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WoW has not destroyed MMORPGs, accessibility has.
sayuri2006
Member Posts: 161
After reading the response to an earlier thread regarding MMORPGs that have come out after WoW and have been crap, I truely believe there are so many factors why many people believe this to be the case. It is not the point that ALL have been crap, there have been a few solid releases. WoW has definitely shaped the MMORPG world, if it wasn't due to the high number of subscriptions, other MMORPGs wouldn't have battered an eye and tried to use the "WoW" formula into their games. Perhaps for devs, the "better play safe than sorry" formula has stagnated the industry as a whole.
People use WoW as a benchmark for many reasons, and too often blame WoW for ruining the MMORPG industry. People on the other side of the fence may look at it in this way: "WoW has brought millions of subscribers to our game, it has done something right. WoW has opened up how other MMORPGs should be like." In other words, success breeds success.
For me, I do not care about subsciption numbers and this is the whole argument. I believe other games were swallowed whole by WoW even though I found a better and more functional community, better crafting aspects, better all round challenge in them. Yet these games never flourished in enough funds and changes to the MMORPG industry which is a shame. WoW in Vanilla was a product of it's time, not the success of it standing on it's own two feet in terms of gameplay quality (EQ/DAOC was around) and it is this time that is the whole key. WoW has always been in the same direction and gameplay needs wanted by players as the industry as a whole. This is where accessibility comes in.
Accessibility has meant that WoW and other MMORPGs have been in a competitive battle to make their games more versatile to the general gaming audience; too often based on time constraints, ease of progression, ease of personal goals/satisfaction VS challenges, and accessibility to as many players as possible.
I would compare this, now looking back, when the MMORPG industry was new. I remember clearly, I didn't give two cents about my own personal satisfaction; ease of progression was often met with a brick wall and challenges were part of the package. I could not rely on my selfish self, and level a character up to max level solo nor could I attempt the challenges without people that I had to get along with. This is something that breathed in the old days, and this is where the most hardy of players stuck together because as much as they had to it is more that they wanted to. Do not confuse being challenging that it meant you had to fork out all day to play; this was simply not the case.
I see it as that the other side of the coin has been turned over and we as players have bred our own demise on how we have shaped the MMORPG industry. Is WoW really to blame? They created the tools to make WoW more accessible and more competitive, they knew where the industry was going. This is where WoW has been successful, by knowing how player's attitudes have changed due to accessibility and everybody wants a piece of the pie.
The way I see it, we have destroyed the MMORPG industry by blaming the games themselves and forcing them to making the linear: "Go fetch max's 10 missing bones and while you are at it, go kill the 10 rats" formula of questing, and repetitive dungeon grinding at end game content for example because we don't come together as a community in these games, we don't attempt challenges with being social, we want things given to us VS how much time we have spend on the game. I know, personally, my attitude has changed as well, because I used to immerse myself into the gaming world knowing the challenges meant social participation and not being so damn "needy."
It is a sign our times that players are churning through content so fast because the devs are forced to create these repetitive and stagnant grinds and challenges because people expect rewards. We need to function once again knowing that this is a MMORPG for a reason; the reward should be the joy and challenge of the world you are playing in, not vacantly seeking the best loot and showing it off once you get it all.
My suggestion to people is that we can't expect dynamic PVE and PVP content in our games if we don't become loyal to our games and build a community within it. You can argue that you pay to play the game so you want to see the rewards and more content accessible to a faster degree but if that's the case, go back to your playstation and solo console games. We should be content on not how much content the devs can put out to us but rather the quality of it.
Comments
No offense, but *what* community* are you talking about when doing *what?* in *which* games? Older games did have more of a community, but those quest types were put in so levelling was more task based and less grind on random mobs in slow regenning groups in EQ/GM 7x via macro I can almost assure anyone who GMed 3+ skills in UO did, when being GMed in UO meant you could actually participate in PvP and not get owned, likewise levelling in EQ is and was nothing more than how shiny and "epic" the next zone and mobs will be until you capped, camped a few mobs that respawned so slowly that there is no way those devs playtested anything. I think the rose tints are on, buddy.
