Not something that just simply isn't as good as WoW.
There is a huge problem with this counter argument, actually two.
1) Something different
It's hard to distinguish yourself from the Borg of MMOs, as it keeps copying and assimilating features from other games. Soon, we're back to "well, WoW did it first, and everyone else is just a WoW clone". (Yea, a bit snarky, but with a kernel of truth)
2) Something not as good as WoW
WoW has been worked on for years, polished over time, improved by taking ideas from other games. It is unrealistic to complain that a new game isn't as good as the old one in all aspects. Doesn't anyone remember WoW's sh!tty launch?!?
Don't complain you can't find a new girl friend, when, as soon as your new crush as much as farts, you run back to your ex, though she lies, abuses you, steals your money and is ugly as sin, but hey, at least you two have history together. Or what I call WoWmentum.
Someone else compared WoW to facebook, just a place to meet your friends and such. Sure, you all may pick up a new game together, but then those 2 don't like it, that guy can't run this new-fangled dee-ecks 11 on his toaster, and these here have to take a break because of RL stuff. Well, you all have your favorite dive bar to hang out in, the one everybody hates about the same, where you can be miserable together.
There is no question WoW destroyed a genre with most potential in whole gaming. Made it from open ended world where every thing is possible and social interaction is the king, into finely polished online version of RPG where players are lead by the nose and everything is served on silver platter.
Blizzard never meant for this to happen. They are not guilty for their success,
But happen it did.
The damage is done. The genre is moving slowly towards its grave.
Maybe sometime in far future when we forget about WOW, we will be able to start again from the begining.
There is no question WoW destroyed a genre with most potential in whole gaming. Made it from open ended world where every thing is possible and social interaction is the king, into finely polished online version of RPG where players are lead by the nose and everything is served on silver platter.
Blizzard never meant for this to happen. They are not guilty for their success,
But happen it did.
The damage is done. The genre is moving slowly towards its grave.
Maybe sometime in far future when we forget about WOW, we will be able to start again from the begining.
Shame for all the lost years...
A polished turd by any other name is still a turd.
A shiny turd, mind you. Spritzed with rose and vanilla smelling perfume. Nevertheless, still a turd.
Raquelis in various games Played: Everything Playing: Nioh 2, Civ6 Wants: The World Anticipating:Everquest NextCrowfall, Pantheon, Elden Ring
Just for a bit of perspective here; the top raiding guild in EQ moved on to WoW and even helped the devs out with raid design and boss mechanics.
Not really, Fires of Heaven wasn't a top raiding guild anymore by the time some of it's players became WoW designers.
Top guilds at the time were Ascent, Triton, Darkwind, Cestus Dei, Dark Horizon..not Fires of Heaven. Fires of Heaven never even beat Uqua I think, they croaked on GoD and never made it past it, which made them a guild that wasn't even in the top 100 anymore.
In fact, Fires of Heaven has a tendency to overstate who they were in EQ.
Furor, Alex Afrasiabi, WoW's designer and top content designer for Blizzard up to last year, had a massive ego, most people didn't even want to group with him.
SWG would have survived well if they fixed their game and kept to the vision - a sandbox Star Wars world.
EQ2 would have done better if it stuck to it's Everquest roots (more hardcore party based PvE).
WAR would have been good if they focused on the RvR and left the quests/dungeons/raids to WoW.
AoC would have been good if they embraced the brutality of the IP with open world FFA PvP (with consequence) instead of trying to appease the masses with generic quest driven PvE.
SWTOR would have been good if they embraced the story and character building in true Bioware fashion rather than watering everything down to include WoW-like elements.
Rift could have risen further if they had focused on the public event/rift/invasions and more unique class building system then trying to chase the WoW-model of dungeons/raids and instanced PvP.
etc. etc. etc.
None of these games "failed" or under-performed directly because of WoW - they did the damage to themselves by trying to be like "that other guy" and simply not doing a very good job at it.
