The World of Warcraft killer

Warhammer Online failed to usurp WoW, despite having EA behind it.

Now we have Aion and Star Wars: Knights of the Republic, can either of them succeed in beating WoW?

I read somewhere that it would cost a billion dollars to take on WoW properly with a chance of winning. Is anyone willing to gamble that much?

 

The biggest threat to WoW is itself--WoW is dangerously becoming outdated, increasingly so, graphically speaking and major engine overhauls and conversions for new technology are customarily done through sequels.

A World of Warcraft 2 would slaughter WoW as their 9M+ player base would awake bleary eyed into the daylight and discover flowers and girls and sushi and quite possibly a different and better MMO.

 

Eventually we'll have World of Starcraft to play until WoW2 is ready

Aion seems under advertised and overly 'final fantasy' japanese in visual style to take a significant chunk of WoWs market as its already a bit niche for a global competitor.

Star Wars: TOR will be fine for the starwars fans who play games, and I'd say it'll take a little bite out of WoW's 12 million player base, but the subject matter is still not casual friendly enough to "beat" WoW. After films 1-3 and the abortion that was the clone wars, star wars is just not as acceptable to like as things like fantasy (e.g. LOTR, Harry Potter etc), it's jumped the shark.

...but if you've played WoW since its closed beta over 5 years ago, you'd know that Blizzard have added large updates and changes to the technology involved. It didn't even have bloom let alone effects like the under water effects (both visual and audio) on release - and combined with the visual style they make it a very pretty game. If you're commenting on the lower poly visual style, it serves two purposes:

1: Perfect stylisation of the Warcraft universe. It's always been in that style, and it suits it well. Other MMOs reach for the realistic look (AoC etc) but they just end up looking incredibly weak due to the uncanny valley effect and have no clear style to the experience. So, they become far less engrossing for the player.

2: Min Spec! Achieving a low minimum spec required to play the game increases your user base by an vast quantity. Why would you be so utterly stupid as to limit your player base to people who have bought a mid to high spec pc in the last 2 years due to you using the latest shiny graphical techniques (Yes DX10, I'm looking at your very cloudy history), when that would only serve to reduce your capable user base by a huge amount? Again, there's a load of MMOs that have done that and they're either dead or on life support, with a few measly thousand players who are left miserable and crying in an MMO world without MM.

Wow still runs on a fairly crappy pc (it even runs at 20 frames/sec on my NC10 netbook!) and it still looks great and gives the player a great experience due to its visual style. It's even won awards from Architectural Societies for its visual style.

I think you're kind of missing the point Dan, WoW might be looking out dated for people who play Call of Duty or Crysis, but thats fine, because thats not what mmo players want or need. Taking the realistic path would be very wrong, as the MMO graveyard serves to prove.

The entire player base would simply go 'oh cool, WoW2, go go go!' and buy it...probably while still keeping their original accounts. The core regular player base is incredibly loyal to the game and have stuck with it through nerfs and buffs. Why do you think its now knocking on the 12 million player base even after 5 years? Even when they've done some huge nerfs to the game, vastly affecting each classes experience, the player base has barely wobbled by a few %.

Bruce, the whole "billion dollars" thing is down to one key element: time.

WoW started preproduction in 1996, they'd been thinking about it for about a year before that as WC2 was in production. It then took $120~Mil and 8 years before the original vanilla WoW was released. Since then its had another 5 years of development with 300+ strong team delivering countless free content releases and 2 paid for expansions which each have more content than the original vanilla WoW.

To design, construct and produce something which has equal or greater quantities of entertaining content (and even then, you're not going to shift wow's 12 million players, beacuse it's not wow.) I think you've got two ways of looking at it:

1: You take the same amount of time, ensuring that you have a well built and designed product...but then you're another 13 years behind Blizzard. Well done, you've failed.

2: Or you employ every developer in the known world and try to make it in a timely manner. But, because you're trying to generate such an epic quantity of content I'd bet a kidney and one of my testicles (and I must stress that I do like my testicles, they come in handy) that the quality would be dreadful due to production, planning and design constraints. So, you've spent a billion dollars in two years on a product that still isn't wow and is terrible. Well done, you've failed.

