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[Editorial] World of Warcraft: WoW Clone - You Say That Like It's a Bad Thing
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
It’s no secret that World of Warcraft inspires many people to great heights of passion, both because of their affection for or antipathy towards the game. In the nine years since WoW launched, every subsequent MMO has been compared to it in one way or another, usually by those who mean that comparison as an insult to the developers who made the game.
Head through the jump to read Suzie Ford's editorial, WoW Clone - You Say It Like It's a Bad Thing.
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Comments
I haven't played very much UO or WoW, but in my small experience the two are nothing alike really. I can't see how WoW could have built on ideas in UO.
Sure "WoW clone" is a compliment if you like WoW, or judge games purely on their success, but personally I do neither. And its not so much an insult as a description of a genre of mmorpg's. Since a huge proportion of mmorpg's have near identicle gameplay to WoW, such a term is useful to those who did not enjoy WoW.
The term mmorpg has become a dirty word that some developers avoid to escape wrong assumptions being made about their games. to the vast majority who don't play many mmo's the term mmorpg literally means "WoW with different graphics".
My blog:
"Blizzard created a mosaic of features that every other MMO since its launch has in one sense or another borrowed. And let’s face it: No company has done it better."
If you believe no one has made a WoW game as good as Blizzard have how can you be confused about whether WoW clone is a perjorative description?
Not only this you've let other types of MMORPG underdeveloped amd escalating ease and casual play to the point of most games being trivial.
WoWclone is definitely not a compliment.
Games:
Currently playing:Nothing
Will play: Darkfall: Unholy Wars
Past games:
Guild Wars 2 - Xpiher Duminous
Xpiher's GW2
GW 1 - Xpiher Duminous
Darkfall - Xpiher Duminous (NA) retired
AoC - Xpiher (Tyranny) retired
Warhammer - Xpiher
Rift is one of the Wow-clones that has been most succesful. Despite claiming a dynamic world, they failed in producing the right dynamics to hold peoples attention for longer than other MMOs.
It shall be interesting to see if games like The Repopulation and other games claiming dynamic contents, will understand exactly which parts need to be dynamic to keep players around.
WoW clone is indeed a insult one need only look to the facts how many of these so called WoW-clones have reached even a 10th of WoW's sub numbers? Why play a game that's almost just like WoW when you can play WoW?
Cut, paste and copy WoW doesn't benefit gamers in anyway and in fact its insulting. Not every game needs to be innovative but they should try at least to stand on their own rather then try to be second rate knock offs of a game that's slowly dying.
I'm not much into fashion and design but saying the gamers world should be full of WoW-clones is kinda like saying all fashion should be nothing but faux Gucci. Repetition and stagnation is not the way forward its the way to extinction
Yeaa that is a bad thing... WoW requires no skill, is more forgiving than even that michael jackson game for sega genesis, and overall is brainless. There is no risk reward factor, only brainless high quantities of giving to make wee one's feel special.
We need challenge, we need content, we need anything but collection quests. We want to feel alive, not brainlessly click every question mark above the head. When was the last time you paid attention to a quest? I remember when I played EQ1 and was trying to find keywords to say to the NPC to get him to talk to me. I remember being challenged. Yea it was tedious farming, but pretend if you had eq1 but without being tedious. Keep that risk reward factor. Keep it interesting .. eq next ftw
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Former EQ1 Rallos Zek (PvP)
Ascendant Chronei Immortal of Rallos Zek
(Now @ Prexus)
GW2 did one thing right: they did not put in endgame addiction raiding so most of that horrible wow community won't touch that game......
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
I no longer play EQ1
but EQ1 has always had a very strong endgame - on par with any raiding mmo
EQ2 fan sites
Just ask fans if their game is a WoW-clone. Many times the answer is a resounding no, even if the features of the game are very similar to WoW. It doesn't sound like a compliment to me.
There is no problem with World of Warcraft. In fact, I really enjoyed my stay in the game for a couple of years and met some really nice people and fondly think back to all the fun we had in the game.
My problem are the games that followed WoW. The games that took the same concept that we have been playing with since EQ and just making their own game from it. However they all forgot to include one thing that made WoW so special. Immersion, sense of fantasy and a really strong artistic world. I feel like just now, 10 years since WoW, we are finally seeing the industry head more towards an open world game. However I believe it is going to be quite some time before we see any game as a juggernaut such as WoW, if at all. WoW came at a good time and in a good way.
Total time played: 9125 Days, 21 Hours, 29 Minutes, 27 Seconds
Time played this level: 39 Days, 1 Hour, 24 Minutes, 5 Seconds
I take issue with the highlighted line from this paragraph in Suzie's article.
"Yet I think that, at least for now, we can think of what Blizzard has done for nine years as something akin to a giant jigsaw puzzle: Each piece represents a feature in what we have come to know and expect in an MMO. Quests, raids, dungeons, PvP, and social aspects have all been fused together over the last decade to create the world’s most successful MMO."
It would more properly be stated as Each piece represents a feature in what we have come to know and expect in a standard theme park style MMO. (the natural evolution from the EQ1 model)
See, the issue is, there are other ways to design a MMORPG, UO is quite different, so is Lineage 1/2, DAOC, FFXI, EVEm AC1, AO1 and some other's I'm sure I'm overlooking.
These designs are similar, yet quite different from the tree built by EQ/WOW, and the complaint by some of us is that Developers continue to focus most of their resources on building a better WOW, and of course, failing.
We're looking for MMO's that should have naturally evolved from some of those other titles which would have happened had Blizzard not discovered the holy grail in terms of game sub numbers which most every developer after them has continued to chase.
Point is, the standard theme park is one type of MMO design, but doesn't have to be the only one. We're just now starting to see evidence of developers starting to turn away from this one model, and incorporate more features that were in many cases part of the earlier titles in the genre, but largely ignored since Blizzard chose not to use them.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
worse
common trash talk i hear in other games is "go back to WOW"
EQ2 fan sites
The problem is that WoW took other game ideas and made them better. All these WoW clones are just making terrible versions of WoW.
Huge Difference
Here's a question: Do you get involved in a new game world or universe because of the creatures, lore and game world? Or are you more interested in new mechanics, game systems and clever approaches?
It's the same argument with tabletop RPGs. For some players, it's all about the setting and storytelling, and mechanics don't matter. For others, they see D20 as a drastic oversimplification and 'dumbing down', and feel that GURPS is the only way to play a game.
Currently playing: WildStar, Guild Wars 2, EVE Online, Vain Glory.
The reasoning I understood behind the word 'WoWclone' is essentially stating that it is 'outdated'. We had an amount of evolution between games like UO, EQ, and the others. New features, refinement, nifty things that made WoW successful.
The problem that we have with games that come out having had the exact same model that WoW has is one of "Been there, done that." The evolution of it stopped and we were left with something that we've done before, often covered up with a single 'gimmick' or something that is generally 'mleh'. Like Aion flying, rift's rifts, expanded world pvp in WAR.
It's not the WoW system that's bad. It's the repetition of the same thing, that hasn't changed since 2004 over and over again. Blizzard is smart enough to constantly improve their product and look to the future. But the clones focus on just 'meeting' where blizzard is right now. If someone made a 'wowclone' but reached 3-4 steps ahead of what wow currently is. I don't see why I couldn't be successful.
If they added more classes, more races, more sandbox options to agument some themepark type themes and added more complexity to the game. It could work. We just get frustrated when someone reheats something old and tells us it's new. Sure we like the old stuff, but add something new to it as well.
Well put