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.
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,
Lotros combat system, it's small number of classes and choice of art style held it back from taking WoW subs.
World of Tanks - Gadzooks, could players actually be having fun? Beta seems to be doing well.
EVE Online - Incarna will boost this classic game next year.
LOTRO - A potential rival now Turbine's revenues have doubled since the F2P launch. Needs flying mounts to really compete imo (The Eagles are coming! Hopefully!)
DDO - Large player base, kick started new life into this dying game.
Aion - Hmmmm nah. Goldseller'd to death and then some. Accounts hacked.
FFXIV - Too buggy at present.
STO - No expansions planned, death probable.
Champions O - Passable.
City of Heroes / Villains - Very passable, recent layoffs are worrying though.
Perfect World / Jade Dynasty / etc - Not bad if you like grind, grind and grindy grind grind.
Guild Wars - Let's be honest here, good player base due to F2P once client & account is purchased, BUT WAITING FOR GW2 REALLY. Not a perpetual world like WoW but GW2 is said to be.
SW:TOR - Undecided. SWG is passable but has died off a bit, probably go the same way as Matrix Online once TOR is launched.
Runes of Magic - Good, but fiasco with diamond currency issue has ruined things a bit.
And many more (mainly of far eastern asian origin)
-----------------------------
So out of that list the main competitors of my choice for the coming year:
Encourage companies that are oriented toward software quality (Blizzard, BioWare, ArenaNet...), import the pay-as-you-go pricing model to segment the market, and keep those bad reviews rolling to point out defects of the industry.
On a side note, it seems Trion World is trying to join this small club of good software quality. We'll see in few months if they really achieve it
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.
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
I gotta agree Anieli, there are many factors as to why WoW is a success. It's not just a code thing. It's Blizzards pipeline that enables the designers to communicate with their programmers in a meaningful way and enables the product itself to be *gulp* FUN. Of course, it's well known the simple fact that they approached WoW from the begining to run on low-spec machines was shear genius from a business perspective. They were able to focus on smoothing gameplay over dazzling bling that brings lesser PC's to their knees.
I do have to add though, to be fair to the programers working on the games Loke pointed out. It's not necessarily their fault. Yes, it's very apparent the programing in those products is problematic, but you have to keep in mind the development structures these people have to work within. Their code is not subpar because they are not good coders, or because they don't care enough, or didn't work hard enough. It's subpar because the deadlines they work under are ridiculous, and in all likelyhood, the support they get from their tools departments are probably shit due to lowball funding (hi Cryptic!).
All that being said, Loke is right when he says you can't make a good game with crap code. That's a hard fast truth that some devs just don't understand.
Encourage companies that are oriented toward software quality (Blizzard, BioWare, ArenaNet...), import the pay-as-you-go pricing model to segment the market, and keep those bad reviews rolling to point out defects of the industry.
Amen and amen! (not super keen on the Pay as you go point, but I'm gonna give it to you anyways cause your other points were so good )
To that end I have to point out the amazing amount of simultainious re-reviews of STO appearing on this and various other gaming websites attempting to convince people to give STO another go.
Payoffs and bribes can keep a website up and profitable in the short term, but when you're writing articles that artificially boost ratings on a low quality product, you hurt not only your reputation as a source of unbiased information, but only damage your own income later on when the masses give up on the genre altogether.
And as for us the MMO starved masses... if we want good quality MMO's we have to stop buying the crappy ones. It's very simple.
Encourage companies that are oriented toward software quality (Blizzard, BioWare, ArenaNet...), import the pay-as-you-go pricing model to segment the market, and keep those bad reviews rolling to point out defects of the industry.
Amen and amen! (not super keen on the Pay as you go point, but I'm gonna give it to you anyways cause your other points were so good )
I'm gonna explain why I'm lobbying for Pay-as-you-go with an example. Let's say I like to PvP in battlegrounds, I like to attack forts and I like to raid.
Due to the current monthly subscription model, I'm encouraged to stick with one game per month otherwise I feel like I'm throwing money out the window. Which game am I likely to choose? Probably an already established behemoth such as WoW.
