There are true wow clones - like Alganon and a few others that seriously make it almost impossible to tell the differnece, then there are themepark clones (that a lot of people just call wow clones) that are different in some respects but still very typical to the themepark model. Good examples would be RIFT, SWTOR, upcoming Wildstar, Age of Conan, etc. All of these games will have their 1 or 2 trademark things that are "unique" in an effort to set themselves apart from the pack, but they are all ultimately themepark clones for the most part.
Personally I think being a wow clone is bad as it has no originality - but a themepark clone can be good for those that like themeparks. Some of the features of each themepark are good, like Wildstar paths seems interesting and the housing - RIFT has got rifts and zone invasions - SWTOR had the story element, etc etc.
However, I think as a whole the mmo community is getting tired of the themepark model in general. It makes sense - after 10-15 years of very similar games it gets a bit old. So in that sense, I think being a wow clone or themepark clone isn't that interesting or "good" in this day and age and going forward from here.
The term "wow clone" isn't a compliment. Far from it I supose. It either means somebody is either trying to duplicate the game and failed, or is taking key gaming features and incorporating those ideas into their own game.
The problem with the first is that far too many people have tried. It has gotten to the point where if you see a fantasy style MMO on the horizon you automatically jump to the conclusion it is a clone. It is only after playing it or researching it that you discover whether or not your first impression is right or not.
Fro the second, instead of coming up with better or different ways to do things you simply rehash the old and tired approach done by WoW. The idea being if it works for Blizzard it will work for them as well. The problem with this approach is that the player base sees through it very quickly. After 10 years of production, you can almost say this dungeon reminds me of WoW's XXX or this PVP match is just like WoW's YYY. This approach works for WoW because after years of playing the game people have a hard time disconnecting from their characters. But try it on a new MMO and people flee thinking that they might as well just play WoW.
It's ok, people will still hate on WoW time and time again, while it continues to hold more players than just about every other MMO game combined (in the West.)
WoW was good in its first Iteration with the promise to advance - Blizzard decided to go the oposite direction and much to many followed its Locust Trail to find out there are no greener pasutres left behind it.
"Torquemada... do not implore him for compassion. Torquemada... do not beg him for forgiveness. Torquemada... do not ask him for mercy. Let's face it, you can't Torquemada anything!"
"All this has really been a prelude to say that there really aren’t, at least right now, that many new ways to go."
What?
WHAT?
WHAT?!!!!
It means that you can build your ideas only around a given infrastructure and technology advacement. The core of how to play play mmos is yet still the same. It will change of course to what weven seen already with Occulus Rift- thats the future of MMOs. Full body involvment, aka 4D- the gext generation of MMOs.
The problem I have with WOW clones is they don't really build on what WOW did, and the ones that have attempted to build on it often let that fall to the wayside. The biggest example would be SWTOR where the Bioware developers wanted to make an MMO where story was a major pillar in the game on top of what WOW already had in the 3 pillars for MMOs.
Unfortunately, story content in SWTOR has really fallen to the wayside of the game for pvp and pve content. This is unfortunate, as instead of taking what WOW has and building upon it and making it better, they're catering to a smaller audience. Many people on SWTOR who make suggestions about how to improve the game have brought up ways to build on story, make more interactive environments, and build on the role play aspects of the game. These suggestions are a huge opportunity for Bioware to really build and improve upon what Blizzard started. Unfortunately, it's falling to the wayside in the name of mostly the pve, pvp, and cartel junkie crowd.
I think it's time the WOW clones stopped painting wow in different colours, and actually tried to offer something different. Creativity and differences won't make people melt!
People want something different that's the bottom line really. I have played my share of WoW and yes it's a great MMO but for it's time only. Nobody wants to play a WoW clone because, well who wants to pay for the same game again and again. It gets boring and quick. People want a variety in their MMO and they want something different to keep them interested in the game for a good amount of time.
I wonder how anyone could take the term 'WoW clone' as anything but a pejorative. Do you take great pride when someone says you're carrying a 'knockoff' Chanel or Gucci bag? Does your heart swell to bursting when someone says you're wearing 'fake' Christian Louboutin pumps? Why would anything said to be a 'clone' be a badge of honor? No one's saying another game is as successful as WoW when they refer to it as a clone. Backhanded compliment? Oh, kinda like, "look at that fat girl with the pretty face"? Do you focus on 'pretty face' and ignore the pejorative (fat girl)?
