Blizzard Talks Free-To-Play World of Warcraft

[Cynical skeptic]

they should do like Guild Wars does; "Buy the Game, Play for Free Forever" - that's one of the main reasons why GW is my favorite MMO

Except guildwars isn't an mmo. Its the same deal if blizzard made the lobby of battle.net full 3d.

All the dungeons/instances/quests/[whatever you kids call them] are p2p with server side saves.

But yea, charging for weapons/gear? No. Ads all over the place? No. If they figure out some other way to make free mmos work, sure, but all current models are just sleazy.

 

[SnugglesPanda]

but not until another game manages to make a serious play for WoW's crown.

So, WoW will be free to play in Spring 2011? After all, thats when SW: TOR comes out.

Lol. I'm just seeing SW:TOR as just another warhammer personally. People will play it and leave.

I'm actually hoping for that a well because I don't want the majority of the population moving to a star wars game. I got enough at galaxies and EQ was way better when that was around.

Also as a poster mentioned above, you make it free to play, you get a shitty in game shop where you can buy items. It will be worse than emblems from heroics and shit, you can just buy your gear, there will be more idiots.
F2P is fail.

It's a BioWare game that is also an MMO, not the other way around.

Instead of an mmo game also being from bioware? I'm sorry but your point just went above my head.

It's a BioWare game (story, dialog, gameplay) first, an MMO (the MMO stuff) second. The focus is on the BioWare Game part, not the MMO part.

Ah. Well thats another point, if it loses focus on the mmo part I won't want to play it. I won't want to play a single player game with half assed multi(I live for grouping). I also haven't heard anything about raids, and thats a big part of it for me.

Also just to clarify, I'm overwhelmingly cynical because I have tried the games that were "wow killers". Mythic was a great developer with DAOC, but they failed miserably with warhammer.

Raids, groups and all that will be there, but there's also a strong focus on your personal quests.

Just throwing this out there.

I'm going to copy paste a little message that sums up my thoughts.

"All we have really seen of SWtoR are two cinematics which or on par with the WoW ones. But we haven't seen much in terms of gameplay. There have been numerous games dubbed WoW-Killers due to the things shown off in pre-release propaganda. Like for Aion the major aspects that presented a threat to WoW were their superior graphics and ability to fly at level 10. For Warhammer Online it was the massive backstory that rivalled that of the Warcraft universe. But all in all these supposed WoW-Killers fell flat on their faces. Don't debate which is better till you've had people who have played the finished product, because all your basing your arguements on at the moment for SWtoR is only info they have decided to give away.

At the moment for WoW - Breaker of Records.
- Massive player fan-base from previous Warcraft universe installments.
- 5 years of perfecting gameplay and balancing out classes.
- Completely 'new' game being released in upcoming expansion.
- Almost unlimited freedom in the world.

At the moment for SWtoR - Massive fan-base from the movies and previous Star Wars games.
- In-game mission cinematics, both solo player and party.
- Not everyone will suddenly jump to jedi / sith, they are not all powerful as they were in Galaxies.

SWtoR hasn't yet had the time to stand up to WoW in terms of whos better. WoW is 5 years ahead of it. Its last expansion became the fastest selling PC game within the first 24 hours of release of all time. Its not gonna be balanced right off the bat, its not gonna be perfect and seamless. Unlike WoW, I doubt you'll have the same level of freedom, such as being able to fly over mountains or swim along the coast from one zone to the other. There will be serious limitation to where you can go.

In other words, SWotR has a long way to go YET before it can compete with WoW at all. You cannot say anything definate until it is released and others have played it. "

Have a nice day.

 

[John Funk]

they should do like Guild Wars does; "Buy the Game, Play for Free Forever" - that's one of the main reasons why GW is my favorite MMO

Guild Wars is almost entirely instanced. It's more like Diablo than an MMOG, which means its expenses are also much lower.

That said, GW2 is apparently going full-world MMOG so I'm curious how they'll pull it off.

 

[Vhite]

If World of Warcraft goes free..

Dear god o.o

Arm the cannons!
Protect the young!
Thou shan't have these young minds!

Muhahaha. Their souls and bodies are enough.

 

[Tourette]

Imagine WoW becoming F2P. All those horrible little oiks that were never allowed to use their parents credit cards all jumping onboard which is already full of those horrible little oiks that got their grubbly little mits on their parents credit cards.
Scary thought.