You can't blame WoW for its success, you can definitely blame the fools trying to break off their piece of it and failing.
i agree..
rift and wild star tried to please and bring hard core raiders from vanilla/classic wow to their games..so they went for hard core raiding end game stuff..well if you read the last ncsoft financial report you know wild star situation..as for rift,,it has small dedicated players who keep it alive but i can tell you this the population is declining slowly..i am still playing rift so i know.
both of these games had/have unique stuff for example:
rift open world invasions and rifts could make it an awesome open world with dynamic events.
trying to clone classic wow and bring hard core raiders from wow to their game..was biggest mistake they made.
Originally in EQ, there were very few young people playing. Early subscription games were uncommon and most people playing were those who actually had credit cards and bank accounts. Those few young players I knew were usually in high school. They were also the players I knew that died the most and had the least understanding of game mechanics.
Why Is wow destructive? Well first it's not wow th game, it serves an audiance, many of which enjoy the game. Blizzard is however a destructive influence because they are abusing a captured audiance (themepark casual gear orientated) while they know five won move on - and they have developed a culture where they are happy to invest the minimum and reap gross profits. The market leader with a stagnant under developed product with massive profits - and so we have other greedy devs with a lack of vision trying to get their own cash cow to suckle from (e.g wildstar).
Imagine if blizzard Invested say 200 million a year on developing wow, it would simply be beyond approach, but they don't care, and so the tone is set for the market that devs have to fight with shareholders to innovate and prove that it's ok to get modest returns.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Also, why don't you comment on the 2 videos i linked on the previous page? All 90% of EQ raids consisted of was drag to corner and dps it down. There was no skill involved in that. The most difficult part of raid mobs was the pull. Once you got it to the corner it was simple from there. You just managed your aggro with the tanks and it was gg. You didn't have to move out of aoe's half the time, and you didn't have to barely even worry about adds assuming you pulled correctly.
I won't since
A: you linked a sandbag raid from over 14 years ago
B: it would have made you 12 years old doing that raid, which is why I called you a liar
C: you've said things before that showed you weren't being honest
you don't want to link your character / gear or show any proof of what you say
E: You say stupid things like "all raids were pulling mobs to a corner and throwing people at it", which is stupid, since that's not true at all, especially not later on
B: nothing in those videos showed something a 12 year old was incapable of doing. Again, many 12-13 year olds raided in WoW and the skill requirement in WoW raids was much higher
C: like?
as i said, its meaningless because of how easy it would be to simply take a picture and say this was me.
E: i said 90% of all raids were like that.
Also i'm fairly sure the "later on" you're talking about is probably after WoW had released and most everyone moved on from EQ. Lord knows i sure did. It just went down hill and lost most of its soul.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say its the elitist crybaby dipsticks who killed the games I loved. You know, the ever present whiners and complainers who filled the forums and game chat full to bursting in UO, EQ, DAOC, and SWG in the days before WoW ever raised its ugly head. The same tidal wave of self obsessed morons who's never ending bitch fest led to Trammel, Planes of Power, Trials of Atlantis, and the CU and NGE.
As a note - Trammel was the best thing to happen to UO.
You sounds like the e-peen elitist cry baby who was angry Origin took away the sheep you and your buddies were praying on instead of fighting each other.
Real men who wanted some challenge in their PvP played on Siege Perilous, after all!
But hey thanks for giving us a text book example of the kind of player I was describing from back in the day. You know the kind that will happily vilify another group of players that don't share their outlook on a game feature to justify the game being changed to suit only their personal tastes.
The irony here is delicious, thank you!
btw it's ok to vilify actual villains. the asshats that camped noobs leaving Brittania for the first time deserved to be as pissed off at the inclusion of Trammel as possible - for each of those losers that left, we got a 100 solid players who enjoyed PvP on far more even ground.
It's not opinion, it is bad game design vs. a really, really brilliant idea that literally saved the game - without Trammel UO would be known this day in the same way like Darkfall 1.0 is known.
I played UO in those days a little bit, pre Trammel. Only way I got out of town to actually level up skills was with the escort of some of my friends that had been in beta for a while (they didn't wipe progress after beta - stupid move!)
Either that or got really lucky sneaking - but my first real experience in UO was sneaking around the safety of town to sloooooooooowly level the skill enough to actually go out and play the game.
While I applaud the effort, the fundamental basis for the argument is wrong.
WoW didn't do anything to kill the MMORPG genre. Quite the opposite really.
