Former Dev: WoW Has Killed the MMO Genre

[Whoracle]

I'd say he's absolutely right. Seeing this in TSW at the moment. I took about 3 or 4 months playing through the game, completing all quests that could conceivably considered "major", and generally had a good time. Nowadays there are more and more people who join the game, breeze through the gear progression, hit the nightmares after 2 weeks, and complain about not having anything to do but grind the end-game gear on the forums.
"This gaem sucks balls! MOAR RAID! MOAR END GAME CONTENT!"*

And TSW has a pretty great world and a good story, at least compared to other MMOs I've played.



* Translation courtesy of google translate.

 

[themilo504]

I always liked the journey in most mmo games a lot more than the destination.
Despite that I don?t think the mmo genre is dead or in the process of getting killed.

 

[bandit0802]

This is how my friend wanted me to play, and that's what killed it for me. He kept trying to "power-level" me, and it just ruined the experience. I just wanted to be able to enjoy the game. There's a lot to enjoy. But, yes, there were way too many meaningless quests that didn't do anything for you.

My argument is probably about to become invalid, but this is why I prefer SWTOR. The quest descriptions are delivered in such a way that gets you involved in the conversation instead of having someone just talk at you, and there aren't so many that they start to weigh you down.

 

[Seventh Actuality]

Translation: I want to get my shitty WoW-clone in good with the WoW-backlash crowd.

 

[BloodSquirrel]

It could be worse and there's still a chance for turn around. See WoW needs to remember the fundamental rule of RPG's, you want to have a tangible effect on the world you're in... WoW no longer does that, it never did actually. Rather than craft boss raids, they would be better served putting in a mechanic that would allow players to seize new territory for their faction and hold it... maybe allow players to determine key narrative points. I mean seriously, who actually wanted Hellscream as Warchief, even if it wound up as hellscream giving the player some chance to affect the outcome would have been a real coup.

That's a far bigger change to WoW's fundamental structure than they could really get away with doing. They've implemented PvP zones that could be "held" by one faction or the other, but there's not much point to them if you're just trying to get into heroics.

 

[dementis]

I've really enjoyed the firefall beta, I was lucky enough to get an invite for the first wave of the closed beta and spent hours a day just thumping for resources. Even in such an early stage of development with no real quests I enjoyed it so much more that WoW.

I like the new system in firefall of having to build your equipment and being able to modify it, I liked the lack of actual levels too. I agree with WoW feeling like a grinding level race to end-game.

I'm kinda going to be sad when it goes open beta as I've enjoyed the relatively small community being helpful and friendly. Something I never experienced during my time on WoW.

 

[-Dragmire-]

This sounds like like it could be true but I don't play MMOs so I haven't felt that type of fatigue. MMO end game complaints I have heard of though.

 

[Comocat]

SWToR tried that it is probably the most expensive game ever made. Simply put it is a lot easier and cheaper to make your skinner box upgrades and bonuses that rich lore and storytelling.

On top of that, I dont play MMOs because of story, I play because I get sweet upgrades all the time and I can interact with other people. Adding rich lore to an MMO is kind of like putting Kinect in the Xbone, sure it's there but it doesnt really make it better.

 

[RJ 17]

"Sometimes I look at WoW and think 'what have we done? ... "And it worked. Players came in droves, millions of them. But at what cost?"

I got a REALLY good laugh out of these two lines. Not because I disagree with the guy, far from it. It's just I can picture these lines being said in the opening voice-over to some post-apocalyptic movie.

Really I think this guy is spot-on with his description of things. After being with WoW from it's original launch till the end of BC (shortly after Lich King launched, to be exact), he touches on one of the main reasons I finally stopped playing the game, specifically the bit about equipment in the new expansions' starting quests being obscenely overpowered in relative terms to what you had before. Think of the countless hours you spent raiding to get the awesome gear you had. I was a warlock player and I put in a LOT of time to get a full Felheart set at the end of WoW's original game...only to find it laughably inadequate when compared to the quest rewards you got in the opening quests for BC. I didn't get Lich King right away, but seeing the gear my guildmates were getting from the opening quest effectively negated all the work I had done in the previous expansion. Hours upon hours of playing the game all reduced to meaningless "You really should have done something better with your time" waste...so I was done with the game. Why bother leveling up to get to the end game and get all the epic lewt when a couple years down the line it's going to be made into a joke once the new expansion hits?