The wise mmo developers aren't looking to beat wow, they're looking to build their own entertaining world in their own way (e.g. EvE).

Sure, there's examples of good design and online tech ideas in wow, but really, don't try to beat it. They're 13 years ahead of you and if you're trying to beat it then you've already proven that you're not very wise.

(ps. Bruce if some of this turns up quoted on some blog or article you write to try and make yourself look amazing, I'll call you a cunt for that now.)

 

I managed to get a solid 30fps on an NC10. And netbooks are being given away free now.

 

bah, need to tweak mine more - which os/spec are you running?

 

Have to agree with pro here. WOW may not have the most advanced graphics engine, but it still does look good (and it is being tweaked a little bit). Cartoon-ish design ages better than ultra-realistic one of AoC for example (which had crazy system requirements and it still didn't really impress me that much). WOW's engine is not very flashy, but it's stable (it crashed on me maybe once during 2 years I've been playing, over 60 days /played), works smooth on low-end machines and still very impressive in some areas (virtually no loading screens except for instances and moving between continents, UI customization taken to the next level). Plus, I just love character design/animations (it takes you just a quick glance to recognize, say, undead rogue from undead warrior).

 

Obviously going after WoW directly is aiming at a moving target. One route would be to take an existing MMO and give it a series of massive upgrades. Then you are building on an existing community and technology.
DAoC, for instance.

Star Wars: Knights of the Republic looks immensely ambitious. They are introducing two fundemental shifts in technology, a very strong story line and immense speech content. So they could make everything else obsolete overnight or fall flat on their faces.

Then there are the "free", browser MMOs. Habbo, Runescape, Maple Story etc etc, there are loads of them now, some with millions of players.

And Runescape, by exactly the same process as WoW, has grown to have massive content. And also like WoW it is engineered to work on as many PCs as possible.

Finally there is the matter of social networking. Some commentators think this is more key to the success of WoW than the game. And Guild Wars is definitely mainly social networking with a bit of gaming attached. So is the key to having a blockbuster more a matter of juggling networking Vs gameplay?

 

A problem with that is while you're taking the existing tech and community, there's a reason why those games still aren't as popular as wow and you're bringing that baggage too. It usually comes down to design when you rule out the bullshit. The amount of changes you'd need to make certainly risk alienating the existing fans and you don't have anything proven to attract new fans so potentially you're in an even weaker position then.

Certainly the only real way you're going to chase the dragon of wow is by many years of updates and continued design review, but that's not really spending a billion dollars on a project, thats just how mmo's are made and maintained.

Are you trying to say that games like WoW and Guildwars don't have immensely strong story lines?

Really? What makes you say that?

 

I know a young lady who is a bit of a Guild Wars addict and from what I have seen her guild is more important than the war.

I think you could write a theseis on social networking and MMOs. Certainly the communities for these games create their own social networking to fill any perceived gaps in what the game publisher offers. There are independent blogs, fansites, forums, tweets etc for every MMO.

There is an article in this weeks Economist that says that adults are giving up on virtual worlds and that they are mainly for children and teenagers now, with 10 million American kids currently playing them, raising to 15 million by 2013.
There are 112 virtual worlds designed for under 18s with 81 in development.

The next big thing in MMOs willl be platform proliferation. Consoles and smartphones will become massive for these games. Sony Free Realms on PS3 will have a takeup of millions, for starters.

 

Ok, I 'll admit I was drawing you down a path there because, to someone who now has around 15 years of playing online games (the last 10 dedicated almost purely to mmos) its very clear that you haven't played them enough or done enough research on them to suitably comment on their content, player base or the psychology involved.

I just needed you to confirm what I already thought

I'll clarify the GW thing a bit:

The only social aspect to GW is in the hub areas. If anything Guildwars is less social than other MMOs like world of warcraft because in Guildwars you can't simply 'meet' people by randomly coming across them in the world. Also in GW you can take AI NPCs into the play areas to complete the content thus avoiding any contact with people.