There are times when a seemingly negative comparison is actually meant as a positive. For example, the Chrysler 300, at launch, had a grill that was extremely similar to Bentley so people took to saying it looked like a 'poor man's Bentley' (at least from the front). That was a compliment. But if you are unique, no one uses the term 'clone' to describe you. It could be said that WoW is an EQ clone, made more accessible. Most of the features you mention are not NEW. WoW didn't create the endgame focused MMO model. Go look at their early dev team and see what game many of them were raid focused guild leaders/officers of. The difference is, WoW made the endgame accessible to (almost) all. The genius of the design was making the earlier game so much faster than it had been previously that almost everyone who played got a chance to "endgame" content (which stood in stark contrast to EQ, where only the most dedicated could even dream of seeing that content when it was current). That helped the developer because it allowed them to focus their efforts on one part of the game. Instead of having to make low level, mid level, and high level content, they could just make high level content because everyone was going to be there seemingly 3 days after rolling their toon.
"She's a ho but I'd smash that"
If the above was said about a woman, would that be a compliment?
Most people use the term WoW Clone like a monkey would... Honestly. Every new game will be a WoW Clone. TESO ? Wow clone. Wildstar ? Wow clone. ArcheAge ? Wow clone. EQN? Wow clone.
Nowadays, to be successful a game has to be a wow clone in some way, simple as that. GW2 was probably my biggest disappointment and yet, it could easily have turned out to be a great game if they did not wander too far from wow: no holy trinity was a joke and made everything in the game look like a real mess, no points in playing since at 80 everybody is the same. If GW2 had kept the holy trinity system and added a gear progression system to keep people interested, I would be playing that game at the moment.
Solid article, Suzie, but I have to disagree with you about WoW's end game, and here's why:
Since the game is so gear-dependent, once you hit max level, there's really not much you can do efficiently (High-end raids, arenas, RBGs, etc.) until you get geared for it. Now, while it's not super hard to get the first set of PvP gear, what counts is the second set, which has a weekly cap to it - that cap becomes very low after the first week of CQ grinding, causing PvP to have a lack of meaning especially since there's no actual territory control in game nor PvP ranks for general PvP. RBG PvP ranks just straight up don't count... It was a stupid idea and niches PvP big time especially on PvP servers.
There are two things that kill raid gear progression: 1) The weekly lockout timers, and 2) The inability to queue solo for the specific raids you need. For my first point, by the time you're wanting to do certain raids to get the specific pieces of gear you want, it feels like you are paying a monthly fee for 4 raid runs at a, maybe, 10% chance for the boss you're wanting to kill to drop the loot you need. Now, I'm not complaining about the low drop rate here, I'm complaining about the inability to be a part of that process of chance. Once a week is ridiculous, and it gets you nowhere fast, especially if more than one person in your raid want that item. Why not just let people raid whenever they darn well want to and however often they darn well please? That leads me to my 2nd point. Why is all the organization necessary? Not only do you have one shot a week, but you've gotta get every person with every specific role together in order to accomplish it. Games these days are become way too guild dependent, where everyone must be on at the same time or else you can't raid that day. What ever happened to the old days when pugging end-game hardcore content was fun (and dare I say even more challenging, not knowing if you're able to finish with given pug or not). Kind of takes a lot of the "rewarding" feeling out of it, no?
So, in conclusion, end-game in WoW is way more of a chore than it is fun due to the requirements and restrictions currently present in-game that limits players to ways in which they want to achieve their goals.
All that, and I still haven't even begun to talk here about the lack of some sort of alternate advancement system for those who don't like making tons of alts and wish to fine tune and augument their character's stats and abilities to reward for character longevity. Thanks for reading!
I dont think most reasonable people are mad at WoW, they are mad at the warhammers, rifts, lotors, swtors, the wildstars. Reskinned clones 10 years later with 30 million $$$ ad programs bought on sites like this, with the sole purpose of telling people our game is not a reskinned clone. This is what pisses me off anyways.
I see everyone talk about innovation that new MMOs need to be different from wow. That the "Themepark is tired". How do you suggest that they make something different? Every Sandbox MMO has the population of next to nothing or has totally failed. Also if you make things TOO different you lose the Switchers who are bored with WoW and want something new to do.
The biggest problem with the Other MMO's is that they copied some specific part of WoW and changed something to make their game a bit different. What they all seemed to miss was the different ways people DO play Wow. In WoW I can do quest hubs etc, but I can also wander around and explore stuff. Sometimes while exploring I find a hidden quest hub. That rewards me for exploring. In SWTOR the game is so linear, everytime I play an alt I am always playing though the same set of quests. There's zero exploration as the game is set up to force you though their questlines. It gets really tired. The stories are fun the first time you go through them, but start to get annoying on the third or fourth repetition. In WoW I can level my alts though 3 different areas per faction. That's been true since Vanilla. Most of the expansion areas give 2 branches per faction to level though. Heck you can even mix and match to mix stuff up.
