Former Dev: WoW Has Killed the MMO Genre

Steven Bogos

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Jan 17, 2013
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Former Dev: WoW Has Killed the MMO Genre


The boss of new MMO Firefall thinks that World of Warcraft made MMOs "too accessible."

"Sometimes I look at WoW and think 'what have we done?' I think I know. I think we killed a genre." Former World of Warcraft developer and CEO of Red 5 Studios Mark Kern believes that WoW, and its countless clones, have killed the MMO genre by making MMOs too accessible to a casual audience. In particular, the ease in leveling through the main game and the race to the mythical "endgame" has made it increasingly difficult for new developers to create rich worlds. "And it worked. Players came in droves, millions of them. But at what cost?"

"Gear from the new expansions' first quests made raid gear from previous expansions a joke. And the level curve became faster and faster until we reached a point where everyone is just in a race to get to max level, and damn everything else in between. Why care about level 20 gear when you would blow by levels so fast it was obsolete before you even logged off for the night?"

"When the bar is lowered so that everyone can reach max level quickly, it makes getting to max level the only sense of accomplishment in the game," he said, "We lose the whole journey in between, a journey that is supposed to feel fun and rewarding on its own. Nobody stops to admire a beautiful zone or listen to story or lore, because there is no time to do so." Kern says that in World of Warcraft style MMOs, players are fed quests "by a firehose" that are so trivial, and offer such obvious gear upgrades, that players are never in one place long enough to appreciate the world around them.

Kern says that this leads to fatigue from both players and developers, which is causing the genre to stagnate. Players don't want to play another "WoW clone" but developers are afraid of deviating from the formula that WoW has ironically made players interested in the MMO genre in the first place.

Firefall [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/112060-Firefall-Already-Launched-Public-Beta-Rolling-Out-This-Month], the new sci-fi MMO/FPS from Red 5, goes into open beta on July 9, and Kern promises that the team is focusing on the "journey" instead of end game.

Source: VG24/7 [http://www.vg247.com/2013/06/29/firefall-boss-feels-mmo-developers-have-killed-a-genre-by-catering-to-accessibility-over-achievement/]

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Thaluikhain

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'Players don't want to play another "WoW clone" but developers are afraid of deviating from the formula that WoW has ironically made players interested in the MMO genre in the first place.'

Copy and paste that into discussions about a number of other genres, I'd say.
 

VladG

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Not sure what to say about this. He's not wrong, not about the leveling. When I started playing WoW it took me months to get to max level. Now you could level an alt in a week or two.

Though the flip-side is I like the endgame content more than the levelling. From my perspective, this isn't really a bad thing.

For anyone who does enjoy levelling though.. the experience is extremely trivialized. Until you reach max level, nothing matters. There's no point to doing most of the quests, crafting is a waste of time, dungeons are trivialized, gear is mostly pointless (especially if you have Heirloom gear, which also makes combat much too easy). Before these changes though.. I felt that levelling an alt was a chore and hardly ever bothered. In the end, I levelled more alts after the changes than I ever did before.

Rather than proclaim one way or another as ultimately bad, I think there needs to be better balance between the two. Don't make levelling a grindy chore ( Vanilla WoW) but don't make it a meaningless experience either.


Wildstar devs have suggested that levelling will be much slower and gradual and that they aim to make all low level activities (getting loot, crafting, quests, dungeons, etc) relevant and enjoyable. Here's hoping they actually manage it.
 

wetfart

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So ... is he telling me not to buy his game? Okay. I don't think reverse psychology is going to work that well as a marketing technique though.
 

New Troll

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wetfart said:
So ... is he telling me not to buy his game? Okay. I don't think reverse psychology is going to work that well as a marketing technique though.
No, he says the MMO genre is stagnant but his MMO is hoping to bring life back into the adventure.

And that is exactly why I quit WoW. I worked my ass of to be the best, only for an expansion to come out and make me obsolete. Way too much work for very little reward.
 

Scars Unseen

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May 7, 2009
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saintdane05 said:
Yeah! How DARE people try to get into and enjoy a game! How DARE THEY!
point you

Here. Let me help. In the article above, Mark Kern was quoted as saying this:

"We lose the whole journey in between, a journey that is supposed to feel fun and rewarding on its own. Nobody stops to admire a beautiful zone or listen to story or lore, because there is no time to do so." Kern says that in World of Warcraft style MMOs, players are fed quests "by a firehose" that are so trivial, and offer such obvious gear upgrades, that players are never in one place long enough to appreciate the world around them."
What he is talking about has nothing to do with people not getting to enjoy the game, but rather that games that are geared for fast leveling -like WoW and most of its wannabes- encourage a belief that the end game is all that matters, and that everything before should be blown through as quickly as possible. This is made pretty obvious when you see people complaining about games that just came out not having a comprehensive end game. And he's right.