Also, just for that one little one of brick wall progression - maybe you played crappy classes, but I know people who soloed to 50 faster in vanilla EQ than most groups could by a margain.
As you said, Blizzard has pretty much pioneered the concept of accessibility in the modern MMO. In the end, both WoW and accessibility are responsible, seeing as they are just two names for the same demon.
I think it is more like this.
MMO's are very expensive to make. That results in investors wanting to spend money on a "sure thing" because most new ideas WILL fail. WoW is far, far more successful than anything else, so investors want to copy it. WoW itself can't change a whole lot because that would risk alienating the user base it has, therefore it focuses on trying to have polished releases of similar content. All this results in companies copying WoW to a large degree to be "safe" and hence the pretty pathetic variety of MMOs. Heck, look at what people have been excited about or are excited about. Rift? Copies most of WoW's basic mechanics (holy trinity, quest system, etc, etc). TOR? Same. TERA? From what I understand essentially the same (some twists in targeting, but IIRC, still Holy Trinity and so forth). Sure, each of these games do have at best a couple elements or so that are new, but largely they copy most of the basic ideas regarding how things work from WoW.
Here's the problem though, in my mind. Holy Trinity games inherently lack deep gameplay for combat. Having everyone with extreme specializations means that each combat role lacks much variety. So Devs try to liven that up with combat gimmicks (rather than use a system that inherently has interesting gameplay, for instance). So that hurts combat in all these games, since they all copy WoW.
Similarly, WoW has a very binary difficulty system. You either all die or you win (and one person dying is largely irrevocable, so mistakes are extremely difficult to recover from). This, imho, makes higher difficulty for an MMO not very fun. It causes small mistakes to mean wipes, which eats up a lot of itme. So WoW (and others) try to alleviate this for most of the players by reducing the difficulty. This IS helpful in some ways. It means if you are super-awesome, then you can play with your good friend who isn't. Or, if you are that good friend, it means you can play with your super-awesome pal. Afterall, elite guilds have to toss aside good friends who aren't highly skilled. I don't think ANY of this is ideal for good community or good gameplay in the long run, but WoW does it, so everyone else is pretty timid about changing any of that, which results in games becoming less and less difficult as they become more popular.
Don't blame wow. Blame the sell outs. They're the ones who did it.
See you in the dream..
The Fires from heaven, now as cold as ice. A rapid ascension tolls a heavy price.
It's simple economics. If you are going to produce a game that costs (put number here) to make then the game needs to generate enough revenue to justify the cost and the risk. Since MMOs are so expensive to build they have to be able to attract a very large audience to support them, thus, they need to be accessible.
Blizzard did not create this dynamic, they simply understand it and are able to exploit it.
But the problem is that they expect WoW numbers.
WoW is the exception. not the rule.
The next game needs to have a smaller budget and needs to have the expectation of about 200,000 subscribers. not 2,000,000. Otherwise we will continue to see clones.
Agree 100%.
With each and every new generation of MMOs, the new features that bring more people into the genre are also the features that many of the current subscribers had been asking for.
As an example, MUDs were fun to play but they were all text with no nice graphics. When 2D and 3D MMOs started to hit the scene, that drew in not just people who had refused to play text games thus far, but also a very large number of MUD players who wanted graphics and had been settling for text MUDs all this time. Likewise, when EQ eliminated open PvP and focused on group PvE, it drew in not just people who refused to play PK Central (UO), but also a large number of UO players who wanted a gankfree MMO and had been settling for what was available. And in turn, when WoW provided a more soloable and more forgiving experience, it drew in not just people who refused to endure EQ's death penalties and grind, but also all the EQ players who had been enduring a game that did a lot of things they disliked simply because that was the closest they could get to what they wanted.
The point I'm trying to drive home is that big changes to MMOs came about not out of a desire to bring in people who previously had no interest in MMOs. Many of these changes were an attempt to please the current MMO players who were unhappy with the offerings at the time and wanted something that was more their style. I'd have to agree that the learning curve was steeper in the past, but I think you're wrong in saying that MMO difficulty has been decreasing in order to pull outsiders in. MMOs now are much more complex than they were in their infancy, and that added complexity translates to added difficulty. Anthony Burch did a little rant about difficulty where he makes a pretty good case for the idea that difficulty means more than just dying a lot.
