I know what some of you are thinking: Oh no, someone made a comment disparaging World of Warcraft, time for Omali to take the stage and say something along the lines of “I’d like to see you hit twelve million customers worldwide.” Well shame on all of you for not knowing me as well as you think. You’d think I had a website or something where I give my opinion on matters relating to gaming. Anyway, let’s move on.
In the past I have had people ask what my stance on World of Warcraft’s effect on the MMORPG genre is an my answer is simple: It didn’t kill the genre, it widened the base. When people say that it hurt the genre, they conveniently leave out multiple oversights. First of all, WoW didn’t make the genre easy, what it said was “this market has potential.” Without World of Warcraft, few companies wanted to make MMOs. It was a genre that had high costs to develop, required heavy maintenance post-launch for any kind of payoff, and high risk because you had to convince gamers that the game was really worth a box price plus monthly subscription, or hourly subscription if you want to go back even earlier. All this for an audience which many developers were not convinced even existed outside of the two big named exceptions known as Everquest and Ultima Online.
I see the hardcore and more difficult MMOs like the grill restaurant in my old hometown. My hometown was so small and unknown that most stores pretty much had a monopoly on their specialty. One Italian restaurant, one hotel, one pharmacy, maybe two gas stations, one local grocery store, a bank, post office, etc. In the past decade, naturally once I moved out, the town has received a Tim Horton’s, a Dollar General, a Tops Markets, and a whole lot of other big name deals. But the old places, including the grill, are still there. They didn’t go anywhere, they just became a smaller percentage because the market grew. If you have a small handful of hardcore MMOs with niche followings, and a metric ton of casual games are suddenly thrown on top, you still have a handful of hardcore MMOs with niche audiences, they just seem smaller by comparison.
So like I said, World of Warcraft didn’t usher in the age of casual MMOs, it simply opened the floodgates and the ensuing competition resulted in a race to the bottom to appeal to the widest group possible. Prior, the MMOs were already working on competing with each other on toning down their products. Ultima Online introduced Trammel, a shard enforcing consensual PvP, in response to Everquest’s release, a full four years before World of Warcraft came on the scene.
Mark Kern is, however, completely on target with his comments on World of Warcraft ushering in an era of MMOs where the goal was pushing the players through the leveling process as quickly as possible to get them to end-game where the “real” content could start, mindlessly grinding raids. The level curve became faster and it drew in millions of players, but at the cost of diluting the achievement of making it to end-game. As a result, people blaze through content, get bored, and leave. To top it off, they do so ignoring the massive amount of work put into quest stories, scenery, art, and presentation. So what happens? The developer puts no effort into the scenery or quests, because why bother when the grand majority will not pay any attention to them?
Kern is correct on the tragedy that is the MMO contradiction, which we have pointed out here at MMO Fallout several times. The idea that the genre built on open worlds and exploration now funnels its players from one location to another with no rhyme or reason to explore for themselves is quite tragic in itself. That a genre built on being “massively multiplayer” spends so much of its time catering to players who will play solo for most of, if not all of their time, is contradictory if not a waste of resources creating the infrastructure.
So I don’t agree with Mark’s overall fear that his Frankenstein monster creation killed the MMO genre, but I do agree that its success encouraged a generation of copycats each vying for who could make their game as easy and accessible as possible. On the other hand, we probably wouldn’t have a lot of the great MMOs we do nowadays if World of Warcraft hadn’t proven that the genre was worth investing in.
You can find Mark’s entire post at the link below.
(Source: MMORPG.com)
MMO Fallout 