 

[TiberiusEsuriens]

Getting ready for a new MMO I've been watching.. I really hope they make the levels take time. The last few MMOs I've played really made me feel like I was falling head over heels towards the 'end game.' I don't mind the focus of a game being end game, but if we feel forced/rushed to get there then the arrival has little impact. If leveling dungeons don't have a steady progression of difficulty and gear then raids have a different impact.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

I dunno I think MMOs are flawed as in it forces you to work with others and be a generic drone just one of many same type archetypes. MMOs should focus on single player and customization(free/mix and match builds/archetypes). Then build and expand the lore. Have group play work like co op things are scaled up to make things harder for a group. I really dig champions online it might be content lite but to make up your own character and tweak it to your tastes its wonderful.

 

[cidbahamut]

This guy pretty much nails it. It's one thing FFXI did extremely well back in its heyday. For better or for worse, the journey was long and arduous in that game, but it meant your gear mattered and you took in the world. Once you finally got to end game, it was still all there and the progression from there was anything but straight forward. To this day there are still pieces of gear from the first couple expansions that are still relevant and even Best-In-Slot in some cases.

The mad rush I see in MMOs now just makes it kind of bland and forgettable more often than not.

 

[Colt47]

I don't know why the founders of WoW would blame themselves for what happened to the genre. There wasn't any other game out before World of Warcraft that attempted to cater to the audience like it did, and even the most successful games at the time still showed the game industry was a small time business.

It's kind of like a popular home builder blaming himself for the formation of the housing market bubble ten years later.

 

[Ickabod]

When I started playing MMO's back in 99 with Asheron's Call, there wasn't a right or a wrong way to play an MMO, you were simply playing a game. You would grind to level up, but hitting that next level was the the sense of accomplishment at the time. Heck even WoW was like that for me for a long time, I'd level by myself, do some dungeons with friends, but there wasn't any "checklist" of gear that you "had to have".

Once Burning Crusade came out, all of my friends and I jumped on the level train and tried to level up as fast as we could, and that was where the wheels started to come off. We still have fun playing together, but the you must to A, before B, and C before D, exposed the treadmill. I quit for a little while and then came back for Frozen Throne, and had fun with that for a while, until we got to the hard core end game.

Looking at it today, or any MMO for that matter now, I only see the game as being about the end game, and not the game leading up to that point. So now I'm forced to grind out levels so that I can then go play the end game content and grind that content and commitment so that I can then do more of the same. Look I like playing my games, I play them as much as time allows, but I have to play on my time, and once I felt like I was forced to play a given way at a given time with a set timing based on youtube how to videos, it started to lose it's fun.

In the end I played WoW off and on for like 5 years, but I can't see myself ever playing another MMO just because they all share the same model that WoW created. For the most part it was fun, but now feeling like it's only a giant skinner box, I can't see myself ever going back to an MMO. Which is a shame because I liked the just playing the game randomly with my friends.

 

[Blindrooster]

I can't relate. Maybe it's just because I love Star Wars, but I miss Galaxies.

 

[DugMachine]

While he's right, what he has to realize is leveling can still be fun for new players. My friend recently got WoW and he's having a blast leveling up. He's not doing it ultra fast, he's exploring a lot and taking his time to know his class and do some low lvl PvP.

Then you take players like me, who have been playing since Vanilla and it's just ridiculous to assume we're still going to find leveling fun. I have 4 max lvl characters and I've seen just about every quest there is to see, every single zone, every dungeon, every "secret" area. You just can't expect anybody who's played for more than 2 years (and it's quite a few) to still be invested in the leveling scene.

Is the leveling too fast and trivialized? Yes. But only when you know that end game is where the game is truly at. I'm hiding this from my friend so that he maintains his innocence and levels at his own pace. That in itself is a problem but I enjoy WoW and have for many years. I'm hoping Blizzard finally shakes things up with the new expansion but I'm not holding my breath. I've quit before and I'm not opposed to quitting again but at the moment I feel the game is fine.

