Grey Carter said:
If I knew exactly what WoW did "right" that allowed it to pull in so many users, I'd be making games myself. Some of WoW's popularity is down to momentum yes, but it needed something special to start that momentum in the first place. I don't think that "x" factor that turns a game from a product to a social phenomenon is something you can quantify and repeat. I mean, Angry Birds is a pretty good well-designed physics puzzler, but I couldn't explain it, of all the games in that genre, was the one to go nova.
For Angry Birds i would say in order of importance:
- Luck
- Character design
- Good implementation of the gameplay
They did nothing new, but it was a well executed game that got very lucky and was targeted at the right market at the right time.
And yeah, WoW did a bunch of things right, go play Everquest, Asheron's Call or DaoC, all of them were big way before warcraft so inertia is not the right answer. I know it sounds vage, but i think it's doing all the baiscs good from start and trying to polish them as much as they could, from the casting animations to the implementation of their Global Cooldown, just compare the level desing for places like the (old) barrens to tatoine. I dislike most of Blizz politics, and i will never play WoW again, but as a mmo? It's the pinnacle of a decade to say the least.