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WoW needs some competiton desperately
Mogcat
Member UncommonPosts: 193
WoW needs some competition desperately. I hope next years games do become successes for WoW's sake. No wonder there is so much hate and general angst around WoW.
I think the developers when designing the game never worried about it becoming too easy or repetitive. "Oh look Warhammer is making a huge RvR game! Oh sweet that means players with go and have their fill in RvR and can come back fresh to WoW! longer subs! Whats that WAR isnt doing too well?....isnt doing too is an understatement?! What about AoC....oh I see..." and so on. I think that in the end cause no one seemed to just make their game even stand out and be noticed then it hurts the whole market. WoW is bland cause there is nothing really that is giving it even a little jog for its money. Sure we have EvE online and Lotoro but their games are good but they arent that sort of game that gives WoW that competition so that people can bounce between MMOs and give them a break from one style to the next. Or even be a supporter of a Telara or GW2 thats gonna be good not only for them but also WoW.
The market just needs to expand a bit. I think it will be good for WoW too.
P.S I just wrote this as it popped in my head so I dont know how it sounds in typing..writing...
Comments
What the genre needs are developers/publishers who can remember not to promise the moon and the stars to the players and then deliver a half baked game devoid of everything they promised. Pumping out PR campaigns about all these innovative features the game will have long before actual hard development begins is just a bad idea.
Also the money spent on PR could be spent on making sure the game releases in a stable, release ready feature complete state. Once the game is in good shape and ready for release is when you can start bragging about features.
The biggest thing they can do is make sure the launch goes off with as little hiccups as possible. back about 8 to 10 years ago an MMO could stumble and trip off the starting line and still have a chance at winning the Silver/Gold medal. Today however that stumble may cause you to not even qualify for the Bronze.
There are 3 types of people in the world.
1.) Those who make things happen
2.) Those who watch things happen
3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
The genre needs the above agreed and tbh one big prblem is that makers of mmorpg nowadays seems to think of the money before the game without realizing the passion is what made the great mmorpg of the past great and then profitable not the other way around.
but it seems the real devs with a passion do not work for AAA companies but small indie companies who have a vision but no resources to make it a proper reality and end up produces sub standard games.A good example would be roma victor so much good ideas there but horribly executed.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/Cloudsol/
The genre certainly needs more competition. We all lose when there isn't enough and right now there is practically none.
WoW doesnt need anything they just crossed 12 mil subscribers I dont think they need to change anything. There is no such thing as competative and mmo the genre is all about large groups of newbs playing socializing and defeating easy content with no risk so they feel good about themselfs and show off there shiny gear and wow does that better than anyone else.
With cata coming dec 7 the chance of any compet for wow is pretty non exsistant and Im fine witht hat I play RTS / FPS and get my RPG fix from wow :P
TOR and GW2 will shake things up. Tera and Rift might be good too, but TOR and GW2 look so extremely good it's not even funny to wait anymore.
Agreed. There are a few others too but they wont release in 2011. Don't underestimate Rift, it have a good team too and it's similarities to Wow can be either a blessing or a curse (I mean mechanics wise, particularly combat mechanics).
Wow will get it's competition next year one way or another. Finally.
This has been said for the last 5 years. While I personally hope it is true it would not be realistic to ignore the trend of big name big hype games that have crashed on release.
i dont know, personally the only thing that TOR will shake up, will i think be peoples confidence in Bioware, but... GW2 on the other hand, is starting to look like a more solid game, certainly one thats worth watching, but, its not something i would expect to really impact WoW.. but its a start at least. and, it might make a few other developers sit up and take notice a bit more. we really do need to see more AAA quality games in development, else the current ones really will start getting lax.
Lets look on who is making the upcoming games...
Last 5 years:
Turbine (had some players with AC and LOTRO did at least acceptable even if not good).
SOE (Only great success EQ, EQ should have been a competitor to Wow but released broken and crappy).
FunCom
Mythic.
Upcoming:
Bioware (Blizzards old nemesis, their games have sold about as well as Blizz games but this will be their first MMO)
Trion (Never hearsd of them? Founded by the guy who made Heroes of might and magic and about 200 other PC games).
Arenanet (Have many ex Blizzard employees and good budget).