I think that the people putting out MMO's just don't see the whole picture of wow. They also don't listen to playtesters who say things the dev team doesn't want to hear. Too many MMO's are released before they are ready. Game Companies really need to learn. MMO's have one chance to capture audience. Once that window has closed in the first 2 months, if you game isn't truly fun. You will lose the majority back to Wow or to the next "big game".
Solid article, Suzie, but I have to disagree with you about WoW's end game, and here's why:
Since the game is so gear-dependent, once you hit max level, there's really not much you can do efficiently (High-end raids, arenas, RBGs, etc.) until you get geared for it. Now, while it's not super hard to get the first set of PvP gear, what counts is the second set, which has a weekly cap to it - that cap becomes very low after the first week of CQ grinding, causing PvP to have a lack of meaning especially since there's no actual territory control in game nor PvP ranks for general PvP. RBG PvP ranks just straight up don't count... It was a stupid idea and niches PvP big time especially on PvP servers.
There are two things that kill raid gear progression: 1) The weekly lockout timers, and 2) The inability to queue solo for the specific raids you need. For my first point, by the time you're wanting to do certain raids to get the specific pieces of gear you want, it feels like you are paying a monthly fee for 4 raid runs at a, maybe, 10% chance for the boss you're wanting to kill to drop the loot you need. Now, I'm not complaining about the low drop rate here, I'm complaining about the inability to be a part of that process of chance. Once a week is ridiculous, and it gets you nowhere fast, especially if more than one person in your raid want that item. Why not just let people raid whenever they darn well want to and however often they darn well please? That leads me to my 2nd point. Why is all the organization necessary? Not only do you have one shot a week, but you've gotta get every person with every specific role together in order to accomplish it. Games these days are become way too guild dependent, where everyone must be on at the same time or else you can't raid that day. What ever happened to the old days when pugging end-game hardcore content was fun (and dare I say even more challenging, not knowing if you're able to finish with given pug or not). Kind of takes a lot of the "rewarding" feeling out of it, no?
So, in conclusion, end-game in WoW is way more of a chore than it is fun due to the requirements and restrictions currently present in-game that limits players to ways in which they want to achieve their goals.
All that, and I still haven't even begun to talk here about the lack of some sort of alternate advancement system for those who don't like making tons of alts and wish to fine tune and augument their character's stats and abilities to reward for character longevity. Thanks for reading!
This pretty much articulates why I can't stay with WoW for an extended period of time. My guild was never really a big raiding/pvp guild, just a social guild, so we didn't really have the people to do raids and get the top tier gear. Maybe we could get the arena gear, but that's about it, and it requires weekly dedication to getting your points capped out.
I actually like a game that doesn't have a real gear grind or traditional endgame, because it means I can do what I feel is fun when I want to and be able to get the best gear with the playstyle I choose. Some people may not like it because they want to be better than everyone else, but if you want to be better than everyone else simply because of your gear, then play a gear grind game.
Its almost impossible to have a MMO with out similar features as other MMOs such as WOW. Can you make a football game without having first downs and passing? Hard to make a FPS without guns and running through a map shooting people. If you change it too much it will not be a MMO anymore. When i played AOC if felt nothing at all similar to WOW. To me it was completely different eventhough it had a lot of the same features. Dungeons actually felt like dungeons in the game for example.
Even Skyrim has a ton of the same exact features as MMOs but everybody holds up so high. When you do the main storylines of guilds and the main storyline you have to go do this quest before you do the next. You have side quests too just like MMOs. Crafting isnt anything new in Skyrim vs other MMOs. The quests you basically go kill mobs or collect an item most of the time just like any MMO. The thing Skyrim does is make it fun on how they implement.
Anything that's a clone is bad, even if what you are cloning is good. WoW destroyed the mmo genre. Not vanilla WoW, that revitalized it, and had they not brought in raidordie hacks to direct the game, or newbordie hacks to direct it post 2008'ish, and if they had just let it go after 5 years so other mmo's could flourish, and maybe give us titan, things would have been different.
But instead they eliminated real world pvp, turned pvp into battleground bs, the game was dominated by raiding or arena bs, just bs after bs. I can't even sound intelligent when I talk about it because of how stupid it all was and how it's just not even worth my time trying to pretty up my language. It's just so stupid. And game after game tried to copy them but just failed, over and over. Until we get to 2014. Nearly 10 years after it's release and the mmo genre is a wasteland of non-mmos, because even the definition of the term has been completely corrupted in it's wake by names like guild wars and neverwinter.
"Yet I think that, at least for now, we can think of what Blizzard has done for nine years as something akin to a giant jigsaw puzzle: Each piece represents a feature in what we have come to know and expect in an MMO. Quests, raids, dungeons, PvP, and social aspects have all been fused together over the last decade to create the world’s most successful MMO"
Ermm EQ had raiding as end-game and dungeon plus the game had PVP.