 

[Ferisar]

"Sometimes I look at WoW and think 'what have we done? ... "And it worked. Players came in droves, millions of them. But at what cost?"

I got a REALLY good laugh out of these two lines. Not because I disagree with the guy, far from it. It's just I can picture these lines being said in the opening voice-over to some post-apocalyptic movie.

Really I think this guy is spot-on with his description of things. After being with WoW from it's original launch till the end of BC (shortly after Lich King launched, to be exact), he touches on one of the main reasons I finally stopped playing the game, specifically the bit about equipment in the new expansions' starting quests being obscenely overpowered in relative terms to what you had before. Think of the countless hours you spent raiding to get the awesome gear you had. I was a warlock player and I put in a LOT of time to get a full Felheart set at the end of WoW's original game...only to find it laughably inadequate when compared to the quest rewards you got in the opening quests for BC. I didn't get Lich King right away, but seeing the gear my guildmates were getting from the opening quest effectively negated all the work I had done in the previous expansion. Hours upon hours of playing the game all reduced to meaningless "You really should have done something better with your time" waste...so I was done with the game. Why bother leveling up to get to the end game and get all the epic lewt when a couple years down the line it's going to be made into a joke once the new expansion hits?

That's relative from person to person. I appreciate my efforts in, say, WoW, because when I look back at the BC and WOTLK expansions, I remember good times, not epic loot. That's the thing, the padding to all MMO's is going to be material to some degree, but what you do with it is entirely up to you. Yeah, I raided, yeah I ran dungeons a bunch, yeah the leveling was leveling was leveling, but the stuff that was inbetween, especially the stuff with the players and friends is what made for the good time, not the 1337 l00tz. Much like anything else that's virtual, its value is entirely up to how much you invest in it.

This isn't to say that your opinion isn't valid, but that's not the attitude a lot of people have about the game.

OT:
WoW is weird. I can't reasonably disagree with this guy but neither can I fully agree. I nostalgia (that's right VERBS ************) over vanilla and BC, and the experience, and the leveling, and the questing and so on and so forth, and a lot of it is actually -true-. I was immersed, I was drowning in the game. I was, also, younger. A lot of it was new, a lot of it was completely unseen before by me. Warcraft 3 is what drove me to WoW. Now? Well, I don't know. The Cata newb-zone redesign is really fun in most places. I was actually interested in the quest lines, but not the overall feeling of them. I was entertained, but it was often so tongue-in-cheek that the whole factor of "looking back" was entirely devalued. Did I think Horatio Lane in Westfall was too fucking funny? Yes. Does it mean anything to me two years down the line? Well...

As far as WoW having killed a whole genre, hah, well, maybe. I would argue that the "WoW Killers" killed the MMO genre. WoW is just the cause because its own success made it look like an infallible model worth imitating, which is simply not true. The magic that WoW rode can't really be retraced.

I guess I'll try out Firefall, but I have no great expectations of MMO's anymore. It's just not healthy.

Is the leveling too fast and trivialized? Yes. But only when you know that end game is where the game is truly at. I'm hiding this from my friend so that he maintains his innocence and levels at his own pace.

You're a good person. Just wanted to throw that out there.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

I fail to see how WoW in general ruined the MMO genre.

That's like saying CoD ruined the shooter genre.

Snip

But COD did ruin the shooter genre. Its so insanely popular everything is compared to it and developers want to recreate its success. Instead of making unique games, they take the elements of COD and try to rearrange them into something new. But the people who like COD already own it, so they see knock off games as unnecessary.

WOW is like that. Its too popular, too accessible. MMORPGs have to copy some aspects of it simply to get investors and corporate to agree with it. No one will green light a project if you point to a money-cow like WOW and say "we're not doing that." They would laugh you out of the board room. But the problem is WOW already has the throne. Its already on top and nothing short of shutting down the entire game, servers and all, will dethrone it. and Blizzard would never do that. They'd get sued out the ass by 2-3 million gamers within a month. WOW is like the rabid sleeping wolf in the room. So long as everyone is silent and still, it wont wake up. But try to move and create your own unique MMO, and it wakes up and turns a nice little dining room into an abattoir.

