started on GW2, I could rant on everything that went wrong with it for hours, both game-wise and playerbase-expectation-wise. I know that games like Rift still have a large amount of active players but their numbers are nothing in front of the 7 million subscribers that WoW still has.
Players through the years, after playing their first MMORPG and after playing another ten games following that first one, have been let down, while acquiring small "exotic" tastes from the huge variety of MMORPGS that they have sampled. They are each looking for an MMORPG that will lure them in and fill them with awe just like their first one did, and simultaneously satify their other preferences that other MMORPGS provided them with in a mix-and-match kind of way.
Another thing that WoW didn't have to put up with back in the day is that marketing was way more easier back then. It had only a handful of competitors, the only fanboys it had to put up with were a small amount of EQ fanboys to todays standards, it didn't have to be tagged as a WoW-killer and live up to that name, it couldn't even be called a WoW-clone, you didn't have thousands of gaming sites and bloggers and streams reviewing the game for you. The whole MMORPG community in 2014 has been disappointed again and again after trying new games which has led to a new phenomenon of gigantic proportions, players tend to research everything about a game not only before they buy it but before it is even released. This has led to HYPES, they can be positive or they can be negative, they can make a game or they can break it to a point of no return.
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TL;DR: If WoW wasn't the first mainstream and succesfull MMORPG to set the bar there would have been another MMORPG. The key is to satisfy all types of players, PVPers, raiders, soloers, crafters, roleplayers, hardcore guilds, lore fanatics, but to also draw in the crowd of first-timers. Not to only draw them in but to keep them playing by having fun. The next MMORPG-king will have to manage to put up with a whole lot of competition and thrive against them, with better gameplay and with better marketing. It will also have to maintain a positive hype around it's name not only before release but also for a long time after the majority of players have reached endgame.
Now I am finally going to talk about Wildstar and my personal view around it. I fall into the the type of 2-3 hours on weekdays and 10-12 hours on the weekend type of player, I enjoy raiding, pvp, soloing and crafting. I have played most of the big MMORPGS in the last 8 years since I got into this genre of gaming.
I first heard about Wildstar a couple of months back, not anything actually about the game but only that it was published by NCSoft. The problem is that I have a history with NCSoft.
Lineage 2 being my first MMORPG (which I loved at first) that is way too hardcore. WoW was my second one which I loved but it was a difficult transition for me coming from a Korean grinder with an open pvp-pk system full of politics and drama. I later bought into the Aion hype which I thought at the time was an amalgamation of L2 and WoW, I was wrong. Aion was a cool game, different from anything else at the time, it never actually met up to it's promises, time limited flying combat sucks and it was still a korean grinder. After that I spent a couple of years jumping from L2 to WoW back and forth, I stumbled upon Rift and DCUO because I was looking for a satisfying game that kind of felt like WoW. I bought Tera which is another korean game with cool graphics and a new type of action fighting system but with . I later bought again into another hype which was the whole GW2 story which I won't be commenting on. After that I spent 2 years jumping MMORPG-ships and researching and googling for a game that I might actually enjoy again.
So naturaly I thought that Wildstar would be another korean grinder with cartoony WoW graphics or just another GW2-type-story.
Wildstar is the first game for which, although it hasn't even been released yet, I have done research upon it and have googled stuff about it and have spent hours upon hours of watching streams of it's first goddamn 15 levels, and have tried to put together what endgame will be like with the whole Elder system.
I have learned that the actual developer of the game is Carbine, NCSoft is just the publisher, a group of people that left WoW 8 years ago and didn't want to have anything to do with it (probably because of issues with where the game was going and I believe that we all saw in the last couple of years what Carbine already knew would happen). I also found out that Carbine is very picky about it's employees and that it sought out to get the best of the best to get the job done. Wildstar has been in development for 6 to 7 years just so they could code their own engine to run the game, to research and learn about what players really want, taking parts from other games that worked and adapting them to their own style, tinkering with them, adding new stuff, taking well-researched and planned risks but risks nonetheless. Wildstar is their baby and I can see that they are really trying to make the best game possible and that they are actually putting together the formula for the first true WoW-killer, and I know that NCSoft can also see that.
