MMO developers going to great lengths to avoid the mistakes of the past.
It seems somewhat ludicrous to talk about the maturing of the massively multiplayer online game (MMO) market. After all, it has been twelve years since Ultima Online launched as the first big brand MMO. But one can easily argue that it was World of Warcraft (WoW) that pulled the MMO from the role of sub-genre of a sub-genre to what is rapidly becoming the dominant type of PC game.
This was after the first big name attempts to muscle into the genre. Games like Star Wars Galaxies never reached their potential and others like Westwood’s Earth and Beyond just plain crashed and burned soon after launch. It took some fundamental redesigns of the ideas behind titles like Ultima Online and EverQuest to propel WoW to the dizzying heights it has reached.
Blizzard managed to not only define what players expect from loot and experience, it has also enjoyed enough unfettered success that those who have dedicated time into their characters are inevitably drawn back. The vast majority of MMO players now have their expectations set by WoW, and although open to different types of MMO, they expect a level of content and polish that MMOs have historically lacked at launch.
When Blizzard launched WoW it suffered enormous problems due to both demand and the rapid pace players levelled. Servers were crashing, gear was woefully itemised, and some classes were just plain broken. The pinnacle of the endgame was a raid in which the end boss was so over-tuned he was unbeatable for a long time.
Players tolerated this from WoW, largely because they were new to the MMO experience, but what WoW has become now defines what players expect. This has led to some really interesting tactics being adopted for upcoming MMOs, ones that display the lessons learned from Blizzard’s four years of Azeroth.
Overnight, an announcement was made that Big Huge Games, developer of Rise of Nations and Rise of Legends, has been acquired by budding MMO developer 38 Studios. Owned by retired baseball player Curt Schilling, 38 Studios is developing an MMO codenamed Copernicus. In the press release announcing the acquisition, it explains that Big Huge Games was now working on a console and PC real-time strategy title that will be set in the same world as Copernicus. This was the same tactic that Blizzard used with Warcraft III, using the game to introduce characters, storylines, and locations key to World of Warcraft.
We see the lessons manifest in different forms, too. Two of the bigger MMOs launching this year are Cryptic’s Champions Online and NetDevil’s Jumpgate Evolution. Both of these titles have now had their launch dates changed to later in the year in order to ensure that the games are polished and ready for launch. The old philosophy of ‘launch now, patch later’ as used by games like Age of Conan seems to be waning – you simply cannot launch an MMO with rough edges and expect good reception from gamers.
Then we have Aion: The Tower of Eternity, NCsoft’s next big title, which uses a model that will likely become more common in coming years. Aion is a CryEngine-based, Korean-developed MMO, but is much more like WoW than the long, involved grind-fests that games like Lineage are known for. While it has always been intended for a Western audience, NCsoft has been running the game since late November 2008 in Korea. It won’t launch to Western audiences until later this year. This has allowed time for a degree of balance, polish, and content that is needed to compete with the massive lead built by Blizzard’s four years since launch.
There are, of course, many, many MMOs on the horizon, both big and small. Not all of them display the desire to compete for WoW’s audience, but for those that do aim at the mainstream, the barriers to entry have shifted immeasurably since Blizzard won the MMO hearts and minds battle.
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Somazx
2009.05.28 16:19 ~
I don't think it will be enough to just match WoW's feature sets with some added evolutionary improvements. People have a lot of investment in WoW. Enough that given an MMO with modest improvements they'll still choose WoW. The WoW killer MMO will have to do something revolutionary imo. A more dynamic game world or more open ended game-play. WoW took many of the ideals people hoped to realize in an MMO and trimmed those features down to what would actually be realistic to accomplish. I'd like to see MMO's revisit those ideals and solve them.
One thing I've ranted about to whomever would listen was to not build a "tall" MMO like WoW where you play a character to some level limit and wait for expansions to extend that. I'd like to see a "wide" MMO where you play a character who's life is intentionally finite, but the game experience involves a big enough world with enough quests, classes, and variety that people look forward to playing again and again with new characters - each character a story unto its self. I suppose this idea is somewhat borrowed from the rogue-like games out there.
2009.05.28 17:27
One of the big problems with the current level based system is that it involves a whole lot of content that essentially gets a few months of proper play before the majority of the playerbase is at max level. It also puts in months of slog for anyone new who wants to play with friends beyond the 'tag along and loot' dungeon runs that leveling players seem to now expect in WoW.
There seems to be a push by some to try and strike a new balance - introducing 'leveling' that does increase a character's potency with time played but doesn't pull said players away from friends that spend less time in the game. Sony seems to be trying this with The Agency, using the operatives system and skills that level at a pace different to the main story arc. Funcom has also hinted that The Secret World will use a similar skill based system that tries to diverge from the traditional. While I have a few level 80 (and even more 70) WoW toons, the thought of going through all that again in a new game excites me only in the sense of discovery. If a developer can add that discovery and a feeling of advancement without 80 levels of boar killing in the interim then they have a winning formula.
The 'wide' concept is certainly intriguing - I'm assuming you mean essentially recreating the old cRPG notion of replayability through diversity (I'm thinking stuff like Arcanum with a broad range of gameplay experiences). Bioware seem to be promising this without the finite lifespan for The Old Republic. The notion of true character development definitely steps away from the WoW situation which feels more and more like a server browser and less like an MMO as time passes. It would be interesting to see if a game could manage without the ZOMG endgame focus that has become the status quo.
Stange
2009.05.29 10:22
The perfect MMO in my mind would have a combat system like that of Soul Calibur.
"The notion of true character development definitely steps away from the WoW situation which feels more and more like a server browser"
Couldn't have said it better myself.
Teaspoon
2009.06.04 14:26
WoW is a pretty-looking 3D front end to a fusion of IRC and Progress Quest. Given the amount of time I spend playing, it seems that that's all that I was really looking for in my games.