 

[Guffe]

WoW... really many seem to not read the article at all!!!

I completely agree with this guy, I played WoW for about 6 months, 3 of which were Burning Crusade.
I was/am a HUGE WarcraftIII fan and wanted to continue the lore.

The highest level I ever achieved was 45 (Priest) and even getting to that (max level was 50, later raised to 60 back then while I was playing) I felt a bit of achievement.

My problem with MMOs is that I get so easily distracted from the "main objective" and usually just running around exploring and gathering useless shit (RolePlaying was my thing in MMOs). So my last month I went from 42-45, ONE MONTH! I felt like I couldn't play the game correctly and all my friends were talking about the epic battles they did with big groups etc. I wanted to be a part of that but just playing an hour or two a day wasn't going to get me there.

The epicness in the stories of my friends was great to listen to, like I had ones beaten Illidan, Mannoroth and Archimond in Warcraft III. But I also felt the open world of WoW did not fit the storytelling ways of Warcraft, it was too open, which is why I eventually quit.

So I think WoW is too easy, there is no sense of achievement amongs my friends who still play since they can play through the boss and 2 weeks later 70% of the players have killed the same boss, it was epic before to go to youtube and see the first group who succeeded in taking down the big bad guy 3 months after the patch was released. WoW has also changed a lot lately but the "hardcore" groups who play together finish the bosses a lot earlier these days and abck in the early days of WoW.

I think it's nice for the "casual" players to be able to get the epic feeling of these battles but for me it was a bigger charm that only the elite of the players, who spent a lot of time on the game could actually say they'd done something only 2 or 3 % of the whole community had achieved.

 

[Strazdas]

re-reading the article:


"FORMER WOW DEV: WOW HAS KILLED THE MMO GENRE"

It's isn't some offshoot MMO developer, its a guy who did work on WoW. SO I'm guessing it's safe to assume he would know a bit more about the mmo genre than most people.


He is right though, look at the endless lists of MMO's, about a good quarter are some form of WoW clone, do I even NEED to mention "World of LORDcraft"? New MMO's already have an uphill battle to get people interested, but with WoW that hill becomes a Morpheus ring and you end up going uphill while upside down.

The reason is simple, People played World of Warcraft. They expect the game to hold their hand and tell them "YOU ARE WINNAR" every time they complete a fetch 500 murlock ass quest. The second they have any actual challenge they cry how unfair the game is, how it's a casual mmo, bitching about actually going out on their own.

I would love to see people play Ultima Online before it got nerfed beyond hell.

Oh, you're putting something in your bank? well, that thief just stole all your health pots AND your weapon and is beating you to death with them because you are too stupid to pay attention.

I miss MMO's that actually wouldn't hold your hand all the way through the game like some over obsessive mother taking her 28 year old son out to the park.


But that is alright, there are a few non carebear MMO's out there, and we keep our social pool thoroughly cleansed from the unwashed WoW masses.

A former WOW develper can still be wrong about judging whole MMO audience though. yes, he probably know more than most people, he does not know everything. Youd thing a developer of the second msot selling console would know its audience, but i disgress.....

Yes, there are plenty of wow clones, plenty of COD clones, plenty of SC clones, plenty of Angry Birds clones, see the point? and yet it is somehow only MMOs that suffer from it.
What i pointed out is that you dont have to be a wow clone to be popular. Eve online, wold of tanks, and the like did it fine. heck, the very first graphic MMO (Tibia) is still running and it has no level cap or endgame.
And a good developer has said: i would rather have my players annoyed than bored. and it worked for him.
Ultima at the begining was.... raw..... i had no internet back then so only glimpses of that that i know, but yeah. still, you are taking an extreme to prove the opposite extreme, and neither is good.
yes, i remmeber playing Tibia, dieing 3 times in one day, and what do you know, the whole progress i reached in last month is obliterated. But yeah, i think modern MMos are WAY too forgiving. what is this you dont even losoe exp when you die, what stupidity is this.
carebear comment made me think you play eve.