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"I think we killed a genre"
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I'd say the copy cats killed the genre, not WoW. WoW boosted the genre, put it in the PC gaming spotlight and attracted millions of new players.
Everyone looking to make a quick buck by imitating WoW killed the genre.
What I would like to hear, and probably never will, is what he thinks they should have done differently to make the game successful, but not "ruin" the genre.
Less intuitive UI?
More grinding?
fewer but better quests?
Longer time to level?
Be glad that he did, he will be receiving a surprise. At any rate I edited the post.
If you want a new idea, go read an old book.
In order to be insulted, I must first value your opinion.
I'm just going to post in here and facepalm a little bit... why would you link to an outside site that links back to an article originally posted by Mark here as its source and one that was all over our front page on Friday?
Here's the original article folks:
http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/feature/7540/Mark-Kern-Have-MMOs-Become-Too-Easy.html
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So, wrecked a genre? You bet they did. Else we would be playing.
over 20 years of mmorpg's and counting...
Even if a bit hostile, you make good points. I did not start gaming until 1980, PnP and I did not even own a computer until 2003, when I discovered SWG. Being a SWG nerd since the movies released, I had to give it a go. Between then and now, things have, in my opinion gone down hill. It is no longer about the journey it is all destination.
However like someone else pointed out, I would not just point the finger at anyone thing. WoW was and still is a major player in the industry and I don't see that changing any time soon, however their audience, the ones that will pay for re-hashed crap, for the clone market and everything else bad about gaming will keep the same low standards coming back again and again.
At the end of the day, Blizz, Trion, EA, SOE, etc are all in the business of entertainment, and like all big business they are going to go where the cash is and right now, people are blowing up cash shops, and paying subscription prices to play this junk. We (as a community) need to change the mind of the working dad and mom that only have a few hours at most in the evening to play. I don't see that happening.
So until an independant studio comes along, and decides to go their own way (this has been done btw, look around) and make a new game nothing like WoW, or its many clones (also been done, just not supported) we are stuck with this business model.
We may never recapture what we lost when they tried to bring PnP to on line. Like it or lump it, it is all about the cash.
If you want a new idea, go read an old book.
In order to be insulted, I must first value your opinion.
You are very obvious but I'm not sure that is your intention. Be honest, the genre isn't dead is it? The only thing that happened is it stopped appealing to you and now you hold ill will towards the majority whom still enjoy it. If the demand was stronger than games like WoW (which I think is getting there but awhile off yet) than those same companies that tried to clone WoW would make other games.
Nothing was lost except your suspension of disbelief. This grand illusion that the genre was a pancea of freedom and fantastic open world adventure at the begining because of these "hardcore" mechanics is just that... an illusion. You point relies on a grand assuption of "why" these games "felt" more alive. It had nothing to do with mind boggling, tedious, time wasting, "no sane person would waste that much time" mechanics. It was precisely because we didn't as a community have a good grasp of the exact mechanics and as result we were "free" to imagine it the way we wanted it. We likened it to the PnP days of old and "assumed" that a artificial world controled by artificial rules was just as reasonable and open to adventure as our PnP worlds controled by real intelligences.
And they weren't, they never were. No reasonable PnP GM would ever have you enter a dungeoun and imediately do a "camp check". You would never sit murdering the same mob over and over again on a predictable spawn timer, waiting for you to roll the right value on the loot drop table to get the perfect item. You conversations with a NPC would never have been as stupid as picking apart their canned response and trying to re enter the right "keyword".
It was inevitable that these worlds would devolve into what they actually were, a precisely known bunch of arbitraty mechanics. We don't fight dragons to save princesses, we fight enrage timers to get +x DPS. This is why you hate the genre now. The one things I give Brad McQuaid credit for in EQ was his insistence that the exact mechanics and numbers never really be revealed and should always be a secret from the players. He thought if we knew the exact numerics of what "+12 armor" did , then the game would simply devolve into "munchkin" type play. And on that he was right. But this devolution was inevitable. Players were going to test the world and figure this stuff out anyway. This was always the inevitable result.
The crux of whole issues lies in the fact that an artificial intelligence will never have the ability to mold the experience enough around the players, individually or community wise, to keep our suspension of disbelief. The state of the art isn't anywhere near intelligent enough to craft an actual moving adventure for us. WoW accepted this and at least tried to make the genre tolerable to still "play" by eliminating the mechanics that simply were not fun.
The current genre isn't a "real" virtual world, we are decades away from AI that could make such a thing for us. But that doesn't mean we can't have fun in a virtual "like" world. Not having fun in this genre simple because it isn't "real" enough is only hurting yourself. The ideal MMORPG isn't being keept off the shelf because of WoW or its clones. It's not possible to simulate the PnP experience with enough detail yet. We have almost an "uncanny valley" type situation here where the closer we get the more flaws we notice. Eventually we will have the compute resources and possibly AI smart enough to get pretty close. In the interum there is nothing wrong with playing games with other people that are fun, despite or even because, we know the precise mechanics. It's not the genre you wanted or expected but it is and can still be a great deal of fun.
Is there a problem with games like EVE, Mortal Online and Darkfall?
^ Pretty much this ^
"If I offended you, you needed it" -Corey Taylor
With WoW it catapult a generation of players who demanded more easy gameplay and fast rewards fast lvling lesser timesink and safezones.