Let's suppose some games such as Aion start using the pay-as-you-go model. They don't have to drop the monlthly subscription model altogether mind you. No, I wont find magnificient raids, or I don't have much to explore in this game, but GvG in the Abyss is fun to me. Well, in such case, I wouldn't mind keeping an active subscription for Aion when I feel like pvpve'ing, and I wouldn't be throwing money out the window for nights/weeks I feel like exploring Middle Earth in LOTRO (either for free, or even with another pay-by-hour model).
Bingo, instead of trying to get 'everything I ever wish for' in a behemoth game, I can subscribe to multiple MMOs that offer quality gaming in their market segment.
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.
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.
The same things were said about many of the companies that have released games in the last 5-6 years.
NCSoft: Plenty of experience and success in this company.
Square Enix: Long history of awesome, but their latest is shaping up to be a huge failure.
Sigil: From the team behind everquest.
Flagship: Former blizzard employees who worked on Diablo.
Cryptic: Creators of city of heroes.
as well as the companies you mention and a ton of other start ups that had some interesting playmakers of note.
While I think bioware and arenanet are great companies as well as trion looking to be a potential new force, the same things have been said for the last number of years. Just a few months ago people were talking about how awesome Square Enix is and how great their game was going to be.
There has just been to much dissapointment from companies that should not have failed like they did.
Encourage companies that are oriented toward software quality (Blizzard, BioWare, ArenaNet...), import the pay-as-you-go pricing model to segment the market, and keep those bad reviews rolling to point out defects of the industry.
Amen and amen! (not super keen on the Pay as you go point, but I'm gonna give it to you anyways cause your other points were so good )
I'm gonna explain why I'm lobbying for Pay-as-you-go with an example. Let's say I like to PvP in battlegrounds, I like to attack forts and I like to raid.
Due to the current monthly subscription model, I'm encouraged to stick with one game per month otherwise I feel like I'm throwing money out the window. Which game am I likely to choose? Probably an already established behemoth such as WoW.
Let's suppose some games such as Aion start using the pay-as-you-go model. They don't have to drop the monlthly subscription model altogether mind you. No, I wont find magnificient raids, or I don't have much to explore in this game, but GvG in the Abyss is fun to me. Well, in such case, I wouldn't mind keeping an active subscription for Aion when I feel like pvpve'ing, and I wouldn't be throwing money out the window for nights/weeks I feel like exploring Middle Earth in LOTRO (either for free, or even with another pay-by-hour model).
Bingo, instead of trying to get 'everything I ever wish for' in a behemoth game, I can subscribe to multiple MMOs that offer quality gaming in their market segment.
This is our future when it comes to the majority of mmorpgs.
We will see more P2p games go Hybrid their success with make other developers go that payment model.
I can also see the B2p model that Guild wars 1&2 use as another option.
And of course straight F2p will be around and only the best companies will be able to pull off a straight Box sale + Subscription fee method.
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...
i dont think so is good like it is...and thats the future.... as an unimployed i liked wow..i think ppl with shity jobs can have some fun too
Encourage companies that are oriented toward software quality (Blizzard, BioWare, ArenaNet...), import the pay-as-you-go pricing model to segment the market, and keep those bad reviews rolling to point out defects of the industry.
Amen and amen! (not super keen on the Pay as you go point, but I'm gonna give it to you anyways cause your other points were so good )
I'm gonna explain why I'm lobbying for Pay-as-you-go with an example. Let's say I like to PvP in battlegrounds, I like to attack forts and I like to raid.
Due to the current monthly subscription model, I'm encouraged to stick with one game per month otherwise I feel like I'm throwing money out the window. Which game am I likely to choose? Probably an already established behemoth such as WoW.
Let's suppose some games such as Aion start using the pay-as-you-go model. They don't have to drop the monlthly subscription model altogether mind you. No, I wont find magnificient raids, or I don't have much to explore in this game, but GvG in the Abyss is fun to me. Well, in such case, I wouldn't mind keeping an active subscription for Aion when I feel like pvpve'ing, and I wouldn't be throwing money out the window for nights/weeks I feel like exploring Middle Earth in LOTRO (either for free, or even with another pay-by-hour model).