One of the reasons GW2 sucked so badly was because NCSoft rushed ArenaNet to get the game "ready". I believe that NCSoft is seeing the actualy potential Wildstar can have if they let Carbine "do their thing". Which is another reason Wildstar wasn't heard of until a year ago, they didn't want to get the hype going on from too early and they didn't want other companies to be properly prepared for when the bomb drops. Wildstar is going to be released at the prime of the playerbase's hype and they will manage to steal alot of players from other games aswell. What they also have going for them is that Blizzard-fanboys now have to wait until 2016-2018 until Blizzard's "Titan" project emerges because the whole development process for the game up until now has been scrapped.
At the moment I am waiting for a beta-key to fall into my hands so I can actually try the game. In theory, Wildstar up until now, has satisfied everything on my checklist of what I expect from a game that I want to play, and also everything else from the checklist of what I believe a game needs to be well-rounded and successful. I am still a college student with not that much money to spare so hopefully, as I have heard, I will be able to try out the game when open beta starts one month before Wildstar's actual release. I really hope this game meets up to all of our expectations, but from getting burned in the past I suggest that you all also get a taste of the game in Open Beta before buying it.
Just remeber that WoW didn't get 13 million subscribers in a day or even in a month, it took them some time. Judge Wildstar by how much you will enjoy playing it. If you really love it, stay faithful to it and sooner or later the subscribers will come. If everything goes well it will either be the new MMORPG-king and the first true WoW-killer, or at least it will split the market down the middle which I also find to be a tremendous accomplishment.
Comments
I have to agree, I feel daunted by this monumental task.
"Regard your soldiers as your children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys. Look on them as your own beloved sons, and they will stand by you even unto death!"
- Sun Tzu, the Art of War
Support the Indie Developers - Kickstarter
Wall of text just crit me for a stupid amount of brain cell killing damage from merely seeing how far down I had to scroll to reach the bottom. Jeepers....
But are you suffering from bleed damage over time..?
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
Will start off with the tl;dr.
To answer the question in the title, much will depend on how you define success. Can the game acquire a player base that helps sustain operating costs and future development? Probably. There are some headwinds though.
Until like FFXIV, Wildstar is launching alongside another AAA MMO in the Elder Scrolls Online, and not long before the anticipated WoW expansion. It’s hard to convince people to pay for one sub, much less stay engaged in more than one game. So Wildstar splits the potential customer base with TESO, and then loses out on people subscribing who go back to WoW for their next expansion.
As long as the financials are good, the game should be ok. Expecting lighting in a bottle is a bit much to hope for though.
I need an adult!
/sarcasm off
In all seriousness you can't expect people to invest 10m just to read and comprehend everything you just said on a forum.
People never learn..
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
"If I offended you, you needed it" -Corey Taylor
We'll just have to wait and see.
-Azure Prower
http://www.youtube.com/AzurePrower
No need to read beyond here. Faulty premise is faulty. Any product that turns a profit is a success, there are many successful MMOs.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
I would say WS will definitely be an early success which is scary to think it is all based on marketing,since a high majority had already committed to a game they have never played,not much different than when Wow started.
Me i take the intelligent approach,i WAIT and see the product and if you can't let me try it first,that tells me you are afraid to.Nowhere in this world do i buy things i cannot see or try first,it is using common sense,otherwise it is like buying a paper bag from a salesman not knowing what is inside.
I see in forums everyday the trends,when a game gets hyped,everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon,they even start defending the obvious drawbacks.
WS is not bringing anything new "that we know of",the graphics are VERY low end which has NOTHING to do with art style.It shows me nothing to entice spending money on it but i have already seen a lot are willing to throw money on a whim,so yes it will do quite well to start.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
If in 1982 we played with the current mentality, we would have burned down all the pac man games since the red ghost was clearly OP. Instead we just got better at the game.