On top of that EQ2 came out before WOW and really was the first to do the type of questing you saw in WOW.
Don't get me wrong, their can be no doubt that WOW is the most successful P2P mmo to date where numbers are concerned.
I was in beta which had no NDA, i came from EQ so i know a fare bit of how Blizzard made WOW. Blizzards main inspiration was EQ even to the point of hiring people from top EQ raiding guilds.
I appreciate the author's optimistic viewpoint on the subject of "Wow Clones", but I see things a little differently.
To preface my critisizim of the "WOW Model", and subsequent clones, I just want to say that Blizzard is a world class game development / publisher house. And despite all of the critisizm they've received over their handeling of WOW over the last half of game's life, I think most people that have played the game (especially the ones that played in the beginning) will admit that the game experience was stellar....atleast for the first few years playing.
However, one of the problems with the approach to MMO gaming that Blizzard took with WOW is that the content becomes repetative & predictable. As the author points out, there is only so much you can do, in terms of innovation, so despite all the gimmicks & "innovation" added to WOW over the year, it all ends up being the same dog & pony show.
That is one of the inherant flaws of the developer driven approach to content creation.
Where the "WOW Clone" comes in as a jab at new, simarly developed "themepark" MMOs is that the overall game experience ends up being about the same as what you can get in WOW. After you've been playing this kind of MMO experience for 5+ years, a kill 10 boars quest or a gear / level treadmill are still the same...regardless if you have wings, lightsabers, or dynamically created groups.
To the point of Blizzard not really doing anything new, I have to disagree as well. What Blizzard found about games like UO & EQ was that one of the gaming industry's most lucrative pricing model was being wasted on one of gamings most niche audiences. It's no secret that old traditional MMOs had a HUGE learning curve, was in a very hard knocks kind of environment, and required lots of time to be competitive.
Blizzard then set out to find out what all of the pain points were for all the folks that tried UO & EQ (barriers to entry), and take those away, so that they could maximize the earning potential of a box sale + monthly fee subscription pricing model. (UO had up to 200k subs & EQ had up to 1 million.....imagine if you could get 10+ million paying $15 a month)
They created a totally new product, in a totally new unexplored space in MMO gaming....and enjoyed all the business benefits of being first to this new market.
(Check out a marketing theory called Red Seas / Blue Oceans. )
Cirque Du Soleil did this. Theatre & traditional stage performance art was for the niche upper class & have tons of competition (Red Seas), and traditional circus operations were a money pit, with all of the animal handling costs. They removed the animal portion of a circus, and put the acrobatics on stage...creating a whole new product, with little to no competion...and have had tremendous success by taking parts of two different mature products and making something completely new (and more efficient).
That said, WOW was first to market with this new MMO product (casual gear driven linear themepark MMO), and enjoyed all the first to market benefits therein. Had Rift been released in 2004, instead of WOW....Rift would be the game with 10+ million subs strong. They reason Rift doesn't have those numbers is because they came into this new market late, and (essentially) provide the same game experience you can get in WOW....where most already have established characters, assets, and a network of friends & achievements.
What your seeing now is a gap in the MMO market (with most AAA publishers going full "WOW Clone"), and lots of indie developers are trying to put together something in that space (open world / sandbox MMO).
TLDR: WOW is infact a COMPLETELY different game than UO or EQ was, and draw a very different userbase.
The use of the word WOW Clone is meant to describe the gear progression based, linear themepark model, where developers drive content creation, not the players.
This model is failing because of fatigue that has set in, from many putting in 5+ years in a very similar gaming experience called World of Warcraft. Games like Rift, SW:TOR, Warhammer, Aion, etc. suffer because of the fatigue carried over from those 5+ year WOW vets that are trying out their game.
WoW clone is a bad thing because people who like WoW already have a huge time investment in it and people who don't like WoW obviously don't want to play a clone of it. So the notion that WoW players will give up all their progress/friends/guildmates in WoW to come over and do the same thing in your game for years or that people who hate WoW will like your WoW clone because you changed up one or two things is stupid. I can't believe it has taken the industry this long with so many failed games and some, like the Wildstar devs, apparently still don't realize this simple truth.
Not bad article. The term WoW Clone bothers me since, obviously its a system/format that blizzard didn't even begin. It has barely any elements that are unique only to their game, yet people preach things as being a 'clone'. To me, a clone is something that bluntly takes ALL elements of a game from its art style, its gameplay, and even its lore to mimic the other game in every possible way.