The real damage came from the shills trying to chase Blizzard's success by releasing unfinished, fundamentally flawed WoW clone + twist games.
Let WoW be WoW, to the gamers that want that kind of game and enjoy it - great! Have it it.
You want to compete with WoW?
Offer me something different.
Something I can't get in WoW.
Not something that just simply isn't as good as WoW.
Sorry to beat up your entire well thought out and written paper in about 100 words.
WoW doesn't have the worst community. It does have one of the largest and most diverse, and in that diversity there will be the good and the bad. The actual game design itself promotes both the positive and the negative, but that is more on the individual than anything else.
You can't blame WoW for society, and for gamers as a whole.
Well said! The games that followed WoW had one problem...it wasn't that they tried to copy WoW, it was that they did not do it better. Go read any number of my reviews of games and I repeat this over and over again. Blizzard set a bar. The others failed to obtain. Not Blizzards fault...blame the game companies and publishers for half-ass delivery of their games.
And all the apologists come out of the woodwork who want to bury their head in the sand and pretend the MMO genre has never been better, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
OP never claimed WoW actively did this, but the current market is absolutely a response to WoW's success.
With the failed attempts at wow clones, and the medicority of themeparks in terms of pvp and giving an indepth and alive system and mmo virtual relaity, they made MMOs worse.
There are good things about WoW, and the best thing about wow, is that mmo developers after almost 10 years realized they need to differentiate enough from WoW... but still dont know how.
I liked where EQN was heading, but with any game the combat is a hit or miss regardless of how great the other systems may be.
Until now, mmos have not offered a cmplete package of gambling, mini games galore, short themepark main story progression, a lot of horizontal progression, indepth and alive mmo system (npc alignment).
Developers maximize their development on combat, environment and mass producing simple quests, and sprinking some story. Of course they will 'differentiate' from WoW a bit in regards of player housing, sci fi setting, VO work etc, but in the end it becomes a grind to end game with not much end game.
Imo, the journey to end game should be short, and really end game is where the real content or journey begins. The so called linear progression is a waste of development and really becomes a long winded introduction with the possibility of ncie story. MMOs lack variety and quest mechanics as a result of development focusing on linear progression, which is the fate of every new WoW clone, and never having enough variety due to their development being blown on a long introduction rather than end game content.
(possibly bcuase apparently a lot of people like long introductions - which is why these games do well at release when tnhey market a long introduction, but then everyone is pssied with little to no end game - becuase customers did not make an informed decision. if they were given a choice - a long introcudtion or a better end game with more content and horizontal progression- in theory people should vote for more end game. and if they dont, they ahve themsevles to blame, or really dont know what they want since developers cant give them what they want - by giving them both, so they are basically lied to and thus mmos are only an introduction - or as others would put it, beta testing their mmo until more content comes--- assuming the mmos surivies with their marketing lies and makes enough money to develop content properly beyone the wasted development on a long introduction.)
In short, WoW made mmos worse, but only becuase developers are foolish to make wow clones but at the same time blow huge budgets on things like VO, or bad engines etc. I think a game like swtor had a great chance of becoming something much more by drawing a bit of a better balance by offering more mmo content had their engine and design been for such a grand implementation. In stead swtor becomes more of the same, just like wow clones, and just like WoW... but i beleive WoW with the garrison inclusion, pet battles, and more to come, have the potential to add more quality content and continue to set a trend that amateur mmo developers try to folow in their shadow while over developing a new mmo which means a lot of their developmemnt is wasted on linear and simple content. But that is how they will get funded to make their content, and that is how they sucker the customer to a 'AAA' MMO.
I think a game like star citizen has the potential to set a better trend. A game like that is more to my liking with a design for a single player portion, and a design for mmo, and has other systems such as fps, and what looks like some racing.
Write bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble
And all the apologists come out of the woodwork who want to bury their head in the sand and pretend the MMO genre has never been better, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
OP never claimed WoW actively did this, but the current market is absolutely a response to WoW's success.
Oh yeah, WoW greatly participated in the fact that MMORPGs, or at least their "end game" content, is no longer doable just by no life hardcore teenage/jobless nerds but also by adult people with a job, a family, and other leisure activities than just sitting in front of a screen.