I remember back in Everquest, I always felt a sense of being in the present. Leveling took so long that it was important to enjoy what you were doing, because -and this is my opinion as a somewhat casual MMO player- grinding in that game was a one way trip to insanity. I mean, what you were doing would be considered grinding by today's standards, but there was grinding and there was grinding. One thing that WoW did right over its predecessors was to up the volume of structured quests(20 bear ass quests notwithstanding). What they did wrong was speed up the leveling process so that they became nothing more than a more wordy version of grinding(albeit a shorter version as well).
 

Yarrow

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I think a mmo that focuses on the 'journey' and not the endgame would suffer at the hands of those WoW trained players who somehow manage to rapidly burn through the all the contend in a week then ***** of forums about it. I seriously don't understand how people are able to get though content so fast unless they ignore all lore and the experience of the game.
 

shadowmagus

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Yarrow said:
I think a mmo that focuses on the 'journey' and not the endgame would suffer at the hands of those WoW trained players who somehow manage to rapidly burn through the all the contend in a week then ***** of forums about it. I seriously don't understand how people are able to get though content so fast unless they ignore all lore and the experience of the game.
As a regular MMO player, I can tell you that this is exactly what they do. They have it so ingrained in them that they HAVE to get to endgame and they HAVE to get that awesome gear that they blow through the main quest as fast as possible, going so far as to get a friend or guild to run them through on their first character. It completely kills the idea of what an MMO is supposed to be about, but this normally brings in the "I paid my money, so I can play how I want" crowd, never realizing they are missing the point of the whole thing.
 

Clive Howlitzer

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Speaking as someone who used to partake in quite a few MMOs but none really since the WoW train started. I almost always cared more about the journey and never once saw the appeal of end-game and raids and such. It just wasn't my bag.
 

Strazdas

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if you dont like endgame, make mmos without such ridiculous concepts like level caps. oh wiat, there already are plenty, and their popular. so whats your point again?
yes, wow has killed the MMO genre by making it mainstream and now your niche game cant cut its own part unless it becomes imaginative and unique, how terrible that you have to invest some work and not just have people flock to you simply due to lack of choice. i pity you, truly, for you have not found the monopoly that you expected in MMOs.

You just have to pick the right MMOs and you will see that there is aboslutely no need to be a WOW clone to be sucesful.
 

WWmelb

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I reject the notion of vanilla wow's leveling being a trivial grindfest, and i found myself (although i quit a few weeks into cata) reminiscing about the epic quest chains of vanilla wow that just never resurfaced.

I remember picking up the quest from the fallen hero of the horde at around level 37 for the first time, and that quest chain stuck with me until level 60 when i finally killed the last boss of the chain.

The story was awesome, the scope of it was amazing, sending you all over the world, and giving you great azshara back story more than any other quest in the game.

And there were a number of chains like this, that were amazing. Especially things like the class specific epic quests... Benediction, the hunter chain, doomguard, paladin mount... all amazingly awesome (and fucking hard) quests...

It was the stripping down of the leveling process completely in cata that turned me away for good. Go to hub A. do all quests and it will open hub B. continue until 85 through the 3 more zones. Do the same thing in left over zones for cash.

Ugh.

But yes, i want a new MMO that grabs me like WoW did upon release, but the only one that has come close was the secret world. Speaking of which, is free to play now, maybe i should go give it another shot..

And i'll keep an eye on this firefly..er firefall game.
 

Dragonbums

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May 9, 2013
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I fail to see how WoW in general ruined the MMO genre.

That's like saying CoD ruined the shooter genre.

I disagree with that sentiment. Did WoW lose it's spark? Maybe, I never played the games.

However it is entirely the fault of the WoW clones that they killed MMOs. They all want a piece of the cherry pie, but there is only room for one.
Instead of making a blueberry, or an apple pie they just try to make an even more delicious cherry pie to the point where nobody likes pies anymore because all there is is the cherry flavor.

Same thing with shooters. Everyone wanted to be a CoD clone, and the result is what we have now. Dull color shooters with same look and feel. A good amount of people are sick of shooters now, but there is just enough of a high demand to keep the dead horse running.
 

BloodSquirrel

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This guy is an idiot.

Before WoW came out, the top dog, Everquest, had subscription numbers south of 500k. Then WoW hit ten million subscribers, and suddenly morons in the industry decided that WoW numbers were the new norm and that any game that couldn't hold at least a few million subscribers was a failure.

