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Is it feasible to expect new MMORPGs to have as much content as WoW?
Angier2758
Member UncommonPosts: 1,026
So I work in IT and constantly see how projects get ruined or are successful because of scope control.
Imagine a triangle with these 3 points:
1) Time
2) Quality
3) Money
In the center of that triangle is "scope". If any project (or game) has too much scope 2 of the points of that triangle suffer. Scope is basically "requirements".. ie What are you planning on having in your game?
Any game that comes out can not feasibly have the same content level as WoW because the game will either be horribly over budget, take forever, or have shitty quality.
Most likely it'll have 2 of those.
So here's the question now that you know the basics: Do you think it's feasible that a new mmorpg have as much content as WoW?
The prevailing thought is no (from IT work and from when I was in college).
Comments
It's impossible to make nearly 8 years of content within the course of a standard MMO development cycle.
Even if you did somehow, it would probably end up being 99% open flat land with a bunch of monsters scattered all over the place.
Yes, but it would literally take them years to catch up to the sheer amount of content in WoW. It may take them a long time to develope content but WoW released their content over... how many years old is WoW now?
You get the idea, slow and steady wins the race.
I played WoW up until WotLK, played RoM for 2 years and now Rift.
I am F2P player. I support games when I feel they deserve my money and I want the items enough.
I don't troll, and I don't take kindly to trolls.
i dont expect a new game to have as much content as a game that has been out for years and years. but what i do expect is a game that isnt so damn easy that i can get max level and do all the content within the first free month. and thats why in my opinion alot of these new games fail so bad.
but on the other hand if they slow down the leveling and make the content harder then you have thousands of crying little kids saying its a grind fest.
*Mainly made this post because of a rl friend who said he'd never leave WoW because he doesn't see a point if a new game doesn't come out with more content.
(verbatim)
This is why the themepark model isn't a sustainable nor viable one. It is 100% reliant on Developer created content.
WoW has had almost a limitless fund for developing content, and have an entire section of their studio dedicated to new quests, content, etc.
Sandboxes however, are more like 40% developer driven & created content. So when a new AAA Sandbox releases it can easily compete with other Sandboxes that have been out for 4+years.
Answer: Of course it isn't feasible.
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity:
Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
This have been a good conversation
I'll be honest, that's a dumb question and the results show that.
MMO developers aren't expected to match WOWs content from vanilla to now. They are expected to have implemented features that are deemed standards today. Saying it wasn't standard when WOW released misses the point completely. As seen with SWTOR. This includes group finders and rated PVP. Addons would be nice but they always fall to the wayside as a nice but expensive/complicated feature.
A large world with a loose story and a lot of developer and player sandbox tools? Yes. I think the future of good MMOs will be in generation tools that make developing easier and cheaper. Building everything from the ground up is too costly and people burn through it way too easily.
because old content becomes useless during each expansion, so I wouldnt count that.
and without counting that stuff I would say yes.
How many new Raids and Dungeons did WoW Cata add? how much content in total did Cata add? Compare that to what Rift has in terms of content in total since its lifetime.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Hire 8x as many developers and make the working structure 100x more efficient (more devs<>more production).
But it doesn't matter if it's feasible or not. It's plausible.
Someone will always be expecting the two to mean the same thing.
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 hope you're right, but for the foreseeable future, I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed in the future of "good" MMOs.
I personally would rather something be feasible than plausible. The appearance of potential success doesn't match the actual ability for something to succeed.
I think that the answer isn't more devs, or more dollars, but BETTER devs that are making the game they desperately want to play. Devs nowadays only make games to cater to the masses in order to increase their bottom lines. It's true that gaming as an industry has always been about money, like any industry, but you can see the difference in quality from AAA MMO games in years past as opposed to today (in my opinion).
thats a short sighted perception
for 5 years, 1999 - 2004
Everquest was the most popular MMORPG in US/EU
(Lineage was bigger but not in US/EU)
when WOW launched,
WOW had less content than EQ and its 8 expansions
The Ruins of Kunark (April 2000)
The Scars of Velious (December 2000)
The Shadows of Luclin (December 2001)
The Planes of Power (October 2002)
The Legacy of Ykesha (February 2003)
Lost Dungeons of Norrath (September 2003)
Gates of Discord (February 2004)
Omens of War (September 2004)
using the same reasoning,
if your friend was a EQ player PreWOW, he would have never left Everquest
EQ2 fan sites
No.
Having said that, as a casual player I rarely get through all the content even on games that other players 'complete' in a couple of weeks. Usually by the time I'm mid level I'm playing in a ghost town because most other players are max level.
Unless some billionaire has secretly been making an MMORPG over the last dozen or so year's (I'm looking at you Bill Gate's)
Then no I dont think it's realistic or feasable to expect a new MMORPG to have as much content as WoW does now.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
I believe WoW's design model is vulnerable to being outcompeted by a combination of emergent and procedurally generated content moderated by user input. But I don't have a prototype on the table.
But there are other, more reasonable, expectations to be met.
e.g. A new title can have gameplay as smooth as WoW. It can have art direction as inspired as WoW. It can learn from WoW's mistakes and avoid repeating them.
I agree.
I think it's important to note that large MMORPGs don't start out that way. The successful ones, at least. They build on content to meet player demands as they eventually reach endgame. The problem new MMOs have is that they try to do everything at once, and they try to make getting to endgame as easy as possible now. When it took a year to hit endgame in the EQ days, they already had content available, and new content was already in the pipeline because they had enough time to develop something really solid to add to the game, instead of just new raids and a new gear tier.
I wish the standard to beat were still EQ, but I digress...
"The prevailing thought is no (from IT work and from when I was in college)."
College nor IT should have been where you learned this. It's called common sense and rationale thinking. Both of which laugh at this question even being a question.
##Best SWTOR of 2011
Posted by I_Return - SWTOR - "Forget the UI the characters and all ofhe nitpicking bullshit" "Greatest MMO Ever Created"
##Fail Thread Title of 2011
Originally posted by daveospice
"this game looks like crap?"
This is the greatest debate right now in the mmo genre. New mmo's are often relying on player generated content. NWN mmo will have it's player content mechanics. Sandbox games set the scene for player content by providing unrefined resources and then the players refine it. The trick is for the developer to balance this while somehow still maintaining a sense of a unified game world.
Queueing up content that is nothing more than a mini-game outside of the developer designed world does not make a good mmo. Hopefully we can see a sandbox mmo someday that is largely driven by it's dedicated players where the most popular content is rated and melded seamlessly into the game expanding it's original concept. Where each shard is dramatically different than another. One can dream.
You stay sassy!