But honestly stop kidding yourself. If the best an MMORPG can achieve is what WoW did which is over 10 million paying subscribers over the course of 5 years, then yes you can safely say that it has been the only successful MMORPG here in the west, not as a game but as a product. It is like disregarding the existence of multinational and multibillion corporations like McDonalds or Coca Cola and considering that best you can become is the equivalent of Tim Horton's. Playing a game that you enjoy and that you know will still be there in 10-20 years time with a healthy amount of players is priceless. You sir want a game as successful as WoW was/is, the only problem is that you want a game also worth playing and that is what we are all hoping for here with Wildstar.
They are trying to copy what WoW did back with EQ2. Besides that the art style was easier to maintain with a low-end PC, WoW kept lowering the system requirements just so it could suck in a larger crowd that couldn't even run EQ2 at the time.
I don't like it as an idea, but I do find it practical. As most casual gamers and low-income gamers are using PCs from the 2009-2010 era, most games already out and certainly future releases are pretty heavy even on mediocre 2013 computers.
I am a low-income gamer myself which is the only reason I support this decision of theirs. Truth be told, if I had a better computer that I could trust I would currently be playing FFXIV ARR.
You seem to be seriously confused about what the word success means. Under your definition, anything that isn't the absolute best in it's category is a failure. That is complete nonsense. Judging something as a product, if it makes more than it costs, it is successful. Are some products more successful than others? Of course. But, *especially* in the video game industry where a large number of games never turn a profit, anything profitable is successful. TOR, for example, pulled in somewhere north of 200 million in 2013 alone. Most companies would kill for that kind of "failure."
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
Just because a game can pull in that kind of player base does not make it fun for everyone. Fun can only be judged by the individual and that is only reason someone would play a game for any length of time. WoW found a way to be fun to a large player base but not everyone plays it. There is a hell of a lot more people out there that are waiting for a game to enjoy, it just matters is it is fun enough for them to stay and keep the game going.
All you're stressing is the game should aim to be like WoW, which has proven to be a fail method already many times over to pull in the same numbers as WoW. It may hang on to enough to go in to the black but realistically it will never reach 13 mil players like WoW did, I doubt any of the games in the next few years will be able to pull those numbers. Nobody is saying WoW isn't the McDonalds of MMO's they are just saying that others have also had success in a different way. Some people don't like a greasy slab of soy bean paste and meat on a crappy bun, they want a steak with veggies
and they are ok if not as many people want a steak also.
TLDR: OP hasn't touched the game. I only see posters who aren't in beta making novellas about how its going to either be the best game ever and the internet shall collapse around it, or its failwowclone.
I personally hope all of these action-combat type MMORPG to fail. I've got twitch gameplay in fps, rts, sports, platform, and moba games. Why the hell would I want it in an RPG. I played MMORPG's for years to relax, communicate with friends, progress little by little. Not to spam keys non stop with tons of lights flashing.
If you think Wildstar will be as big as WoW or a game is not successful unless it does what WoW did; you are going to be sorely disappointed. Same thing for people who think the game will be dead in 6 months when the shininess fades. Seriously, as much as I love WoW; I wish it never got as big as it did. Now an entire generation of player have some of the most warped view on what makes a game good or successful. Seriously, as long as the game has content that keep players logging in; then it was successful.
It does not even need 10 million players, even having 1 million a month would be considered a smash hit. Just do math for 5 second. $15 x 1 million is 15 million a month. Let's have fun and say the expense of keeping a staff, updating the games, maintaining the servers, ect costs 1 million dollars a month (BTW, it is no where near this high, but for the sake of the mathematically challenged, run with it). That means they would be netting 14 million a month in profit, just from the subs, not even taking into account box sales. If the game cost 150 million to make, they would make their initial development cost back 10 months. Now let's say they only have 500,000, a number a lot of people kind of just laugh at this point in terms of being successful, now it would only take 20 months to make their development cost back. Unless the game magically shuts down before they make their development cost back, it is a success financially speaking.