The last 3 have a lot better budget and more experience than the others. Most of the companies that have tried to make a hit have more or less one game that sold so so and nothing more behind them.
There are several others 2. I am pretty sure that at least 1 of these games will be pretty bad, maybe even 2 of them but I don't see all 3 because there are just too many experienced people and good programmers involved.
But the thing that really made all games fail were the fact that every single one of them except possibly LOTRO were released way too early and had rather bad code. I know ANET at least are perfectionists, what we seen from GW2 is already better polished up than AoC and WAR are 2 years after release. And a game needs that to compete really.
Both TOR and GW2 look very solid games. I can't see how you can think GW2 is looking like a solid game while TOR isn't. They both look like the best MMO's in development for a long time.
At 2-3 months, WoW had more subs than EQ did at peak. Much of that came in from Blizzard having a solid foundation in the gaming community from Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo. They had a good customerbase going in the RTS and Action-RPG genres... just missing a FPS for that game lobby world.
GW2 may pull some GW folks and those curious with the hype, but they do not have the base waiting.
BioWare may have a decent share of the single player RPG market, but that cannot compare to the base that Blizzard had in their genres.
What company has a huge base ready to make a jump into MMORPGs?
Lol, are we going to see 2K and Firaxis make a CIV Online MMORPG?
Is Zynga going to make a Farmville Worlds?
WoW does not need competition.
The genre simply needs to move forward - splinter off into the Action MMOs and the MMORPGs - stop trying to muddle the two and go nowhere.
I miss the MMORPG genre. Will a developer ever make one again?
Explorer: 87%, Killer: 67%, Achiever: 27%, Socializer: 20%
you guys are living in a dream world. TOR is the greatist game thats never going to get finished. Cata comes out dec 7 that will pretty much make wow the best game of next year as well like it or not.
Quantity is not quality.... need to elaborate on the "best" bit there.
I miss the MMORPG genre. Will a developer ever make one again?
Explorer: 87%, Killer: 67%, Achiever: 27%, Socializer: 20%
What makes it the best game? And why is this a competition? Those who play wow will say its the best, those who play EVE will say EVE is the best, and so on. There is only a best for you, everyone has different preferences.
Here is an idea for all those just riding around dal Level an alt if u wanna play an mmo. Thats what i did. I love to level and quest. So maybe im just weird. But when i get bored raiding or dungeons i just go level me an alt for a bit then it helps refresh the raid and i can go back in after a few weeks off no issue.
I persoonally would love for swtor to be a huge hit just because im a huge sttar wars fanboy. That said in order to compete with wow u have to be a game casuals can come in a play pretty easy.
Im sorry people talk about the good old days of mmos but no one actually plays them still. They talk about the immersion and the time it took to get from one quest hub to another. Yet ff14 makes a hard game with a huge travel between places and everyoen whines its to hard.
So some disconnect here. The wow haters say they want a harder game and when one comes out with many diffrent layers and things people whine its to hard. U cant have it both ways. One game cant be to casual and when someone makes a hard game u cant whne about it. If u do u are a hypocrite
U are saying u really perfer easy games u just wanna make fun of them to be part of some so called cool hard core group.
But GW have 4,5 million accounts (and sold almost 7 million boxes including the campaigns), that is more than Warcraft 3 or Diablo 2 sold. Besides did the people who made GW 1 & 2 actually made Warcraft 3 when they worked for Blizzard. Besides say the hype meter here that it will sell fine.
As for Bioware their single player games sold about as well as Blizzards. Baldurs gate 1 & 2 and Neverwinter nights sold about the same as Diablo 1 & 2 and Starcraft. All games exceot starcraft sold about 2-2,5 million copies, SC somewhat more.. The question is if Bioware can get their fans to play a MMO like Blizzard did, but don't count them out until after the game is released.
Besides those games are Bethesda working on a MMO too, they have a huge fan base too.
As for CIV I think a MMO where you start as a cavemen and go to the 19th century would be really cool, it would have more crafting than most games and you probably shouldn't make it with levels but it sounds fun to me.
But yes, MMOs needs to move forward even if I think you can mix action, RPG and a bit of RTS in the same game if you do it right.
The truth. That other publishers don't seem to understand.
