I could not get into wow. I found it incredibly boring and stale and cliche. As far as copying it I would say thats a bad thing. MMO's need a serious re-invention. Here's the problem I find with most modern MMOs, they have a serious lack of story and all gameplay is based on level grinding. There are no good puzzles, there is no good way of keeping currency farming from happening, they all (at least the ones I played) have terrible starting areas, and have no godo music. These are the things that immerse me and I just don't find them. I would love to have a huge budget and development team to implement some of my ideas but I am neither A. A billionaire, or B. An experienced developer so thats out the window :P

To this day, (even though the gameplay was boring the lore was great)I still think Asheron's Call was one of the best MMOs. Not only was all of your armor/items/weapons randomized so noone had the same stuff, but when they introduced tinking everything was really random. This randomness kept players trying to get new gear everytime they went out to battle.

Also, you don't have to rely on currency in that game, eliminating a lot of farming and economy inflation (I havent played it in years so that may have changed)

The lore was awesome in this game, it was very deep and involving and updated every month. And lastly, it was EASY to party with people! None of this bs you see in say, Final Fantasy XI where you have to have certain memebers and classes and they have to be within 3 levels and if you didnt have the best gear you didnt get to party etc.

In AC, I believe you had to be within 5 or 10 levels till you reached level 50, then anyone could party together. Some would call this unbalanced but really it worked. Not to mention that it was a game that friends could just play together regardless of level difference or class. I couldnt do that with some of the other MMOs I played.

Of course AC has been dead for years (well actually its still up) but I think its a good example on how to do things and a lot of people who spent time with the game would agree.

The question is - why would you want to copy WoW?

The huge amount of revenue it brings in is obviously a reason some developers might want to copy it, but the actual game itself is terrible.

And the problem is, once games companies had seen the success of WoW, they created clones, and now the MMO market is full of terrible MMOs.

WoW is a class based grind-fest - your characters entire future is decided during character creation. Skills, spells, abilities - almost everything is set in stone as soon as you finish character creation.

I think MMOs are the only genre in games that have evolved backwards.

We started (and im not including MUDs here), with ultima online - skills based system, no classes, open PvP, full looting - and starting with everquest, games became more closed. Classes were introduced which set your character in stone after creation, limited PvP, and every game after has gone the same way, only with better graphics.

Lets face it, you can't compete with WoW by doing much of the same. You need to produce something different and show players that there are better systems out there.

Game designers need to stop restricting the players paths / choices.
Nobody wants to create their character, only to find out it isn't wanted in groups after spending 3 weeks levelling up.

www.darkfallonline.com

Darkfall online is implemeting the same sort of ruleset as ultima online, and has a large following.

Check out the features page to see whats different to the other MMOs out at the moment.

Ya, Darkfall has a great concept - mixing the actual best MMO (UO) with the one that had the best concept (Shadowbane), but the game has been in development since the dawn of time, and isn't even close to beta. It's not going to happen.

I agree that MMO's have devolved horribly. It's mostly because of the lack of success from the ones that had the best ideas, and were the truest MMORPGs compared to the overwhelming success of grindfest static crap like Everquest and WoW.

The key phrases that make WoW awful are 'static' and 'grindfest'. MMORPGs are persistent; ripe with MEANINGFUL player interaction and purpose. I started playing WoW after not wanting to play it for awhile (because I knew what it was). My guildmates were already well into the game, and interacting with them was pointless... I went through the entire leveling process basically like a single-player game, and the end-game content is completely static. I can kill Illidan a million times, and nothing happens. Nothing I do in the game can affect others and vice versa. That's barely even an online game...

WoW is just recycling the addictive qualities that made EQ a powerhouse in the earlier days of MMOs.

Someone mentioned Warhammer earlier...if you think Warhammer is a WoW clone, to the point of the UI and similar graphics, you might have a point, but the game is much more immersive and a far better example of an MMORPG. Definitely recommend reading up on the current state of the game and finding some info that's slipped through the NDA.