In the end, lets look at GW2 which got a lot more credit then it should. Gw2 actually did NOT change much at all. Its main deal is rather then changing the formula, it disguises it as other elements. Quests are more static 'events' that are quite predictable to take part in. Combat is essencially the old tab target system just with a rather slippery dodge deal, over-all weakening its combat in attempts to make it feel 'different and half assing the change. Its only real changes being "No trinity" and "Lack of end game" for the most part flopped, though I don't think its all bad. Its attempting to do new thing, which is something most MMos try to do to spice thing up. Sure the trinity deal was a horrible mess, but the lack of end game could possibly keep some players happy, so long as they focus on giving lots of content to keep them busy/distracted.
With the "Wow clone" thrown about so haphazardly, it always bothers me. If you have that feeling about every Mmo, then a vast majority games of any genre you best be calling say "Doom Clone" for FPS or "Devil May Cry" clone for action games like God of War. Call that RPG you played a "Dungeons and Dragons" Clone while you are at it. Genre games WILL be similiar, they exist because they are enjoyable and work. Its best to look at things more broadly then claiming anything that uses a similiar format as a clone.
Now if you excuse me, I need to head out in my Ford Clone car so I can stop at my Clone Burger fast food resteraunt before I go out to the clone bar with my friends tonight.
I thought it was funny when some1 said the Perpetuum only were a "EVE"-clone. As that would be a bad thing. How can that ever be bad? There is alot of WoW-clones out there, but barely no "EVE"-clones. Now Perpetuum sure was inspired by EVE, but recently with the terraforming of islands, and peeps controlling their mechs in the game, compared to EVE on no control of their ships etc, it has grown to it's own unique game now. There will always be clones out there of different games. As long as they make their own version of the original, and puts a twist to it. I think it can never be a bad thing.
Comments
Wow Clone because nothing says your flattered as much as cheap imitation!
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/There are true wow clones - like Alganon and a few others that seriously make it almost impossible to tell the differnece, then there are themepark clones (that a lot of people just call wow clones) that are different in some respects but still very typical to the themepark model. Good examples would be RIFT, SWTOR, upcoming Wildstar, Age of Conan, etc. All of these games will have their 1 or 2 trademark things that are "unique" in an effort to set themselves apart from the pack, but they are all ultimately themepark clones for the most part.
Personally I think being a wow clone is bad as it has no originality - but a themepark clone can be good for those that like themeparks. Some of the features of each themepark are good, like Wildstar paths seems interesting and the housing - RIFT has got rifts and zone invasions - SWTOR had the story element, etc etc.
However, I think as a whole the mmo community is getting tired of the themepark model in general. It makes sense - after 10-15 years of very similar games it gets a bit old. So in that sense, I think being a wow clone or themepark clone isn't that interesting or "good" in this day and age and going forward from here.
The term "wow clone" isn't a compliment. Far from it I supose. It either means somebody is either trying to duplicate the game and failed, or is taking key gaming features and incorporating those ideas into their own game.
The problem with the first is that far too many people have tried. It has gotten to the point where if you see a fantasy style MMO on the horizon you automatically jump to the conclusion it is a clone. It is only after playing it or researching it that you discover whether or not your first impression is right or not.
Fro the second, instead of coming up with better or different ways to do things you simply rehash the old and tired approach done by WoW. The idea being if it works for Blizzard it will work for them as well. The problem with this approach is that the player base sees through it very quickly. After 10 years of production, you can almost say this dungeon reminds me of WoW's XXX or this PVP match is just like WoW's YYY. This approach works for WoW because after years of playing the game people have a hard time disconnecting from their characters. But try it on a new MMO and people flee thinking that they might as well just play WoW.
It's ok, people will still hate on WoW time and time again, while it continues to hold more players than just about every other MMO game combined (in the West.)
"All this has really been a prelude to say that there really aren’t, at least right now, that many new ways to go."
What?
WHAT?
WHAT?!!!!
"Torquemada... do not implore him for compassion. Torquemada... do not beg him for forgiveness. Torquemada... do not ask him for mercy. Let's face it, you can't Torquemada anything!"
MWO Music Video - What does the Mech say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF6HYNqCDLI
Johnny Cash - The Man Comes Around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0x2iwK0BKM
some gamers call any themepark a wow clone -- as if themepark and WOW mean the same thing
EQ2 fan sites
It means that you can build your ideas only around a given infrastructure and technology advacement. The core of how to play play mmos is yet still the same. It will change of course to what weven seen already with Occulus Rift- thats the future of MMOs. Full body involvment, aka 4D- the gext generation of MMOs.
The problem I have with WOW clones is they don't really build on what WOW did, and the ones that have attempted to build on it often let that fall to the wayside. The biggest example would be SWTOR where the Bioware developers wanted to make an MMO where story was a major pillar in the game on top of what WOW already had in the 3 pillars for MMOs.
