Dansen said:
I played the free to play trial, reached 20 level as a paladin and have to ask myself why? Why is it still revered by the game industry? It feels so dated, I can see why it was a big deal ten years ago.
I don't think its a bad game. After playing a couple of dungeons I can see that it has some appealing aspects. The teamwork, unique enemies and rare drops made them pretty dam fun. The art direction is also really good in my opinion. The capital cities a visited were all really cool looking and unique. There are also hints of a good story, the story of the Forsaken seemed pretty compelling and unique, and I feel like I would care about the blue goats people(draneli?) if I actually had any idea where they came from or what their goal is.
However its age really shows. The majority quests seem to only consist of; fetch item, kill x amount of creeps or my personal favorite, kill creeps to get fetch items. Pretty damn boring and repetitive. The hot-key combat is not engaging at all. You either have the right numbers to kill something or you don't, no skill involved. There may be strategy involved, but it is really only satisfying when you coordinate with others. On your own you don't have to really do much in the way of thinking. Spam ability, debuff, spam ability, power ability, heal, spam ability, repeat. Upon reaching the cap I uninstalled the game.
The glaring problem, boring ass combat; and yet THIS is the golden standard mmos aim for? It really shouldn't be too hard to beat this game, its on its last knees, but the fact that it was able to beat out TOR is just pathetic on EA's part. Is it really only because WoW has a ludicrous number of subscribers? If publishers had half a brain they would support games that broke the mold. Why do you think WoW has remained relevant for so long?
Well, for starters it's a real RPG, which is supposed to be about the stats and what your character can do, as opposed to what you as a player can do. A big part of it's appeal is specifically the things you don't like about it. The millions of people who don't want all of that action-RPG garbage or agree with that it genuinely moves the industry forward stick with WoW.
The thing to consider also is that in playing a 20 level free trial your not really seeing much of the game at all. Your basically seeing the first few, and oldest (if refurbished a bit with Cataclysm) assets in the game. The real "action" in WoW has always been with the endgame content and the migrating community, whether it's PVP (which can take a lot of movement and timing), or raids which require crazy amounts of obtuse tactics, military presician, and utter mastery of the mechanics of the game, especially when your first "breaking" fights. Half the fun is seeing something that can take a month of wiping a raid again and again become routine and then trivial. People who jump into raids that are on "farm status" for the majority of people running them really tend not to get it. Blizzard is good at coming up with encounters that surprise people and introduce new mechanics and the need for differant sets of tactics again and again.
There is a preconception that in WoW all you need is a tank, some DPS, and some healers and you can wipe out the game. That's an outright lie to be honest, and anyone who claims that hasn't been raiding in WoW, though to be honest some of the first dungeons are that easy, but aren't really endgame material, especisally not "current" endgame material as things started to get pretty obtuse going back years.
As far as the kinds of quests present in the game, those are the same kinds of quests still in MMOs because you can only do so much in an MMO enviroment (unlike a single player game), you run into exceptions here and there, but at the end of the day it's always a matter of bring something from point A to B, kill something, or bring something back. It's all about how they stylize it to make it more interesting.
-
That said, there are a couple of big secrets to WoW's success, which many people deny but still stand as being relevent today.
One of the biggest is in having multiple zones of the same level to adventure through. Each race gets it's own starting area, most quite elaborate, and there are ultimatly multiple paths to getting to the eventual endgame zones where everyone meets, and you can jump from one zone to another to do quests. If you follow the quest chains from region to region a Night Elf and a Human have very differant experience, even if they tend to wind up with the same top level zones. As you move onto other expansions like Cataclysm or Lich king this continues where you can approach the expansion from a couple of differant directions before winding up at the end zone (and go back and clear out lower level zones you didn't do with the same character).
Most MMOs generally have one real play field for each level bracket so you move from A to B to C and it's the same for each character. ToR for example has a couple of differant starting locations based on class, but after the initial planet (which is always shared with one other class) you pretty much get funneled through the same areas in a very specific order, doing the same quests as everyone else, with the addition of a few extras (with cinematics) thrown in for your profession.
The other big thing is WoW's endgame... namely that it has one, and it keeps expanding it and adding in a new endgame. Most MMOs simply do not launch for crap with an endgame, so when people max out their characters there is nothing really left for them to do. WoW generally has a fairly substantial menu of things you can do with a maxxed out character so if you get tired of one grind you typically have some other things you can do instead, and it typically addes a few more endgame dungeons or whatever a couple of times a year between expansions, so in general by the time most of the community has broken Ulduar (for example) they add in Icecrown, etc...
I did indeed get burned out with WoW (after Lich King), but I understand the appeal, and why people keep coming back to it, and why it dominates. Most people launching MMOs fail to realize that at the end of the day it's all about content and gameplay, and they aren't competing with WoW as it was when it launched, but what it is now. WoW might show it's age but it's not exactly ugly (on it's own merits, not compared to the state of the art) and has tons of content and gameplay to keep people coming.
Most action-RPG hybrids that boast they are doing away with "WoW style combat" effectively shoot themselves in the foot right from the beginning because that's what millions upon millions of RPG nerds want. They do not want a twitch contest, and duelling internet connections, for that they could be playing a shooter (and might very well do that when they are so inclined). When someone clones WoW almost verbatim, with the same basic style of doing so, it usually fails because the game might look prettier but lacks much in the way of endgame. People who like the game max out their characters, and then pretty much figure "well that's it? I'll go back to WoW where there is still stuff to do" and leave.
Of course I say this knowing that most people who ask the question of why WoW dominates do so rhetorically, in an attempt to point out it's ridiculousness (in their own mind). At the end of the day WoW is slowly losing people due to age, but still dominates because it's simply the best game out there in terms of solid gsmeplay, amount of content, and giving RPG gamers what they want in terms of a largely stat driven experience. Chances are if you find WoW's combat boring, you weren't really the target audience.
Now understand, I am an Ex-WoW player, but not because I hate it or anything, I just got burned out, and when my guild of years collapsed so did a lot of my will to play. I've tried to go back, but found it kind of depressing on a lot of levels. I very much respect WoW, what it stands for, and will tell everyone it's an awesome game. In absolute terms, better than a lot of the MMOs I currently play.
To be honest EA-Bioware kind of had the right IDEA on what needed to be done to actually steal WoW's audience but they failed on the implementation, getting too tied up on the bells and whistles, and the actual leveling process, without enough initial focus on the endgame. Likewise when I, and a lot of other people, fortold ToR as being the "WoW-killer of legend" it was when it was believed EA was spending close to a billion dollars (Avatar type money) to make it. That was enough money to produce enough content (especially over the years of development) to seriously give WoW as it stood at the time a challenge on that front, but in reality it was financed on a fraction of what was rumored (even if still EA's most expensive game in history). Likewise I, and others, jumped the gun playing in Beta and stuff, judging it by what we saw there, which lead us to certain assumptions which were not met, namely in terms of progression and how the endgame was going to pan out since we didn't have access to that much of the game at the time.
Right now I kind of suspect the next big MMO is ironically going to be Blizzard's own "Project Titan" assuming it doesn't turn out to be a Planetside/Tribes: Ascend, clone like has been rumored... that could be paticularly bad if it is since it seems like Planetside 2, and the genere in general, hasn't quite taken off to the extent initial predictions though it would.
