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What If: WoW Never Existed?
TheLizardbones
Member CommonPosts: 10,910
What do you think the current landscape of MMOs would look like had WoW never released?
The impact of WoW on the market cannot be understated. WoW moved the target for a playerbase from hundreds of thousands of players to millions of players. Developers were shooting for WoW like success, even targeting WoW's playerbase specifically in their marketing and game design.
So, if WoW never got here, would EverQuest II be the benchmark that developers aimed for? Would games like SWG, which peaked at 300k players be considered an under performing MMO, or would that have been considered really good? Would SWToR ever have been attempted the way it was, with a $200M budget?
Here's how I think things would have played out.
EQII would be the benchmark MMO, but SWG would be a close second. SoE would have not had such lofty goals for either game, and would have been very pleased with their success.
Starting with Guild Wars, the idea that a game could be online, and also have no subscription would look like a very viable option. Other companies would try it sooner, rather than waiting for F2P to get here. It's hard to say whether F2P would be as prevalent, or if it would be more prevalent. With lower or more reasonable expectations, the push towards a large amount of revenue generation might not be so extreme.
WarHammer and AoC would not change much, perhaps having more of a sandbox feel, but the overall game quality would not have improved. The developers' expectations would be lower, and perhaps the hype would not have been so high. A modest success would be acceptable for both games.
Cryptic's games would be more successful than they were. With lower expectations, and without the shadow of WoW looming over everything, Cryptic's games would seem more innovative, and perhaps they might have been more innovative.
I think there would be more Asian imports, as the Asian interest in MMOs would exist with or without WoW. More of the Western MMO landscape would be driven by Asian MMOs. I have no idea what this would look like or what the overall effect would be. It would be very brightly colored though, with lots of graphics popping around.
The biggest change I can think of is I don't think SWToR or ESO would exist. With lower expectations, and less money being pointed at the industry, these games would be too expensive to even be considered, much less actually created.
What do you guys think?
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Comments
if WoW didnt exist, the genre would still be the same since it was heading the WoW way anyway if you take note of the trending.
AC = Sandbox
AC2 = Sandpark
AC3 aka LoTRO = Themepark
the trend was heading that way.
EQ1----> EQ2
see the trending. this is before WoW.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
I think the only thing we can say for sure is that there would have been a greater variety of ideas put to the test in MMO development, along with a lot fewer MMOs, had WoW not been released.
I'd like to also imagine, "what if Ultima Online 2 had been released", in addition to WoW not existing.
EQ2 wasn't enough of a game to be the same kind of draw.
So, overall market smaller, by as much as an order of magnitude.
Probably good news for the console titles, certainly good news for EA (no Activision/EA war, maybe???). ACTV may not have even survived without the Blizzard income injection.
Much less OCD rage for a bunch of old EQ1 guys, still clinging to the Sinister Enemy Of All Mankind they created in 2003.
I assume they would have drifted away completely by now, without somewhere to focus the endless slippery slopes.
But given the current evidence, probably still be here QQing.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
i tend to disagree.
the first thing that would change is the player base. we would be by far less.
WoW brought the appeal of mmos to the masses. that's it's main achievement.
you wanna play on servers that feel deserted at nite?
i dont
with those player masses, devs and especially publishers saw their chance to make money and (uh wonder) the chinese started to copy (the love to copy, admit it)
you think we would have more different mmos? na, by sure not. a) it would be less mmos, b) the devs would not have been pulled to the genre to actually give you all your diversities.
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
If WoW never existed many of the games you mentioned would never have existed... the reality is, many games only went into development BECAUSE of the existence of WoW.
Lets' say the gamers never really bought into MMORPGs and they remained more or less a niche game... with RPGs and FPSs and consoles eating up the market like crazy. Developers would have focused more on those genres because that is where the player base was.
If WoW never existed, it could very well be that MMORPGs would have slowly faded away. They got a lot of press because of WoW. Hey look, that game Blizzard made is really taking off... maybe we should make an MMORPG too?
WoW wasn't the greatest thing since apple pie... but what it did do is bring the genre to the masses and get it the kind of publicity if never had before. News stories about kids getting addicted to WoW... playing 24/7... etc... national news... not nearly the kind of press they wanted, but any press, good or bad, ultimately draws a crowd.... hence the success of WoW and the current state of the genre today.