Unfortunately, story content in SWTOR has really fallen to the wayside of the game for pvp and pve content. This is unfortunate, as instead of taking what WOW has and building upon it and making it better, they're catering to a smaller audience. Many people on SWTOR who make suggestions about how to improve the game have brought up ways to build on story, make more interactive environments, and build on the role play aspects of the game. These suggestions are a huge opportunity for Bioware to really build and improve upon what Blizzard started. Unfortunately, it's falling to the wayside in the name of mostly the pve, pvp, and cartel junkie crowd.
I think it's time the WOW clones stopped painting wow in different colours, and actually tried to offer something different. Creativity and differences won't make people melt!
I wonder how anyone could take the term 'WoW clone' as anything but a pejorative. Do you take great pride when someone says you're carrying a 'knockoff' Chanel or Gucci bag? Does your heart swell to bursting when someone says you're wearing 'fake' Christian Louboutin pumps? Why would anything said to be a 'clone' be a badge of honor? No one's saying another game is as successful as WoW when they refer to it as a clone. Backhanded compliment? Oh, kinda like, "look at that fat girl with the pretty face"? Do you focus on 'pretty face' and ignore the pejorative (fat girl)?
There are times when a seemingly negative comparison is actually meant as a positive. For example, the Chrysler 300, at launch, had a grill that was extremely similar to Bentley so people took to saying it looked like a 'poor man's Bentley' (at least from the front). That was a compliment. But if you are unique, no one uses the term 'clone' to describe you. It could be said that WoW is an EQ clone, made more accessible. Most of the features you mention are not NEW. WoW didn't create the endgame focused MMO model. Go look at their early dev team and see what game many of them were raid focused guild leaders/officers of. The difference is, WoW made the endgame accessible to (almost) all. The genius of the design was making the earlier game so much faster than it had been previously that almost everyone who played got a chance to "endgame" content (which stood in stark contrast to EQ, where only the most dedicated could even dream of seeing that content when it was current). That helped the developer because it allowed them to focus their efforts on one part of the game. Instead of having to make low level, mid level, and high level content, they could just make high level content because everyone was going to be there seemingly 3 days after rolling their toon.
"She's a ho but I'd smash that"
If the above was said about a woman, would that be a compliment?
Most people use the term WoW Clone like a monkey would... Honestly. Every new game will be a WoW Clone. TESO ? Wow clone. Wildstar ? Wow clone. ArcheAge ? Wow clone. EQN? Wow clone.
Nowadays, to be successful a game has to be a wow clone in some way, simple as that. GW2 was probably my biggest disappointment and yet, it could easily have turned out to be a great game if they did not wander too far from wow: no holy trinity was a joke and made everything in the game look like a real mess, no points in playing since at 80 everybody is the same. If GW2 had kept the holy trinity system and added a gear progression system to keep people interested, I would be playing that game at the moment.
Solid article, Suzie, but I have to disagree with you about WoW's end game, and here's why:
Since the game is so gear-dependent, once you hit max level, there's really not much you can do efficiently (High-end raids, arenas, RBGs, etc.) until you get geared for it. Now, while it's not super hard to get the first set of PvP gear, what counts is the second set, which has a weekly cap to it - that cap becomes very low after the first week of CQ grinding, causing PvP to have a lack of meaning especially since there's no actual territory control in game nor PvP ranks for general PvP. RBG PvP ranks just straight up don't count... It was a stupid idea and niches PvP big time especially on PvP servers.
There are two things that kill raid gear progression: 1) The weekly lockout timers, and 2) The inability to queue solo for the specific raids you need. For my first point, by the time you're wanting to do certain raids to get the specific pieces of gear you want, it feels like you are paying a monthly fee for 4 raid runs at a, maybe, 10% chance for the boss you're wanting to kill to drop the loot you need. Now, I'm not complaining about the low drop rate here, I'm complaining about the inability to be a part of that process of chance. Once a week is ridiculous, and it gets you nowhere fast, especially if more than one person in your raid want that item. Why not just let people raid whenever they darn well want to and however often they darn well please? That leads me to my 2nd point. Why is all the organization necessary? Not only do you have one shot a week, but you've gotta get every person with every specific role together in order to accomplish it. Games these days are become way too guild dependent, where everyone must be on at the same time or else you can't raid that day. What ever happened to the old days when pugging end-game hardcore content was fun (and dare I say even more challenging, not knowing if you're able to finish with given pug or not). Kind of takes a lot of the "rewarding" feeling out of it, no?
So, in conclusion, end-game in WoW is way more of a chore than it is fun due to the requirements and restrictions currently present in-game that limits players to ways in which they want to achieve their goals.
All that, and I still haven't even begun to talk here about the lack of some sort of alternate advancement system for those who don't like making tons of alts and wish to fine tune and augument their character's stats and abilities to reward for character longevity. Thanks for reading!