WoW didn't kill the genre. It simply made it apparently how small-time it already was. Now, with game budgets in general being what they are, nobody is going to bother making an MMO with a target of 200k subscribers. It isn't WoW's fault that your MMO that would have only had 100-300k subscribers before isn't getting five million now, and if he's hoping to get that with old-school MMO design he's going to be in trouble.

EDIT: Oh, one other thing. Don't confuse "Blew through leveling content in a few weeks" with "Not enjoying the journey". I've leveled enough characters through enough versions of the same leveling content in WoW, and the post-cataclysm 1-60 content was the most fun content to play through, in part precisely because it was fast enough that the scenery wasn't wearing out its welcome before I moved on to a new zone.
 

Phrozenflame500

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I would say he's right. All MMOs now are mostly WoW clones and it's disappointing nobody trys anything too different from the basic formula as there are so many interesting possibilities for an MMO platform.

 

Fdzzaigl

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Dear Firefall developer, I've played your game and was reasonably pleased, but you know just as well as I that it doesn't measure up to WoW. Not because WoW killed the MMO genre, but simply because your game doesn't have the same quality or replay value.

If the MMO genre is dying (and I'm pretty sure it isn't seeing how everyone and their dog is making one), it is because developers lack the creative spirit to make a product that is both immediately appealing while also offering an exciting long term journey and vision.

WoW succeeded in doing that and while all the clones of the game don't help, you can't blame it for succeeding. It was obvious that it would succeed if you look at the state of the genre before it.
 

Ishigami

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BloodSquirrel said:
This guy is an idiot.

Before WoW came out, the top dog, Everquest, had subscription numbers south of 500k. Then WoW hit ten million subscribers, and suddenly morons in the industry decided that WoW numbers were the new norm and that any game that couldn't hold at least a few million subscribers was a failure.

WoW didn't kill the genre. It simply made it apparently how small-time it already was. Now, with game budgets in general being what they are, nobody is going to bother making an MMO with a target of 200k subscribers. It isn't WoW's fault that your MMO that would have only had 100-300k subscribers before isn't getting five million now, and if he's hoping to get that with old-school MMO design he's going to be in trouble.
The Top Dog wasn't EverQuest it was Lineage. Released in 1998 it reached 3 million subscribers by 2002. Then it began a slow decline and was repalced by Lineage 2 (release 2003) as most subscribed MMORPG in 2004 with little more than 2 million subscribers. That didn't last long though because WoW was released shortly after and raced by then in no time.

AFIK there is no MMORPG with more than ~ 2 million players (not subscribers! As most other MMOs are mostly F2P now) aisde from WoW. So your 5 million figure is made up.
Only MOBA (LoL, DotA etc.) draw this amount of players these days.

So yea he is right.
 

Charli

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VladG said:
Not sure what to say about this. He's not wrong, not about the leveling.
That was about what I took from it, the rest is just a nostalgic man thinking back on his Everquest days with a hearty sigh.

Oh sure it was a heck of a time for those that could band together and had all the time in the day...

But for everyone else the game stank. You got in, died lots, flipped a table and went off to play something that didn't have so many shitbags calling you a noob and making off with all your stuff.

Note here in EQ days, I was 12. I wasn't going to be good at it in any capacity, but there was no illusion of even having a chance.

WoW needs to streamline it's difficulty curve. At the moment.

Level 1 to Looking for Raid is this barely incrementing line of nothing steadily crawling up to this massive mount Everest.
Enter Arenas, Normal-Heroic Raiding and Rated Battlegrounds. You wanna play here bub you better make sure you have a friend who can pull you up with a rope or some hella good climbing gear because otherwise you're going to look at that mountain and proclaim; "Sod that!"

And that's where all the 'difficulty' in WoW currently is. Hidden at the end, but you're not 'forced to do it'. You get to LFR, get a weak based epic set with faulty colors that look like the harder gear, and you feel pretty much fulfilled for the most part. And because you're no longer forced to do it to continue your fulfillment those who got knocked out of that niche, or no longer have time to make it, feel like 'all the difficulty was taken out' and take to whining about it on youtube and blogs. Where really the truth of the matter is they just don't have time/gotten bored/their friends have moved on. And being sad about that they need an 'angry excuse' rather than the harsh truth.

TLDR: The difficulty curve is currently not very streamlined. The leveling experience could use lengthening, it no longer feels like a journey and that Blizzard is just trying to hurry everyone along to end game to justify using resources on raiding. (Which...I'll admit the Mists of Pandaria raids so far have been sublime... but...LFR blows and I think is a disappointing outcome for 'new players', sorry.)