Agreed jesot.

However, apparently darkfall is in internal beta at the moment( althougth, we've heard that before!), and official release date is end of this year( hopefully).

We'll see how it goes. If it comes out. I'll play. If not.. nothing lost.

All of this is interesting, and it makes you wonder why would a dull game sell better? Isn't it counterintuitive to think that a game that is deeper would sell less than a game that is more shallow in context to game mechanics and design?

I would like to bring up a unique outside-the-game-industry example for study: the Coke vs Pepsi challenge. Where in the world could you be going with this? Let me explain.

In the Coke vs Pepsi challenge, people were blindfolded and told to taste both colas and then report which one they thought was better. In many more cases, more people said that Pepsi tasted better than Coke, that Pepsi was sweeter, more flavorful, and that Coke was a bit dull in comparison. However, Coke sales are still doing much better than Pepsi, and there have been studies on why this is.

Partly, it was in the marketing, in how Coke was more able to reach to the crowd through ads and etc - but even after reaching towards the consumers, it still boiled down to the taste, for consumers still had a choice between choosing Coke or Pepsi. What is interesting is that one of the studies showed that because Pepsi was much more sweeter, it made drinking it on a common basis a bit more difficult than what Coke provided, and this was one explanation of why people more often choose Coke over Pepsi.

Interestingly, perhaps this could also be applied to games and game design - a game might have an incredibly open or immersive/deep way of allowing players to direct their experience in whichever way they desire, but that might be, in fact, too much intangibility for most people to get on a more casual or common basis, who might just desire some immediate tangible objectives and complete them, and gain an immediate sense of reward from doing this. Perhaps then, a design like Ultima Online can't really be played by the majority of people on a more common basis than what EverQuest or the WoW design offers. Maybe too much of a "good" thing, could indeed become a "bad" thing, especially when reaching out towards more and more consumers with less and less time.

I'm just bringing this up to study this phenomenon, and I'm not saying that one is supposed to be better than the other, but what do you guys think?

[Edited by - Tangireon on June 5, 2008 4:51:48 PM]

I could be way off on this but this is according to what I read and heard from friends of mine who played so take what I have with a grain of salt:

But isnt that what killed star wars galaxies is the fact that the devs were so enamoured with WoW that they ruined the class system everyone liked in favor of an "easier, more accessable" system? If its true thats unreal and I would have fired those devs in a heartbeat. Did you guys see there is an online community trying to remake the game to the way it was before they redid the system? That should speak volumes alone...

Some people really do like the class system, with clear delineation of roles, and the exp and levelling system with its relentless drive for achievement. People do actually enjoy that, no matter how much people on here try to claim it's somehow inferior. There's only a mystery to it all if you fail to appreciate that not everybody wants the same things that you do.

But that's basically a singleplayer game. Which is my problem with it.

The reason WoW and EQ were big commercial successes were the Dev teams and marketing behind them... Not necessarily the games themselves.

Most games with innovative/good MMO ideas are developed by fledgling companies and published by lower-end publishers. They're often buggy the first couple months and the publishers can't afford wide commercial marketing to push the game.

I've been playing Age of Conan for the past 2 weeks and I think it could learn a lot from World of Warcraft in terms of some of the elements that made WoW successful. I agree completely with a statement above that WoW is static and repetitive, and just uses tried and tested concepts of addictiveness. I haven't played any MMO where the world seems to be shaped by the players, although I think this could be mostly from restrictions in network connections (and lazyness of producing content like this that isn't copy+paste).

However, Age of Conan has a terrible user interface for grouping, and has bugs galore in the UI such as buffs not disappearing from your portrait, the wrong level appearing above you, not finding your grouped friends on the map and so on. I wish they had got this stuff right first, prior to other graphical problems in game.

Quote:

Original post by jesot But that's basically a singleplayer game. Which is my problem with it.

No, it's really not. There's nothing intrinsic to classes or levels that makes them single player games.