Now does that mean it was a successful to players, that is completely subjective and impossible to answer. The game is only as good as you believe it is. The biggest problem is people wanting a game as big as WoW, which will never happen again anytime soon. WoW was a game that was in the right place at the right time. If Wildstar can keep between 750,000 to 1 million players over the first year, the game, to me, will be successful. Now, will I like the game once I actually get to play it? How the hell should I know, I still haven't played it. People need to stop running with the extreme cases for a game being good or bad. Play the game, and if you like it, keep playing it. Don't like it? Move the fuck on and find something better for yourself. Post like this really don't do not much except lead to the same tired debate over and over again. Find the right game for you and stop wasting time caring about games you don't like.
Hell, if you go with the "success is relative" train of thought (which I don't, I say anything profitable is automatically a success) then even 500k subscribers is a healthy success, because there is currently only one game confirmed to be beating that number, and only two others in the range to tie it. Most people who aren't frothing at the mouth nuts would say if you are one of the top five games in a market segment (games that include subs in this case) you are successful.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
I agree on the financial success part. That is why I spent time breaking down the math of it. Even at 500,000 subs the game would be doing financially amazing. However, success, in terms of how people perceive the game, is another thing you have to take into account; even in business. This part is subjective. How people "feel" something is doing is going to affect their buying decision. If your servers feels dead, even if it is not the case, the player might decide not to keep playing. Just like when you see a small handful of defective product that have to be recalled, the entire brand takes a financial hit. It does not matter if it was even 1% of product or an entire different department, sales across the board are going to go down. People go off of what they think, not what is true.
If people feel that Wildstar is a "dead game", even if it had 500,000 players and, financially speaking, is doing amazing, the game will take a hit in the long run. Word of month would travel, and they would lose some potential customers. The game would just not grow as as much as it could. Lack of growth then causes the current player base to become concerned, leading to the question of "is the game is dying." Look at how many "WoW is dying" post you see. WoW still have 6 million subs, which is still insane. The game is not dying, it is just not as popular as it once was. There is a large difference, but a lot of normal players are not going to see it that way. They go off how they feel the current situation look. That is why Blizzard is looking at way to entice players to resub to the game. Wildstar success will be a mix of both financial success (making enough money to recoup development cost so the game is pure profit) and subjective player feel success (people like the game, tell their friends it is good, keep playing and new customers join in). They is why "the devs are listening", they want to make sure potential customers are happy with their product and keep playing. That way, they get to keep working on this game for a very long time.
Wildstar will be a fail
Remember those words from an experienced player
Fail or not it is still the best game that is coming out next year, with what should I compare it with? ESO? EQNext or lol ArcheAge?
Best is subjective. Depends on your priorities. Assuming they deliver on their potential, Wildstar, ESO, and EQNext all look like amazing games, but they are amazing games that focus on very different things. If what you are looking for is a game that hits all the same notes as WoW, but does a better job of all of them, Wildstar is your best bet out of the three, but a lot of people don't want "WoW Plus," they want "not WoW," so the other two will be just fine as well.
ArcheAge? Pfffffttt... May be huge in Asia, but the furry fetishists already have FFXIV as an option over here, they don't need another one.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
Of the games coming out this year, Wildstar does look good and i do believe it will be a success. EQNext will probably be a success as well due to the fact it has some impressive features (if all are implemented that were promised). If you consider profit a measure of success, you should consider The Repopulation as well. They are aiming at a group of gamers that have been neglected for a few years now. They probably will not make Wildstar type figures, but for the cost I imagine the game will thrive. Of the options you gave, ESO may struggle, but they will get their money back on it, and ArchAge is the hard one to figure, it may do well, it may do poorly, too early to say, but I imagine many will try it.