I agree.. and it was heading that way because it's what the masses wanted. I was a huge Shadowbane player back in the day.. it was actually the game that got me into MMO's. The difference between myself and most people on this site, is that I realized that even back then.. we were the minority. By we, I mean sandbox players. It really is a niche market and sandbox games often suffer because there is not enough action for players. A lot of a sandbox, well, like shadowbane anyway, was grinding for hours and hours to level up and get money for the shity (ahaha) walls and buildings. The majority of players.. (you know, the ones who don't go on the forums) obviously don't want that. They want themepark. They want to be lead from place to place and for built in action.
All that to say.. WoW had impeccable timing on its side and delivered a solid product with polish.. but if it wasn't wow, it would have been something else.
I don't agree. At all. Like I said before, WoW had really good timing to catch the new wave of social gamers. MMO's were going to blow up at some point. With myspace (at the time) leading the charge on the new social web, games were hundreds of players were together socializing was an inevitability. Games were getting more online friendly.. not less.
Your argument is like saying if the iPhone hadn't have come along to revolutionize the smartphone market, many of the awesome Android phones and the like out today would not exist. They still would have come along due to the age we live in... it just wouldn't have been Apple to bring it.
I compare Apple to Blizzard and WoW often because I see WoW as the iPhone of MMO's. I don't play WoW now, just like I don't use an iPhone... but I can't sit here and say they both were absolute game changers. I find WoW to be bland and kinda boring, just like the iPhone.. but the polish and user experience is still hard to argue lol.
Oh, and mmorpg.com hit count decreased by, what, 75% maybe?
Not only lose the Blizzard fans, but the Anti-Blizzard segment, too.
This question is actually more difficult than intended I think--losing WoW doesn't lose the influence of WC3 and Starcaft and D2.
Just means that most of those players stick with the consoles and/or FPS's they were already playing. And ARPGs a much bigger market than current??
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
I didn't play WoW much, but I did play a lot of DAOC before WoW came out. I'm not sure WoW had anything that DAOC didn't. I tend to think of "WoW clones" as "DAOC clones".
Perhaps the biggest difference could be that WoW "dumbed down" the game to the point that kids could play it. Instead of a somewhat cerebral game of stats, tactics, and planning, WoW seems more like an arcade experience.
Modern MMO"S certainly seem to have gone that route: towards a more shallow, simplistic, action oriented game.
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TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
Blizzard is not Apple... they did not invent the genre, they merely cloned it. Being first to the market can sometimes yield supremacy over the market... as in Apple's case... but keep in mind, that even though millions of people will never part with their iPhone or iPad... they will also never entertain the idea of using a Mac as their home computer. See the disconnect there? How can a company that makes, in their eyes, the best phone of tablet on the market, not be capable of making a computer of equal quality? Simply put... Microsoft beat them to the market, nothing more, nothing less. For the same reasons that consumers will not part with their PCs, they will not part with their iPhones and iPads.
WoW made this genre what it is today... there is absolutely no denying that. For good or bad, the landscape was forever changed. The majority of the player base in WoW was made up mostly of non-gamers at the time... mothers and fathers, housewives and retirees, and yes even little kids who had no idea what MMORPGs were let alone video games. Those massive subscription numbers weren't made up of die hard gamers looking for something new to play... they were made up of people who, until just a few days earlier, never even fired up their computers to play video games at all. That was the revolution that took place... call it luck, call it kharma, in the end... NO ONE EXPECTED their Mom and Dad to do anything on the computer short of email and surfing the web.
I'm going to argue that WoW had to exist.
If not specifically "WoW" then some other game that did what WoW did.
If you look at the history of Human "artistic" offerings there is always a move toward making a thing more universal in its appeal.
WoW is the result of what went before in a new and expanding marketplace.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Apple didn't invent the smartphone market either. That torch goes to Blackberry. They had several years of smartphones and I believe it was several million customers worldwide.
Apple did just what blizzard did. Copied the existing product (blackberry) and refined it making it easier to use. Heck they even use Samsung tech.
And the PC market has dropped 11%.
And no the majority of WoW's market was not non-gamers, non mmo'ers maybe but I would bet only a small segment of their user base is actually the mom/pop/retired people. Most were gamers, just not MMO gamers.
Vanilla WoW was a lot of fun. It was just all the nonsense that spawned later that hurt the genre.