WoW is definitely the devil.
No one is saying WoW is the devil?
No one is even talking directly about WoW. You seem to actively attempt to troll and derail every conversation.
But for the record, your point is nonsense, because WoW's raiding was almost identical to EQ's raiding, except that in many pre WoW MMOs, many casual gamers could hop into massive raids with a lot of other players and do a one off.
With EQ/WoW's tierred style raiding, you needed a static group of players, usually a guild, and you needed to regularly grind the same raid over and over to memorize it, then grind it more to get all the loot for everyone in your static group, so you can have the gear to move on to the next raid.
It was the most exclusionary raiding system I ever saw, and my so called "casual" friend spent almost every night for years raiding just to participate. Whereas in those "old hokey MMOs" like DAoC, I could decide "I want to do a raid tonight" and hop into a random raid group, and have an equal shot at the loot.
The fact is, WoW improved the genre. It made things more convenient, for one.
Do people really want to go back to slow regens while sitting down? Or waiting at dungeon entrances, while also waiting for other players to arrive, only to have one person drop the group 10 minutes later? How many people liked alt-tabbing to a website for each quest?
As far as i know, no other MMO offers addons like WoW does. The macros and customization aspect of it alone, make it superior to most MMO's.
I could go on, but there's no point. People will always blame WoW, even though WoW brought in millions of players to the genre, and billions of dollars to it.
WoW isn't perfect, but it does have it's flaws. Let's not blame it for everything though.
Edit: Some of you need to relax, and stop being so aggressive towards the OP. Keep it civil.
I wasn't sure until I read this article, but now I'm convinced and its time to tell the world.
WoW killed Kennedy!
Its true, I tell you! Go back and watch the Zapruder film! There was an Orc in the crowd that opened an umbrella and then the undead on the Grassy Knoll fired the fatal shot!
I'm afraid I didn't read the whole article because, quite frankly I've read it in many other places and possibly written parts of it in some of my former posts. People have been crying this same lament for the past ten years to the point where this is probably just as much of a troll as saying "WoW was the first MMO!" To say that this era of gaming is any better or worse than any other gaming era is a simple matter of opinion.
Blaming WoW for the state of MMOs today is like blaming McDonalds for obesity in modern society. Blizzard put out a product and people consumed it. The product was successful and other companies tried to duplicate the success. That is the way of the marketplace.
The fact is that the original generation that played MMOs grew up and didn't have time to play those games anymore. The original MMO player was an ex table top role playing game veteran with access to a computer with a modem. After spending entire afternoons rolling dice to determine the outcome of a few encounters in a dungeon, what happened on line was blazing fast in comparison. Then we got older and with jobs and kids we no longer could spend a whole weekend on a raid or thirty minutes getting a group together. Things had to happen faster and it had already started to happen in games like City of Heroes before WoW came out. I played DAoC when it came out. I loved it. But if it re-released tomorrow in its original form I wouldn't play it. Why? Because it took 21 days /played to make it to 50 back in 2001. That's 21 days of in game time to get to the level cap. I just don't have that kind of time to spend on a game anymore.
And to put on our rose colored LCD screens and say, "oh remember how wonderful the downtime was? Remember how we used to talk and engage each other?" is revisionist history. I lived through those days of gaming and I can tell you no one spoke to each other during the downtime. We all went AFK. In fact the "downtime" was explicitly the universal AFK time when everyone went to the bathroom, had a smoke, refilled their drink or microwaved their dinner. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE griped about the downtime. The games were rife with time-sinks that everyone just plain hated and were eventually removed even from the games that had them.
Also if you played Dark Age or any other game from that era you'd know that people back then did the guild shuffle there as well. People would abandon their starter guilds for "RvR" guilds or 8 mans (back then known as "Beat Squads") when they hit 50 so they could get realm ranks. Then came the whole Zergers vrs. 8 Mans argument where people tore at their realm mates for "not playing the game right." There were huge guilds where people didn't know every member and those guilds split and reformed and merged and all kinds of things based upon what the people in the guilds wanted to do. There were guilds that didn't speak to a single soul who wasn't in their guild back then as well.