GW has an incrdibly strong story aspect considering the storyline drives the areas you are able play in and it has a very well tuned pvp aspect (arguably the best balanced fantasy mmo pvp ever created).

With your female friend, I have no doubt that she focuses on the social aspect of the guild because the majority of female mmo gamers are experience gamers not accomplishment gamers.

The daedalus project has several papers which go into mmo play styles and lots of cross examination of them in detail but in laymans terms:

1: Experience gamers pick classes and races based on how they look and sound, enjoy interacting with other players more than defeating the hardest content in the game, actually read quest notes and the lore.

2: Achievement gamers pick classes and races based on the statistics they don't care how they look or sound, interact with other players only when necessary to achieve something (slightly sociopathological), don't read quest notes and the lore, they just want to know how to get to end game content asap and beat it.

In general from all the studies: women and casual gamers fall into the Experience gamer category, men and hardcore gamers fall into the achievement gamer category.

I've no doubt that if you've occasionally watched your friend play GW that you've seen an experience gamer play. Come watch me pvp in GW and you'll see the same game played in a completely different manner (although I doubt I'll be able to get back to being in the top 5 pvp teams again as I'm a tad rusty) so will you then say GW is a hardcore pvp non social game?

I'd like to read that economist article to see where they get their figures and research from because in my experience more adults are turning to mmo gaming than ever before. Sure, there's loads of kids turning to it too, but I haven't experienced a decline in adult (18+) players as yet.

 

The Economist are using eMarketer and Engage Digital Media.

Their supposition about adult usage seems to be based on the near demise of Second Life.

 

I don't know if anyone can beat World of Warcraft, but I hope no one beats to World of Warcraft.

 

Oh, you'd be surprised... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zp0k2NXJcRo

 

Getting back on topic:

"Then there are the "free", browser MMOs. Habbo, Runescape, Maple Story etc etc, there are loads of them now, some with millions of players."

Surely a game like this will ultimately become the WoW killer. Maybe Mechscape from Jagex could be the one. They have invested massively in it and they have state of the art expertise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waK86IKlc3Q


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8Rx2GTS3RI

 

Surely this will happen before the heat death of the universe!

 

Unlikely.

 

Bruce, rather than trying to look like you know anything about what you're talking about, why don't you get out there and play these games?

It'll help to make you a bit more objective and realistic about them.

FYI, yes, Runescape is quite popular and quite enjoyable, but it was around 3 years before wow (released in 2001 if memory serves) and wow's fanbase is huge in comparison. If you go and play RS you'll see why it will never replace wow, but its not trying to. It has its own little market that it appeals to rather than trying to take wow's market.

What makes you think something which was out before wow, had a smaller fan base than wow before wow was released and has continued to be less popular than wow for the last 8 years ...will be greater than wow?

The theory just doesn't work.

For someone who hails themselves as an industry marketeer, you don't do much actual research into the topics you like to discuss do you?

 

You could try reading what I wrote before coming out with the insults.

I was talking about Mechscape, not Runescape. So what you have written makes zero sense.

 

Yep, slightly fast reading from me there, my apologies.

We'd caught sniff of MS a few years ago as a lot of the group I play with are sick to death of fantasy mmo's, but we stick with wow as most of the other mmos we play only serve to proove that wow is the most competant product out there.

MS has already been signed off by a lot of the adult community at sites like mmorpg.com as most people are presuming its Runescape but scifi, and therefore for a kiddy market. We're all keen to see just what tech is in MS as Jagex have claimed its several steps beyond the java tech that RS is built on, but quite frankly they're going to have to do one hell of a job to make a free to play web based mmo be up to scratch to compete with the stand alone products out there.

...and even then, it's still not wow. Which it pains me to say, but it's still true.

That's why a lot of mmo players are hoping for World of Starcraft. That might be the wow killer

 

My brother and sister love WoW. I personally just don't get it. The graphics are poor and basically it just bores the pants off me. I'd rather play with fire.