Serris said:
Saying ToR will unseat WoW is like saying your obscure D&D social networksite will unseat facebook. It might be more fun, but there's just too many people playing WoW.
That's a bad analogy to be honest, in part because of the differance in relative scale. A D&D social network site run by a few people can't compete with the sheer size of Facebook and all of it's options, even if it might be better at that one thing for a niche audience. As a result the masses of Facebook users aren't going to all leave since there is nothing there for the majority of them.
In this case what we are seeing is a case where an equally big production is finally going up against WoW, which is itself showing it's age. All of the other "WoW killers" were far less than they were supposed to be, as nobody put the money into it to produce enough content to compete with what WoW had become. What's more a lot of the designers didn't "get it" and didn't realize that not only does the whoe process of leveling and character advancement have to be good, but you have to have a lot more content than all of those leveling zones and such combined in one way or another to KEEP your players.
WoW has actually felt the impact of other games, when I log in to play after another new MMO has launched, you'll find that there are notably less people around, and a lot of people are talking about playing, or asking questions about, whatever the new MMO of the moment is. The thing is that very few people actually wind up cacelling their accounts and going to those new games permanantly, the typical conversation on say trade chat usually ends with the people playing it saying that the game was cool, but they saw everything within the free month (or two months tops) and then came back to WoW because if they were going to be relatively bored they might as wel be bored with a bigger community and more stuff to do, besides players DO tend to create their own drama and interest in those numbers.
I could be wrong, but I think EA has people that understand this. It isn't their first time to the MMO project or trying to compete with WoW. Bioware, which is new to the MMO thing doesn't just have their own single player development experience, but the whole resources of EA behind them, which includes people from companies like Mythic who have experience from having tried things that wound up failing, like the recent "Warhammer Online".
This could be a titanic flop, nobody can say anything for sure, but really the situation looks promising here. It was months ago that we heard that whole "EA Louse" thing, and even if The Louse was right, a lot could have been corrected since then, and all promise of an annoucement for a release date in April aside, we still know the game is under development. EA definatly doesn't seem to be taking "we want our game out there right now and making money" attitude that has destroyed similar projects. Since the estimates a while ago that the project had reached 300 million dollars, more money has definatly been spent, and irregardless of whether they transferred people from Mythic in to "save the game from Bioware's incompetance" or not, the time has passed to give them a chance to do it.
In the end we'll know what the score is roughly 3 months after it releases. The big question is not just whether it's going to draw people in, but whether it can keep them from going back to WoW and they are going to get sucked into a long term endgame which is something other MMO projects had failed to do. Then you'll see WoW start to see damage as they will have people canceling subscriptions to pay for Star Wars instead. WoW won't "die" but it might be knocked out of the #1 spot.
It's also important to note that one thing about Facebook is that it's fairly "new" as far as things go. The whole idea is innovative. WoW on the other hand is showing it's age, while it's graphics are helped by a consistant and cartoony art style, there is no denying that the game looks a little shabbier every couple of months. It's gameplay and deep endgame have been it's saving graces. Another game shows up that offers just asmuch material and has better tech, well... nothing is forever. Facebook will itself be replaced by something better one day as people look towards social networking, eventually you'll see a ton of improvements Facebook can't make because of the very way it functions,and an investor that can launch the new social service on an equally large scale, and it will go down. It won't happen tomorrow, or even next year, but it will happen. The thing is that WoW isn't as fresh as Facebook is, it's been there for a while.
I could be wrong, but I'm sort of betting on "Old Republic" not because I hate WoW, I mean obviously I don't with all the time and money I've invested in it (if you only knew how sad it was) but because I've watched the industry for a while, and unless what we're hearng about "Old Republic" proves to be pure deception, it's a matter of the timing being right, and the project being big enough.
Also I'll say there is another factor that needs to be looked at, and it's something of an insider thing for WoW players: people are increasingly bored with WoW, for all the praise "Cataclysm" hasn't been floating a lot of boats, especially seeing as the actual game is the endgame and the refurbished "leveling areas" only provide so much content for most of the player base who generally see leveling as simply being a chore you do to get another toon up to the point where it's useful in a raid.
On top of this, a lot of forever guilds are collapsing, it's surprising because my guild which has been around in one form or another with the same basic people for years has itself more or less collapsed, with sheer burn out and boredom being a major contributing factor. I've been hearing a lot of the same things from a lot of people I know on a lot of servers. It's not unprecedented, and it's not a good sign. Sure there are still a lot of these guilds out there, and plenty of hardcore players, I do however think that a lot of WoW's backbone is ready for a change, it's just there is nothing ese out there worthy of changing to yet. Of course none of this is visible on a balance sheet since people are still maintaining accounts, and stopping by to chat a bit here and there, and there is still a lot of raid activity going on of course in general. As I said it's a timing thing, looking at it from the inside WoW does seem to be as vulnerable as it's going to get. Of course none of this matters if "Old Republic" turns out to be a $300 million+ cow patty.