Want to know what really killed Role Playing? Voice Chat. Ventrillo, Mumble, Roger/Wilco and Teamspeak did more to kill Role Playing than WoW ever did. How can you role play a character while voice chatting with the real life people behind the toons?
All of these "maladies" you point to as starting in WoW existed prior to WoW. All WoW might have done is magnify them by multiplying the number of people involved. All that really changed was the consumer and consumer expectations and needs. Those games are gone and they're not coming back and it's not WoW's fault. It's our fault and we can also be the cure.
You have the choice. You can sit around and pine for "Ye Goode Olde Days of Yore when every gentle soul typeth like this" while waiting 10 minutes for a port and mana regen and write pissy posts blaming WoW for giving you hemeroids, or you can log into any game and be the cure by meeting people and having adventures with them just like you used to.
If anything we should thank the gods for WoW. It proved to companies that MMOs could be profitable beyond their wildest dreams and has probably caused more companies to make MMOs than would have if games like EQ still dominated the genre. It brought in millions of more players for us to meet and adventure with in WoW and other games. Maybe instead of lamenting its appearance we should join in the celebration because the truth is WoW breathed new life into a genre that was a dead man walking.
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
The fact is, WoW improved the genre. It made things more convenient, for one.
Do people really want to go back to slow regens while sitting down? Or waiting at dungeon entrances, while also waiting for other players to arrive, only to have one person drop the group 10 minutes later? How many people liked alt-tabbing to a website for each quest?
I could go on, but there's no point. People will always blame WoW, even though WoW brought in millions of players to the genre, and billions of dollars to it.
WoW isn't perfect, but it does have it's flaws. Let's not blame it for everything though.
Improved the genre ? they pretty much create a new genre that should be called Co-op Online RPG.
Use the name of MMORPG for the new genre they created was the damage they did for MMORPG , that lead to age where MMORPG isn't MMORPG.
WoW pretty much murder what MMORPG mean , and they should be succeed if there weren't people who remember what MMORPG mean.
Everyone knows it wasn't necessarily Blizzard that borked MMOs for us... it was Funcom when they offered Anarchy Online for $12.99 a month instead of the (then) current standard of $9.99.
People bought/subscribed to AO indicting to the industry that there was a LOT more coin to be had from the MMO gamer.
Other games failed because we got used to the high quality of WoW playing. I mean the skills where so well performed that no mather what you did! duel 9 hours in front of ogrimmar? or battleground? where you show off your well earned gear and skills!
Recently i played darkfall unholy wars which was a sandboz and now for me it's difficult to play theme park mmos
Comments
There is a huge problem with this counter argument, actually two.
1) Something different
It's hard to distinguish yourself from the Borg of MMOs, as it keeps copying and assimilating features from other games. Soon, we're back to "well, WoW did it first, and everyone else is just a WoW clone". (Yea, a bit snarky, but with a kernel of truth)
2) Something not as good as WoW
WoW has been worked on for years, polished over time, improved by taking ideas from other games. It is unrealistic to complain that a new game isn't as good as the old one in all aspects. Doesn't anyone remember WoW's sh!tty launch?!?
Don't complain you can't find a new girl friend, when, as soon as your new crush as much as farts, you run back to your ex, though she lies, abuses you, steals your money and is ugly as sin, but hey, at least you two have history together. Or what I call WoWmentum.
Someone else compared WoW to facebook, just a place to meet your friends and such. Sure, you all may pick up a new game together, but then those 2 don't like it, that guy can't run this new-fangled dee-ecks 11 on his toaster, and these here have to take a break because of RL stuff. Well, you all have your favorite dive bar to hang out in, the one everybody hates about the same, where you can be miserable together.
There is no question WoW destroyed a genre with most potential in whole gaming. Made it from open ended world where every thing is possible and social interaction is the king, into finely polished online version of RPG where players are lead by the nose and everything is served on silver platter.
Blizzard never meant for this to happen. They are not guilty for their success,
But happen it did.
The damage is done. The genre is moving slowly towards its grave.
Maybe sometime in far future when we forget about WOW, we will be able to start again from the begining.
Shame for all the lost years...