 

[rosac]

Sod WoW its WAR thaat needs to become free... but hey, if it does become free it may crush guild wars two.

and then I will be a very sad panda.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Not even if free. It annoys me enough when I don't play it.

Hold on...CoD is allegedly going pay-to-play and WoW isn't?

Shum mishtake shurely?

 

[Croaker42]

And yet I still would not go back.
I know its strange me already owning up through wrath and all.
But I am having way too much fun on Eve. Perhaps its my addiction to having choices in a game.

 

[Legion]

With any luck, this means that 'Fallout Online' will not have any subscription in order to get a large enough fan base.

One can dream... (Especially as it's the only way that I'd buy it).

 

[Twilight.falls]

WoW is the juggernaut of the MMO world and has been there for a while. If Blizzard made it free, they could get away with it. They already have Scrooge McDuck-quality money vaults.

 

[Billion Backs]

F2P model is a gimmick that will end up costing you more unless you're some 14 year old basement dweller with no job and no credit card. Which probably described quite a lot of people on the internet that whine about some fucking 15 dollars a month.

I'm a college student with barely any money, and I could still easily handle 15 bucks a month payments for an awesome game that doesn't end after 6 hours of cliched single-player mode. It's just cliche fantasy until you stop paying! Ha!

It's cheaper to pay the fee.

I hope most people realize that free-to-play means you get most of the races and classes and about half of the actual game. Then you have to pay for extra character slots, races, classes, and additional quests (i.e. most of them).

 

[Brad Shepard]

It wont happen, Its making too much money.

 

[Billion Backs]

"I can definitely imagine that being the case with World of Warcraft. If another game comes along and blows us away it may not make sense for us to have a subscription fee,"

Exactly.
Because you know that you'll loose 90% of your paying playerbase because Vanilla WoW is the only good WoW.

When you say "vanilla WoW", do you mean "WoW before any expansions came out"?

Cause if you do... You, sir, are mistaken. Vanilla WoW was shit, for the most part, until later patches. Practically nothing to do in game without a 40 man raid, and even in that case it's still running the same instance. Bad class balance, horrible itemization (although the only thing I'd miss were various awesome procs on weapons. Those were cool, if a bit impractical at times. WoW needs more procs!) and very little to do in the game aside from raiding.

Unless you also count the old broken PvP system. Which was pretty much an equivalent of raiding, both time- and group-wise, if you were interested in getting anywhere. Trust me, I've done it. It's still more fun then Molten Core, but the newfangled Arena and upcoming rated BGs are simply better.

 

[Fatscalyman]

THE ONLY THING THAT WILL DESTROY WOW IS WOW ITSELF.

I hope to god this does not happen for a long fucking time. I despise F2P games. This is the reason:

Buy the game and pay 15$ a month and you get everything in the game if you work for it. - Monthly Subscription Model

Buy the game, or download it for free and then you have to pay say 5 bucks for a cool weapon skin, 20 for this rare mount, 40 to get these potions and exp boost. - Free to Play model (Or the F2P games I have tried)

The point I am trying to make, F2P games seem to have far less quality than those who pay subscriptions for. Also most of the cool stuff in F2P MMO's require you to pay a lot of freaking money just to get them. Unlike in Subscription where you pay a base line of 15 bucks a month. And If WoW every does this I will happily jump ships to SW; TOR and no they will not go Subscription anytime soon after it is released (that is my guess anyway)

Also SW: ToR will NOT kill WoW. Only WoW could kill WoW as I stated above. How hard is that to get through your heads?

And if I had to harbor a guess I would think they would go F2P at around 2012/2013 If not later, only because that is where I am guessing they will release there other MMO, since I am guessing again that they release info on it this or next Blizzcon.

I hope most people realize that free-to-play means you get most of the races and classes and about half of the actual game. Then you have to pay for extra character slots, races, classes, and additional quests (i.e. most of them).

This and this. It's pretty hard to get into a game when you can spend six hours trying to get good gear when you can just spend needless amounts of money for the same, if not better, gear. It's like buying Dragon Age and then shelling out twenty bucks to skip to the end.

 

[BboyTeddyBear]

i might play it if enough of my friends join in. Mmo are only good when you have a bunch of friends.