Bingo, instead of trying to get 'everything I ever wish for' in a behemoth game, I can subscribe to multiple MMOs that offer quality gaming in their market segment.
yes, to me it already started , playing 3 mmo sametime . pay as you go model would be perfect for this!
Why do people think there will be competition for WoW? In order to compete with WoW, you would have to do what WoW does. But nobody is going to leave WoW if all you offer is WoW. So you need to do WoW...better than WoW. Yet, everybody is complaining about what WoW is and not wanting that.
So how do you expect to beat it? If people wanted different, they would have left.
I miss the MMORPG genre. Will a developer ever make one again?
Well... there is a lot of competition out there its just not very good competition.
Do you think millions of players will actually keep playing WoW for another 5 years? Sooner or later they will tire of WoW or MMORPGs in general. When they get to where they are only playing to socialize I could imagine a F2P game like LotRO would be a tempting switch especially if it ends up being one of the most popular F2P MMORPGs.
Comments
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.
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,
Lotros combat system, it's small number of classes and choice of art style held it back from taking WoW subs.Playing: Rift, LotRO
Waiting on: GW2, BP
WoW competitors:
Club Penguin - Let's not go there.
Warhammer - Struggling.
World of Tanks - Gadzooks, could players actually be having fun? Beta seems to be doing well.
EVE Online - Incarna will boost this classic game next year.
LOTRO - A potential rival now Turbine's revenues have doubled since the F2P launch. Needs flying mounts to really compete imo (The Eagles are coming! Hopefully!)
DDO - Large player base, kick started new life into this dying game.
Aion - Hmmmm nah. Goldseller'd to death and then some. Accounts hacked.
FFXIV - Too buggy at present.
STO - No expansions planned, death probable.
Champions O - Passable.
City of Heroes / Villains - Very passable, recent layoffs are worrying though.
Perfect World / Jade Dynasty / etc - Not bad if you like grind, grind and grindy grind grind.
Guild Wars - Let's be honest here, good player base due to F2P once client & account is purchased, BUT WAITING FOR GW2 REALLY. Not a perpetual world like WoW but GW2 is said to be.
SW:TOR - Undecided. SWG is passable but has died off a bit, probably go the same way as Matrix Online once TOR is launched.
Runes of Magic - Good, but fiasco with diamond currency issue has ruined things a bit.
And many more (mainly of far eastern asian origin)
-----------------------------
So out of that list the main competitors of my choice for the coming year:
EVE Online & Incarna
LOTRO - F2P version + DDO F2P
World of Tanks.
GW2 - when launched.
Possibly SW:TOR
Encourage companies that are oriented toward software quality (Blizzard, BioWare, ArenaNet...), import the pay-as-you-go pricing model to segment the market, and keep those bad reviews rolling to point out defects of the industry.
On a side note, it seems Trion World is trying to join this small club of good software quality. We'll see in few months if they really achieve it
I gotta agree Anieli, there are many factors as to why WoW is a success. It's not just a code thing. It's Blizzards pipeline that enables the designers to communicate with their programmers in a meaningful way and enables the product itself to be *gulp* FUN. Of course, it's well known the simple fact that they approached WoW from the begining to run on low-spec machines was shear genius from a business perspective. They were able to focus on smoothing gameplay over dazzling bling that brings lesser PC's to their knees.
I do have to add though, to be fair to the programers working on the games Loke pointed out. It's not necessarily their fault. Yes, it's very apparent the programing in those products is problematic, but you have to keep in mind the development structures these people have to work within. Their code is not subpar because they are not good coders, or because they don't care enough, or didn't work hard enough. It's subpar because the deadlines they work under are ridiculous, and in all likelyhood, the support they get from their tools departments are probably shit due to lowball funding (hi Cryptic!).
All that being said, Loke is right when he says you can't make a good game with crap code. That's a hard fast truth that some devs just don't understand.
WoW's competitor will be a highly polished casual themepark with a competent team behind it...i.e. it will be TOR.
Aside from that why should other mmo's compete with it directly, the likes of EVE try to innovate and attract a totally different audience.
If anything there needs to be more mmo's that don't try and compete with WoW.