Just for a bit of perspective here; the top raiding guilds in EQ moved on to WoW and even helped the devs out with raid design and boss mechanics.
A polished turd by any other name is still a turd.
A shiny turd, mind you. Spritzed with rose and vanilla smelling perfume. Nevertheless, still a turd.
Raquelis in various games
Played: Everything
Playing: Nioh 2, Civ6
Wants: The World
Anticipating: Everquest Next Crowfall, Pantheon, Elden Ring
Not really, Fires of Heaven wasn't a top raiding guild anymore by the time some of it's players became WoW designers.
Top guilds at the time were Ascent, Triton, Darkwind, Cestus Dei, Dark Horizon..not Fires of Heaven. Fires of Heaven never even beat Uqua I think, they croaked on GoD and never made it past it, which made them a guild that wasn't even in the top 100 anymore.
In fact, Fires of Heaven has a tendency to overstate who they were in EQ.
Furor, Alex Afrasiabi, WoW's designer and top content designer for Blizzard up to last year, had a massive ego, most people didn't even want to group with him.
That's funny.
i agree..
rift and wild star tried to please and bring hard core raiders from vanilla/classic wow to their games..so they went for hard core raiding end game stuff..well if you read the last ncsoft financial report you know wild star situation..as for rift,,it has small dedicated players who keep it alive but i can tell you this the population is declining slowly..i am still playing rift so i know.
both of these games had/have unique stuff for example:
rift open world invasions and rifts could make it an awesome open world with dynamic events.
trying to clone classic wow and bring hard core raiders from wow to their game..was biggest mistake they made.
Imagine if blizzard Invested say 200 million a year on developing wow, it would simply be beyond approach, but they don't care, and so the tone is set for the market that devs have to fight with shareholders to innovate and prove that it's ok to get modest returns.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
A: i linked 2 raids
B: nothing in those videos showed something a 12 year old was incapable of doing. Again, many 12-13 year olds raided in WoW and the skill requirement in WoW raids was much higher
C: like?
E: i said 90% of all raids were like that.
Also i'm fairly sure the "later on" you're talking about is probably after WoW had released and most everyone moved on from EQ. Lord knows i sure did. It just went down hill and lost most of its soul.
Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!
The irony here is delicious, thank you!
btw it's ok to vilify actual villains. the asshats that camped noobs leaving Brittania for the first time deserved to be as pissed off at the inclusion of Trammel as possible - for each of those losers that left, we got a 100 solid players who enjoyed PvP on far more even ground.
It's not opinion, it is bad game design vs. a really, really brilliant idea that literally saved the game - without Trammel UO would be known this day in the same way like Darkfall 1.0 is known.
I played UO in those days a little bit, pre Trammel. Only way I got out of town to actually level up skills was with the escort of some of my friends that had been in beta for a while (they didn't wipe progress after beta - stupid move!)
Either that or got really lucky sneaking - but my first real experience in UO was sneaking around the safety of town to sloooooooooowly level the skill enough to actually go out and play the game.
And people wonder why they changed it...
Well said! The games that followed WoW had one problem...it wasn't that they tried to copy WoW, it was that they did not do it better. Go read any number of my reviews of games and I repeat this over and over again. Blizzard set a bar. The others failed to obtain. Not Blizzards fault...blame the game companies and publishers for half-ass delivery of their games.
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Is it just me or does anyone else find it ironic that the OPs quote says "death to themepark".
And all the apologists come out of the woodwork who want to bury their head in the sand and pretend the MMO genre has never been better, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
OP never claimed WoW actively did this, but the current market is absolutely a response to WoW's success.
With the failed attempts at wow clones, and the medicority of themeparks in terms of pvp and giving an indepth and alive system and mmo virtual relaity, they made MMOs worse.
There are good things about WoW, and the best thing about wow, is that mmo developers after almost 10 years realized they need to differentiate enough from WoW... but still dont know how.
I liked where EQN was heading, but with any game the combat is a hit or miss regardless of how great the other systems may be.
Until now, mmos have not offered a cmplete package of gambling, mini games galore, short themepark main story progression, a lot of horizontal progression, indepth and alive mmo system (npc alignment).