I see everyone talk about innovation that new MMOs need to be different from wow. That the "Themepark is tired". How do you suggest that they make something different? Every Sandbox MMO has the population of next to nothing or has totally failed. Also if you make things TOO different you lose the Switchers who are bored with WoW and want something new to do.
The biggest problem with the Other MMO's is that they copied some specific part of WoW and changed something to make their game a bit different. What they all seemed to miss was the different ways people DO play Wow. In WoW I can do quest hubs etc, but I can also wander around and explore stuff. Sometimes while exploring I find a hidden quest hub. That rewards me for exploring. In SWTOR the game is so linear, everytime I play an alt I am always playing though the same set of quests. There's zero exploration as the game is set up to force you though their questlines. It gets really tired. The stories are fun the first time you go through them, but start to get annoying on the third or fourth repetition. In WoW I can level my alts though 3 different areas per faction. That's been true since Vanilla. Most of the expansion areas give 2 branches per faction to level though. Heck you can even mix and match to mix stuff up.
I think that the people putting out MMO's just don't see the whole picture of wow. They also don't listen to playtesters who say things the dev team doesn't want to hear. Too many MMO's are released before they are ready. Game Companies really need to learn. MMO's have one chance to capture audience. Once that window has closed in the first 2 months, if you game isn't truly fun. You will lose the majority back to Wow or to the next "big game".
This pretty much articulates why I can't stay with WoW for an extended period of time. My guild was never really a big raiding/pvp guild, just a social guild, so we didn't really have the people to do raids and get the top tier gear. Maybe we could get the arena gear, but that's about it, and it requires weekly dedication to getting your points capped out.
I actually like a game that doesn't have a real gear grind or traditional endgame, because it means I can do what I feel is fun when I want to and be able to get the best gear with the playstyle I choose. Some people may not like it because they want to be better than everyone else, but if you want to be better than everyone else simply because of your gear, then play a gear grind game.
Its almost impossible to have a MMO with out similar features as other MMOs such as WOW. Can you make a football game without having first downs and passing? Hard to make a FPS without guns and running through a map shooting people. If you change it too much it will not be a MMO anymore. When i played AOC if felt nothing at all similar to WOW. To me it was completely different eventhough it had a lot of the same features. Dungeons actually felt like dungeons in the game for example.
Even Skyrim has a ton of the same exact features as MMOs but everybody holds up so high. When you do the main storylines of guilds and the main storyline you have to go do this quest before you do the next. You have side quests too just like MMOs. Crafting isnt anything new in Skyrim vs other MMOs. The quests you basically go kill mobs or collect an item most of the time just like any MMO. The thing Skyrim does is make it fun on how they implement.
Anything that's a clone is bad, even if what you are cloning is good. WoW destroyed the mmo genre. Not vanilla WoW, that revitalized it, and had they not brought in raidordie hacks to direct the game, or newbordie hacks to direct it post 2008'ish, and if they had just let it go after 5 years so other mmo's could flourish, and maybe give us titan, things would have been different.
But instead they eliminated real world pvp, turned pvp into battleground bs, the game was dominated by raiding or arena bs, just bs after bs. I can't even sound intelligent when I talk about it because of how stupid it all was and how it's just not even worth my time trying to pretty up my language. It's just so stupid. And game after game tried to copy them but just failed, over and over. Until we get to 2014. Nearly 10 years after it's release and the mmo genre is a wasteland of non-mmos, because even the definition of the term has been completely corrupted in it's wake by names like guild wars and neverwinter.
Ten years down the drain. It's a gd crime.
"Yet I think that, at least for now, we can think of what Blizzard has done for nine years as something akin to a giant jigsaw puzzle: Each piece represents a feature in what we have come to know and expect in an MMO. Quests, raids, dungeons, PvP, and social aspects have all been fused together over the last decade to create the world’s most successful MMO"
Ermm EQ had raiding as end-game and dungeon plus the game had PVP.
On top of that EQ2 came out before WOW and really was the first to do the type of questing you saw in WOW.
Don't get me wrong, their can be no doubt that WOW is the most successful P2P mmo to date where numbers are concerned.
I was in beta which had no NDA, i came from EQ so i know a fare bit of how Blizzard made WOW. Blizzards main inspiration was EQ even to the point of hiring people from top EQ raiding guilds.
I appreciate the author's optimistic viewpoint on the subject of "Wow Clones", but I see things a little differently.
To preface my critisizim of the "WOW Model", and subsequent clones, I just want to say that Blizzard is a world class game development / publisher house. And despite all of the critisizm they've received over their handeling of WOW over the last half of game's life, I think most people that have played the game (especially the ones that played in the beginning) will admit that the game experience was stellar....atleast for the first few years playing.