I think there's more to it than just saying that innovation is stifled because game companies want to be safe and give the established playerbase whatever they want. Giving players what they want has been the driving force behind big changes all along.
I refuse to believe a game is less fun when it attracts (and retains) more players.
Accessibility is only a good thing. All games should be simple, yet deep.
The bigger problem is MMORPGs failing to provide a variety of difficulties. Every player deserves to have the game be exactly as hard as they're comfortable with (because otherwise they're going to have less fun.) And this means true challenge, not the things MMORPG players commonly mistake for challenge (which normal players call "inconveniences".) Corpse runs, harsh penalties, and travel times don't make a game harder, just more of a hassle.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Ahh, but what do gamers WANT? That's actually an extremely difficult question. Sure, you go on the forums and they might say "we want this" or thousands might sign a petition for that. A good part of the time if such things are implemented, it ends up they don't like it. Figuring out what they want is generally far from easy, beyond the trivialities (nice graphics, responsive controls, etc). Being creative risks offering consumers things they don't like and if that's expensive, then there is very high risk compared to the reward...hence a conservative strain in MMOs compared to gaming in general.
Regarding difficulty, there are lots of ways to do difficulty, actually. A simple level, you could just vary rewards best on how efficiently you beat defeat an encounter. Perhaps you get one sort of boost if you aren't hurt much or another if you do it quickly, etc. That's one way to boost difficulty...playing better just will get you better or more stuff. Note that this would be significantly different from how WoW does things, where you press a button to make everything harder (hence more dying)...it would be about doing the same content...better. I think there are actually a lot of ways to provide varying challenges without making it all about dying more.
Another way might be to go with a GW2 or Borderlands (not an MMO, I know) system for death. If you go down to zero, then you start dying. You can either recover from that, get helped, or die. This makes dying in an encounter less of a encounter ender. Perhaps if your team isn't good, they take an hour doing something that takes a good team 10 minutes, but they get challenged the whole time because there aren't 5 minute breaks every 8 minutes throughout that hour due to wipes.
Really, the problem with higher difficulties in games like WoW really boils down to death and wiping. Having to sit out of the game isn't very fun and it just isn't a good system. Heck, you don't see other games on the market that make you not play for certain amount of time if you die. It's horrible design.
The only people who have a handle on what players *really* want are successful developers like Blizzard. They tune their games so MILLIONS are willing to shelf out $$$ every month to buy it.
People ranting on this forum have no clue of how to make a good game. I would love to see them try though.
I think it is a near certainty though, that there are a lot of potential MMO designs that would be as or more successful than WoW (at least from a competitive standpoint). The problem is that it is crazy expensive trying to figure that out, so there isn't much experimentation. It is perfectly accurate to say the current choice among MMOs leaves a lot to be desired...not much healthy competition. Not easy to fix, however (from a business perspective).
My opinion, yes it did destroy MMORPGs. Sad but true! Whereas before WoW smaller game developers could take chances on innovation in their games, Blizzard has made a game so huge that is marketed to such a wide audience that the only way to compete with it is to copy it.
It's the same with science fiction being ruined with all special effects now and no story. It's mass marketing: making a product that appeals to such a wide audience so that others are afraid to deviate from the norm because it's too risky. Why do you think Blizzard took out spending stat points in Diablo 3? Because it appeals to a larger audience than just hardcore RPGers.
If you want to compete with the biggest MMO on the market you better bring something equal to it.
Otherwise, find your niche and grow it. Nothing wrong with that.
EVE, Ryzom, MO all does things differently from WOW and grows their business.
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
Honestly, I think the industry reaching near-capacity and people being satisfyed as a majority for the AAA Wow-like titles being the issue, not that it's a bad thing, if that many people are enjoying themselves. The market is *not* like having to choose between battlfield 3 and Modern Warfare 3. you can pick up and play both trivially in terms of cost compared to an MMO subscription, but WoW might actually have enough about it that people like it just holds its subs on its own, and that newer games regardless of genre flavor accesibility innovation and ubiquitness are irelevant when people already have what they like and are *not* tired of it yet.