Developers maximize their development on combat, environment and mass producing simple quests, and sprinking some story. Of course they will 'differentiate' from WoW a bit in regards of player housing, sci fi setting, VO work etc, but in the end it becomes a grind to end game with not much end game.
Imo, the journey to end game should be short, and really end game is where the real content or journey begins. The so called linear progression is a waste of development and really becomes a long winded introduction with the possibility of ncie story. MMOs lack variety and quest mechanics as a result of development focusing on linear progression, which is the fate of every new WoW clone, and never having enough variety due to their development being blown on a long introduction rather than end game content.
(possibly bcuase apparently a lot of people like long introductions - which is why these games do well at release when tnhey market a long introduction, but then everyone is pssied with little to no end game - becuase customers did not make an informed decision. if they were given a choice - a long introcudtion or a better end game with more content and horizontal progression- in theory people should vote for more end game. and if they dont, they ahve themsevles to blame, or really dont know what they want since developers cant give them what they want - by giving them both, so they are basically lied to and thus mmos are only an introduction - or as others would put it, beta testing their mmo until more content comes--- assuming the mmos surivies with their marketing lies and makes enough money to develop content properly beyone the wasted development on a long introduction.)
In short, WoW made mmos worse, but only becuase developers are foolish to make wow clones but at the same time blow huge budgets on things like VO, or bad engines etc. I think a game like swtor had a great chance of becoming something much more by drawing a bit of a better balance by offering more mmo content had their engine and design been for such a grand implementation. In stead swtor becomes more of the same, just like wow clones, and just like WoW... but i beleive WoW with the garrison inclusion, pet battles, and more to come, have the potential to add more quality content and continue to set a trend that amateur mmo developers try to folow in their shadow while over developing a new mmo which means a lot of their developmemnt is wasted on linear and simple content. But that is how they will get funded to make their content, and that is how they sucker the customer to a 'AAA' MMO.
I think a game like star citizen has the potential to set a better trend. A game like that is more to my liking with a design for a single player portion, and a design for mmo, and has other systems such as fps, and what looks like some racing.
Write bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble
No one is saying WoW is the devil?
No one is even talking directly about WoW. You seem to actively attempt to troll and derail every conversation.
But for the record, your point is nonsense, because WoW's raiding was almost identical to EQ's raiding, except that in many pre WoW MMOs, many casual gamers could hop into massive raids with a lot of other players and do a one off.
With EQ/WoW's tierred style raiding, you needed a static group of players, usually a guild, and you needed to regularly grind the same raid over and over to memorize it, then grind it more to get all the loot for everyone in your static group, so you can have the gear to move on to the next raid.
It was the most exclusionary raiding system I ever saw, and my so called "casual" friend spent almost every night for years raiding just to participate. Whereas in those "old hokey MMOs" like DAoC, I could decide "I want to do a raid tonight" and hop into a random raid group, and have an equal shot at the loot.
Oh, look. Another blame WoW thread.
The fact is, WoW improved the genre. It made things more convenient, for one.
Do people really want to go back to slow regens while sitting down? Or waiting at dungeon entrances, while also waiting for other players to arrive, only to have one person drop the group 10 minutes later? How many people liked alt-tabbing to a website for each quest?
As far as i know, no other MMO offers addons like WoW does. The macros and customization aspect of it alone, make it superior to most MMO's.
I could go on, but there's no point. People will always blame WoW, even though WoW brought in millions of players to the genre, and billions of dollars to it.
WoW isn't perfect, but it does have it's flaws. Let's not blame it for everything though.
Edit: Some of you need to relax, and stop being so aggressive towards the OP. Keep it civil.
I wasn't sure until I read this article, but now I'm convinced and its time to tell the world.
WoW killed Kennedy!
Its true, I tell you! Go back and watch the Zapruder film! There was an Orc in the crowd that opened an umbrella and then the undead on the Grassy Knoll fired the fatal shot!
I'm afraid I didn't read the whole article because, quite frankly I've read it in many other places and possibly written parts of it in some of my former posts. People have been crying this same lament for the past ten years to the point where this is probably just as much of a troll as saying "WoW was the first MMO!" To say that this era of gaming is any better or worse than any other gaming era is a simple matter of opinion.