However, one of the problems with the approach to MMO gaming that Blizzard took with WOW is that the content becomes repetative & predictable. As the author points out, there is only so much you can do, in terms of innovation, so despite all the gimmicks & "innovation" added to WOW over the year, it all ends up being the same dog & pony show.
That is one of the inherant flaws of the developer driven approach to content creation.
Where the "WOW Clone" comes in as a jab at new, simarly developed "themepark" MMOs is that the overall game experience ends up being about the same as what you can get in WOW. After you've been playing this kind of MMO experience for 5+ years, a kill 10 boars quest or a gear / level treadmill are still the same...regardless if you have wings, lightsabers, or dynamically created groups.
To the point of Blizzard not really doing anything new, I have to disagree as well. What Blizzard found about games like UO & EQ was that one of the gaming industry's most lucrative pricing model was being wasted on one of gamings most niche audiences. It's no secret that old traditional MMOs had a HUGE learning curve, was in a very hard knocks kind of environment, and required lots of time to be competitive.
Blizzard then set out to find out what all of the pain points were for all the folks that tried UO & EQ (barriers to entry), and take those away, so that they could maximize the earning potential of a box sale + monthly fee subscription pricing model. (UO had up to 200k subs & EQ had up to 1 million.....imagine if you could get 10+ million paying $15 a month)
They created a totally new product, in a totally new unexplored space in MMO gaming....and enjoyed all the business benefits of being first to this new market.
(Check out a marketing theory called Red Seas / Blue Oceans. )
Cirque Du Soleil did this. Theatre & traditional stage performance art was for the niche upper class & have tons of competition (Red Seas), and traditional circus operations were a money pit, with all of the animal handling costs. They removed the animal portion of a circus, and put the acrobatics on stage...creating a whole new product, with little to no competion...and have had tremendous success by taking parts of two different mature products and making something completely new (and more efficient).
That said, WOW was first to market with this new MMO product (casual gear driven linear themepark MMO), and enjoyed all the first to market benefits therein. Had Rift been released in 2004, instead of WOW....Rift would be the game with 10+ million subs strong. They reason Rift doesn't have those numbers is because they came into this new market late, and (essentially) provide the same game experience you can get in WOW....where most already have established characters, assets, and a network of friends & achievements.
What your seeing now is a gap in the MMO market (with most AAA publishers going full "WOW Clone"), and lots of indie developers are trying to put together something in that space (open world / sandbox MMO).
TLDR: WOW is infact a COMPLETELY different game than UO or EQ was, and draw a very different userbase.
The use of the word WOW Clone is meant to describe the gear progression based, linear themepark model, where developers drive content creation, not the players.
This model is failing because of fatigue that has set in, from many putting in 5+ years in a very similar gaming experience called World of Warcraft. Games like Rift, SW:TOR, Warhammer, Aion, etc. suffer because of the fatigue carried over from those 5+ year WOW vets that are trying out their game.
WoW clone is a bad thing because people who like WoW already have a huge time investment in it and people who don't like WoW obviously don't want to play a clone of it. So the notion that WoW players will give up all their progress/friends/guildmates in WoW to come over and do the same thing in your game for years or that people who hate WoW will like your WoW clone because you changed up one or two things is stupid. I can't believe it has taken the industry this long with so many failed games and some, like the Wildstar devs, apparently still don't realize this simple truth.
Not bad article. The term WoW Clone bothers me since, obviously its a system/format that blizzard didn't even begin. It has barely any elements that are unique only to their game, yet people preach things as being a 'clone'. To me, a clone is something that bluntly takes ALL elements of a game from its art style, its gameplay, and even its lore to mimic the other game in every possible way.
In the end, lets look at GW2 which got a lot more credit then it should. Gw2 actually did NOT change much at all. Its main deal is rather then changing the formula, it disguises it as other elements. Quests are more static 'events' that are quite predictable to take part in. Combat is essencially the old tab target system just with a rather slippery dodge deal, over-all weakening its combat in attempts to make it feel 'different and half assing the change. Its only real changes being "No trinity" and "Lack of end game" for the most part flopped, though I don't think its all bad. Its attempting to do new thing, which is something most MMos try to do to spice thing up. Sure the trinity deal was a horrible mess, but the lack of end game could possibly keep some players happy, so long as they focus on giving lots of content to keep them busy/distracted.
With the "Wow clone" thrown about so haphazardly, it always bothers me. If you have that feeling about every Mmo, then a vast majority games of any genre you best be calling say "Doom Clone" for FPS or "Devil May Cry" clone for action games like God of War. Call that RPG you played a "Dungeons and Dragons" Clone while you are at it. Genre games WILL be similiar, they exist because they are enjoyable and work. Its best to look at things more broadly then claiming anything that uses a similiar format as a clone.