So partly WoW started this but it gave the gamers a platform for the decline of the whole genre in general.
I blame in last 4 years mainly the community for decline and small part the developers/publishers.
Yeah because gaming itself exploded and became very popular. WoW helped exposing the masses to the MMO genre but they aren't the ones that made it so everyone plays games. Also just because something is easily accessible and popular doesn't mean it's good. Look at McDonalds.
By the way, never said they should have it revolving around me and those of mine, but having something at all to play for the older generation of gamers who liked the genre before it became all silver platter crap would be appreciated.
true.
and it continues.
also catering to PvE-only players again and again and again and again and again again and again and again and again and again .
as if they are the only ones to make money from.
I was talking only about MMO genre and yes Blizzard even though in beginning made the Warcraft MMO only to attract Warfract strategy fans, they had no idea that they will end up being so big and popular and change MMO landscape for ever.
Things like this are not planned it just happens. And please don't even start with Mcdonalds analogy. Mc donalds is popular because it is cheap. So this analogy never fits with MMOS which require hell lot of money investment than cheap Mcdonals menu.
Andto answer your last paragraph. There are plenty of MMOS which appeal to older generation who want something old school problem is that people spend more time bashing WOW than actually playing those games.
"The problem is that the hardcore folks always want the same thing: 'We want exactly what you gave us before, but it has to be completely different.'
-Jesse Schell
"Online gamers are the most ludicrously entitled beings since Caligula made his horse a senator, and at least the horse never said anything stupid."
-Luke McKinney
Bill,
I read your article the day you put it up and I could not agree more that MMOs have become too easy. I agree that WoW killed a genera because the way they built the game around accessibility. They did start off making things easier at the end of BC which was a very smart move to allow players to see the content that were not top end raiders. This would still allow players to make the game itself a process and spend more than 2 months chewing on a raid instance. Yes WOTLK did do an OK job expanding on this and making the older content easier to clear however what they did do wrong was make it so that there was no point in continuing the old content. So there was no reason to get the gear from Naxx, then Uld, then TOC when IC was out. Just run the new instances and you get geared to move into IC. Accessibility was also done wrong in the sense that the raid did not scale so it was up to the guilds to keep exactly 10 people or 25 people in the raid group just to be able to go. The problem is I started seeing this in WOTLK few and few people could do 3 or 4 night a week, many only could do 2. These are the same people that were raiding 3 to 5 in Vanilla in BC however by WoTLK they had kids and other priorities.
People think of Scaling and Smaller raids as being easier. How hard was Shattered Halls Herioc or Shadow Labs? These are 5 man instances which many players did not clear during BC. They were hard and if you did not have a tight nit group you would not clear these instances. I cleared both with my friends, I never would have pugged them. Back to my point these are smaller groups that the raids were harder. Also during WOTLK how many guilds were selling LK slayer titles? I know of 1 guild on my server would bring 15 people into the 25 man raid and the 15 people would jump off the cliff in the 25 man raid 10 people would kill the LK. In a 10 man if you lost 1 or 2 people you were likely going to wipe. Smaller raid tougher than the 25 man.
First MMOs need to get back to tougher content. Second Tougher content does not mean group size. A 5 man herioc can be much tougher than a 25 man raid. See Shattered Halls Heroic during BC. 3rd its time for games to push to scale their content. Want to do it with 25 people, bring 25 people and it will be harder than with 13 people in the casual guild. Lastly a LFR tool which allows you to ignore all mechanics is pointless just mail the players the gear. WoW LFR is a joke and is why normal raiding guilds are no more as well as because they got too many tiers of 1 raid.
It is a featured article on this site.....shouldn't these threads be merged?
http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/loadFeature/7540
Dude... just what? Games at all are freaking cheap, almost free ffs. a burger is 9USD and a subscription is just a bit more than that.
Also I think WoW was pretty nice back when it released, it was much more grindy than it was these days. Harder to finish and all that, I had no beef with it even though I didn't enjoy it. But at some point they just started making it easier and easier and everyone else followed suit because that is how you persuade investors. "These guys did great, we can make even better just look at this and that!".
And tell me what plenty of games there are, where are those plenty of games? Tell me this.
actually panda land brought back exploration in a big big way.
Well all games are cheap then so why only pick WOW for Mc Donald analogy? you are talking about popularity here and i told you exactly why mc donald is popular because it is very cheap. How does that analogy even work when WOW and Mcdonals both are popular for very different reasons?
Let us see..
Fallen Earth
FFXI
Eve Online
Perpetum Online
Darkfall
Age Of Wushu
Ryzom
Xsyon
Few just top of my head and i didn't have to think too hard i am sure there are more). Hell even old games like EQ, Anarchy Online are still up and running.
Then we have upcoming games like Archage, The Repopulation, World Of Darkness, EQnext and many many more.
Thing is not MMO is good enough for so called old school players. And i am 100% sure even the new upcoming sandbox MMOS won't make them happy.
"The problem is that the hardcore folks always want the same thing: 'We want exactly what you gave us before, but it has to be completely different.'
-Jesse Schell
"Online gamers are the most ludicrously entitled beings since Caligula made his horse a senator, and at least the horse never said anything stupid."
-Luke McKinney
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