Thott on Kunark

[Leokaiser]

Originally Posted by yorumi [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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Yeah, I should maybe have quantified that I'm speaking about AAA titles here, and by commercial success I'm not just meaning anything in the profit margins, but something that meets the expectations of the developers and their backers (hence I don't consider WAR particularly successful, for example, even though it probably turns a profit).

FFXI, like EQ, was released at a time when MMOs were still a relatively niche market. The reason so many emulate WoW (I feel the term 'Wow clone' is applied too liberally) in many respects is due to the fact that WoW brought the genre into the mainstream by cutting out a lot of things that kept it niche. Pretty much any big developer who wants to release an MMO which is successful by the standards of 2011 (rather than 1999 or 2003) wants a slice of that mainstream audience. From what i've seen of FFXIV (I could be totally wrong here), it doesn't seem as if Square were very confident the FFXI formula would work for them in today's market.

Vanguard is actually the perfect example of what I'm talking about here. It started out on a path towards The Vision, and I doubt they strayed from it because they themselves lost faith rather than caving in to the demands of the mainstream audience they hoped to attract and/or the finacial overseers.

If someone comes out with a low budget game that aims to make a large profit from 100k subs or the equivelent in item transactions (see: Korea), I'm not going to know their relative success, but it's not really on the scale I was talking about considering the size of the MMO market.

The most interesting blip on my gaming radar at the minute is the MMO under development by Curt Schilling's 38 Studios. Here is a guy who loved EQ, who also loves WoW, and is a player first-and-foremost rather than a developer; here is a player putting his money, time and reputation on the line. Will his game be more comparable to EQ or to WoW? No one knows at the minute, but if someone like him isn't going to bring back corpse runs and 40 minute hoofs across a continent to get a group, I wouldn't be too hopeful that any other big players will.

[yorumi]

I still don't think you're giving credit where credit is due. FFXI was released in north america mere months before WoW, and for pretty much all of it's life was in direct competition with WoW. The various census data they put out reported over a million active subscriptions at it's peak. Perhaps it was just getting stale but the game didn't start to die until things were made more WoW like, you would think if anything that should increase subscriptions.

EQ was the same way, again perhaps it's age but when did it start to die? As soon as it was made easier. SWG was supposed to be the anti-EQ, which is sort of what you're arguing that WoW did, it died a horrible death(i know it's techincally still around but lets be serious), they even tried to outright copy WoWs design and its STAR WARS, and they could get a population worht anything. Vanguard goes to be like WoW, they're not running two servers and only one is populated.

I guess my question is how many games do we have to make like WoW that are horrible failures before we stop saying WoW is the only way to make an mmo? Obviously WoW did a lot right, but you can't just completely ignore other games that have had success, and a game isn't a complete failure when it doesn't have 10 mil subscriptions. You'd actually probably be amazed how many games out there are around the 100k mark and the profits are amazing.

I think the real problem is the mmo industry might possibly be the least creative sector of the video game industry. All the games are just copies of something else, and there's rarely an original idea.

[mwatt]

Originally Posted by yorumi [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I think the real problem is the mmo industry might possibly be the least creative sector of the video game industry. All the games are just copies of something else, and there's rarely an original idea.

I think the real problem is that the mmo industry is basing their game design ideas off of game mechanics and themes found within WoW, because of it's huge success. They give no consideration to the idea that a major reason for the huge success of WoW is not just WHAT it is, but also WHO produces it. Blizzard consistently produces engaging products that are mature enough to be released and it does not make a habit of pissing it's customers off as time goes on. They have an excellent reputation within the gaming industry. This has a Synergistic influence on their gaming populace.

So far, every company that has tried to copy the WoW formula has produced a WoWish game, but without the backing of a Blizzard. Who wants to play a game that is already like an existing game except that it is worse and is run by corporations that sink because of inadequate bank or like SOE, generally just fuck up their games and piss their customers off?