Lets see your Battle Stations /r/battlestations
Battle Station
It's hard to say honestly. Wow was a polished and interesting theme park when it first came out. There are some other considerations though. Such as the fact it was playable on a wide range of machines, I remember that being a big deal for many. Also WOW being a blizzard game had the warcraft lore and thus already a devoted following just based on that alone.
Would MMO's have rocketed to the point they have without wow? Maybe, but it would have taken some more time, perhaps swtor would have been the one to be a huge success...then again EA would never chance a swtor project without wow as "first experiment' so to speak. Really hard to say.
I didn't think about sites like MMORPG.com. I think sites like this would still exist, but yeah, if the market in the West was considerably smaller, then the population on the websites would probably be smaller as well.
The other side of that is whether or not the mass market is even visiting sites like this anyway. The forums certainly seem to be full of people who are fans of MMOs specifically, so would having a smaller market actually change that? MMO fans would congregate someplace, why not here? I mean, at any give time there are a few thousand lurkers and a few hundred people logged in at any given time. That's a pretty small number of people compared to the number of people who played EQII. I'm not sure sites like this would be all that different. At least on the forums anyway.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
I'm with Axe on this one.
The only real change I can see is not as many games or gamers.
Gamers were already drifting from the sandbox and made more user friendly (I am not going to say dumbed down). That trend would have continued.
Outside of games the other factors still existed, broadband was being done cheaper and more available.
Some other game would have become King for the same reasons and drawn the same people resulting in the same place we are at today.
Maybe it would have been EQ2, they had many of the same factors that WoW did (timing, following). Or maybe Lotro, it launched a few years later.
If WoW didn't exist there would be small differences along the way to where we are now.MMORPGs would of still went mainstream just maybe a bit later and with a different game,Social gaming will still of exploded on facebook and mobiles devices,consoles devs woudls till of come up with DLC/microtransactions and so the F2P model would still of come to fruition in this genre.
So I think with minor differences and maybe gameplay tropes(though WoW was just the fruition of where MMORPGs were heading at the time anyway,so whatever took it's place would of been similar) we would still be where we are today.
Without WoW, would we have Scarlet Blade?
/discuss
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
I think I jizzed my pants a little bit there...
Unfortunately, it was not just the appearance of WoW, but many technological factors that came into play at the point in time. A lot of players that never even heard of MMORPGs now had instant (cable/DSL) access to the internet and wanted to see what was out there.
Warcraft was a big name as many players played its various games. Many of them made the jump to WoW. It just happened to be the lucky one out of all 21 games released in 2004. When I first played it (2004), it really was not all that different. It had a few things in play that made the game a little easier, but remember, WoW has morphed over the years, too.
I hope that if WoW was not there, maybe the influx of new players would have spread out a bit more and then we would have kept getting MMORPGs that did not try to duplicate WoW's success, but rather kept being made for whatever audience they wanted.
When I think of the direction that scenario presents...
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Ready................... imagine " It's a Wondeful Life " but James Stewart aka " George Bailey " is replaced by Bill Murphy.
MMORPGs may not have made the dramatic leap they did without WOW. WOW's designers were not shy about doing away with some of the excessive tedium and weak gameplay of earlier MMORPGs, and they continued to introduce fantastic innovations like Dungeon Finder and Phasing well after the original release.
Without that sort of innovation (which also made LoL successful), the MMORPG industry would've continued plodding along slowly with its innovation. EQ2 itself, at launch, is actually strong evidence of this. It took most aspects and incrementally improved them, but the classes and rotations and combat were still very rudimentary, and not particularly fun.
SWG wouldn't have been that much more successful, because inevitably it was a sandbox-like game right? And that's just not a popular concept for an MMO regardless. Nevermind the fact that it took Star Wars and gave us Uncle Owen (a fine choice with any IP that doesn't have war right there in the name, but not a good idea for an IP about lightsabers and blaster fights.)
Basically, a defining trait of the game industry since long before MMOs is that Simulation games (like early sandboxes) do worse than Game games (like themeparks.) The only way that wouldn't be true is if you take a sandbox and don't worry about world simulation at all, instead focusing on gameplay.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
I was thinking the performance of those MMOs that released right around WoW's time wouldn't change, it would just be the expectations of the developers and players that would change. Developers wouldn't expect multiple millions of people to play any given MMO, so when they got a population of 300k or so, they'd be happy.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.