Blaming WoW for the state of MMOs today is like blaming McDonalds for obesity in modern society. Blizzard put out a product and people consumed it. The product was successful and other companies tried to duplicate the success. That is the way of the marketplace.
The fact is that the original generation that played MMOs grew up and didn't have time to play those games anymore. The original MMO player was an ex table top role playing game veteran with access to a computer with a modem. After spending entire afternoons rolling dice to determine the outcome of a few encounters in a dungeon, what happened on line was blazing fast in comparison. Then we got older and with jobs and kids we no longer could spend a whole weekend on a raid or thirty minutes getting a group together. Things had to happen faster and it had already started to happen in games like City of Heroes before WoW came out. I played DAoC when it came out. I loved it. But if it re-released tomorrow in its original form I wouldn't play it. Why? Because it took 21 days /played to make it to 50 back in 2001. That's 21 days of in game time to get to the level cap. I just don't have that kind of time to spend on a game anymore.
And to put on our rose colored LCD screens and say, "oh remember how wonderful the downtime was? Remember how we used to talk and engage each other?" is revisionist history. I lived through those days of gaming and I can tell you no one spoke to each other during the downtime. We all went AFK. In fact the "downtime" was explicitly the universal AFK time when everyone went to the bathroom, had a smoke, refilled their drink or microwaved their dinner. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE griped about the downtime. The games were rife with time-sinks that everyone just plain hated and were eventually removed even from the games that had them.
Also if you played Dark Age or any other game from that era you'd know that people back then did the guild shuffle there as well. People would abandon their starter guilds for "RvR" guilds or 8 mans (back then known as "Beat Squads") when they hit 50 so they could get realm ranks. Then came the whole Zergers vrs. 8 Mans argument where people tore at their realm mates for "not playing the game right." There were huge guilds where people didn't know every member and those guilds split and reformed and merged and all kinds of things based upon what the people in the guilds wanted to do. There were guilds that didn't speak to a single soul who wasn't in their guild back then as well.
Want to know what really killed Role Playing? Voice Chat. Ventrillo, Mumble, Roger/Wilco and Teamspeak did more to kill Role Playing than WoW ever did. How can you role play a character while voice chatting with the real life people behind the toons?
All of these "maladies" you point to as starting in WoW existed prior to WoW. All WoW might have done is magnify them by multiplying the number of people involved. All that really changed was the consumer and consumer expectations and needs. Those games are gone and they're not coming back and it's not WoW's fault. It's our fault and we can also be the cure.
You have the choice. You can sit around and pine for "Ye Goode Olde Days of Yore when every gentle soul typeth like this" while waiting 10 minutes for a port and mana regen and write pissy posts blaming WoW for giving you hemeroids, or you can log into any game and be the cure by meeting people and having adventures with them just like you used to.
If anything we should thank the gods for WoW. It proved to companies that MMOs could be profitable beyond their wildest dreams and has probably caused more companies to make MMOs than would have if games like EQ still dominated the genre. It brought in millions of more players for us to meet and adventure with in WoW and other games. Maybe instead of lamenting its appearance we should join in the celebration because the truth is WoW breathed new life into a genre that was a dead man walking.
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
Improved the genre ? they pretty much create a new genre that should be called Co-op Online RPG.
Use the name of MMORPG for the new genre they created was the damage they did for MMORPG , that lead to age where MMORPG isn't MMORPG.
WoW pretty much murder what MMORPG mean , and they should be succeed if there weren't people who remember what MMORPG mean.
Everyone knows it wasn't necessarily Blizzard that borked MMOs for us... it was Funcom when they offered Anarchy Online for $12.99 a month instead of the (then) current standard of $9.99.
People bought/subscribed to AO indicting to the industry that there was a LOT more coin to be had from the MMO gamer.
It's been downhill ever since.
(edit) Yes, this was Pre-WoW.
Ahhhh common stop this nonsense!!
Other games failed because we got used to the high quality of WoW playing. I mean the skills where so well performed that no mather what you did! duel 9 hours in front of ogrimmar? or battleground? where you show off your well earned gear and skills!
Recently i played darkfall unholy wars which was a sandboz and now for me it's difficult to play theme park mmos