The problem is that current publishers are greedy and only interested a very fast return on investment. So they're only interested in launch day box sales, and not necessarily steady business. There's no motivation for them to give meaningful support of the product beyong the initial pre-launch hype (hi DCUO!) and invest in a game that will keep people coming back month in, month out, because that would take real money.
Personally, I hope TOR and GW2 are great games...well made, polished FINISHED games. Not just because I want to play them, maybe I will, maybe I won't, but because quality games are the exception and not the rule in the MMO space, and we want that... we NEED that to change if we want to be playing MMO's of any kind in 10 years. It's pretty easy to see that if the quality factor doesn't improve soon, the bubble will burst and we'll all be left with nothing. Well, not nothing... we'll still have WoW.
EA has put too much money into it to can it now.
As for Wow, I don't agree with you. Wow is aging fast now and is only gaining subs in China, here it started going downhill a month after WotLK released.
Some small changes are not enough to make the game last for years, that is why Blizzard spent 2 years already on their next MMO, they know this as well.
Wow will still be the biggest MMO in 2011 but that is due to it uses 2 different payment models, P2P in the west and 8 million Chinese players who pay a few cent for each hour of play too. If you only count P2P gamers it is not unlikely that TOR or Rift might pass it late 2011.
GW 2 will eventually pass it however. It is designed by Blizzard veterans (who in fact had the original idea for Wow in the first place) and have no monthly fees. But then some F2P games have a lot more accounts than Wow so a comparision might not be fair (but neither is counting Wows Chinese players together with the P2P western players).
However, the number of people who like a product does mean something. When a game has as many subcribers as WoW it's considered the most successful. This is the word everyone uses - successful. Why? Because if you say the best, everyone will start saying how their game is the best and that their opinion is worth more than someone else's.
But if there is a MMO which deserves to be deemed 'the best', this will be WoW. It appealed to so many people and on so many different levels.
Quantity is the most objective way of finding which one would be the best. Everything else is subjective. You can say game X is Y but this will be affected by your own personal perceptions.
P.S. I will be amused if I read yet another McDonalds comparison.
P.S. No company needs competition. This is what you might find in a lot of economics books - 'competition is an uncivilised way of doing business'. No one wants it but the consumers. That's why companies try to avoid competition, which is illegal of course.
Agreed. The thing that really made Wow the largest one was one thing: It have superior coding to all other MMOs (counting GW as a CORPG, it have even better but simpler code). There is nothing other that is unique for Wow but the coding is enough to tip the scale a lot.
The reason games like AoC, WAR and the rest can't compete with Wow is that they have rather crappy programmers. Bioware, ANET (and Bethesda for that matter) have good programmers, that is why these games differs from what we seen for the last few years.
You can not make a huge hit with crap code, it is just not possible.
This is just plain downplaying of WoW's success. There are many reasons why WoW was succesful. IMO, the game was just plain fun. The first time I played through 1-60...well..I've never before had so much fun in a game. No game managed to deliver so much fun neither before nor after WoW. I had friends who played WoW and really enjoyed it. And they have never ever played a computer or video game in their life, varying ages as well. WoW just had that thing that hooked up everyone who played it.
Yet another edit (:P): I have a friend who tried the game 2 years ago, I think. And we played it for a week or so. And he quit and didn't want to subscribe after the trial. Why? Because WoW sucks and it has stupid graphics and what not, basically all the crap. I could tell he had a great time playing the game but he wouldn't buy it because of the general outcry about WoW. Made me quite angry and since then I /spit on the WoW haters ;P
You should be aware that wow has not even 8mill asian customers, meanwhile other asian games have 50+ mill
subcribers on the asian market alone, so what kind of shitty game is wow?
Numbers, so fun sometimes
Pi*1337/100 = 42
Playing: Rift, LotRO
Waiting on: GW2, BP
Wow gets its winner when somebody bakes the same cake with everything better, char animations, graphics and so on.
good vs evil ns needs to be background story and players need to have option to play either side, Aion is good example
coming up close but then didnt deliver enough. also lotro would have been very close if you would have had option to play with good guys nor bad guys meaning that you could roll a orc and have a story background written with it against alliance forces.
what it did have was weak monsterplay option only, didnt warm much. ( just minor detalis missing on big concept )
cheers,