"Come and have a look at what you could have won."
Ding Ding Ding we have a winner
Amen and amen! (not super keen on the Pay as you go point, but I'm gonna give it to you anyways cause your other points were so good
)
To that end I have to point out the amazing amount of simultainious re-reviews of STO appearing on this and various other gaming websites attempting to convince people to give STO another go.
Payoffs and bribes can keep a website up and profitable in the short term, but when you're writing articles that artificially boost ratings on a low quality product, you hurt not only your reputation as a source of unbiased information, but only damage your own income later on when the masses give up on the genre altogether.
And as for us the MMO starved masses... if we want good quality MMO's we have to stop buying the crappy ones. It's very simple.
I'm gonna explain why I'm lobbying for Pay-as-you-go with an example. Let's say I like to PvP in battlegrounds, I like to attack forts and I like to raid.
Due to the current monthly subscription model, I'm encouraged to stick with one game per month otherwise I feel like I'm throwing money out the window. Which game am I likely to choose? Probably an already established behemoth such as WoW.
Let's suppose some games such as Aion start using the pay-as-you-go model. They don't have to drop the monlthly subscription model altogether mind you. No, I wont find magnificient raids, or I don't have much to explore in this game, but GvG in the Abyss is fun to me. Well, in such case, I wouldn't mind keeping an active subscription for Aion when I feel like pvpve'ing, and I wouldn't be throwing money out the window for nights/weeks I feel like exploring Middle Earth in LOTRO (either for free, or even with another pay-by-hour model).
Bingo, instead of trying to get 'everything I ever wish for' in a behemoth game, I can subscribe to multiple MMOs that offer quality gaming in their market segment.
The same things were said about many of the companies that have released games in the last 5-6 years.
NCSoft: Plenty of experience and success in this company.
Square Enix: Long history of awesome, but their latest is shaping up to be a huge failure.
Sigil: From the team behind everquest.
Flagship: Former blizzard employees who worked on Diablo.
Cryptic: Creators of city of heroes.
as well as the companies you mention and a ton of other start ups that had some interesting playmakers of note.
While I think bioware and arenanet are great companies as well as trion looking to be a potential new force, the same things have been said for the last number of years. Just a few months ago people were talking about how awesome Square Enix is and how great their game was going to be.
There has just been to much dissapointment from companies that should not have failed like they did.
This is our future when it comes to the majority of mmorpgs.
We will see more P2p games go Hybrid their success with make other developers go that payment model.
I can also see the B2p model that Guild wars 1&2 use as another option.
And of course straight F2p will be around and only the best companies will be able to pull off a straight Box sale + Subscription fee method.
Playing: Rift, LotRO
Waiting on: GW2, BP
i dont think sois good like it is...and thats the future....
as an unimployed i liked wow..i think ppl with shity jobs can have some fun too
yes, to me it already started , playing 3 mmo sametime . pay as you go model would be perfect for this!
Why do people think there will be competition for WoW? In order to compete with WoW, you would have to do what WoW does. But nobody is going to leave WoW if all you offer is WoW. So you need to do WoW...better than WoW. Yet, everybody is complaining about what WoW is and not wanting that.
So how do you expect to beat it? If people wanted different, they would have left.
I miss the MMORPG genre. Will a developer ever make one again?
Explorer: 87%, Killer: 67%, Achiever: 27%, Socializer: 20%
Well... there is a lot of competition out there its just not very good competition.
Do you think millions of players will actually keep playing WoW for another 5 years? Sooner or later they will tire of WoW or MMORPGs in general. When they get to where they are only playing to socialize I could imagine a F2P game like LotRO would be a tempting switch especially if it ends up being one of the most popular F2P MMORPGs.
LOTRO does not offer what WoW does though. So it would not make a decent replacement for it.
Odds are, those playing WoW would be more likely to move to some Facebook app than another MMO game.
I miss the MMORPG genre. Will a developer ever make one again?
Explorer: 87%, Killer: 67%, Achiever: 27%, Socializer: 20%
Even though they are not MMOs, COD and BF2/TF2/etc....do take a lot of people away from WoW and other MMOs.