Last week I canceled my World of Warcraft subscription, burnout strikes again.  I couldn’t simply leave it at that, being the massively multiplayer online (MMO) hobbyist that I am, so I went on the interwebs to see how previous games I had played are fairing in the shadow of the unstoppable juggernaut that is WoW.  Sadly, I found nothing more than merged servers, dwindling populations, and development teams who had all but quit every which way I turned.  That’s when it hit me:  WoW has killed the genre.

Don’t get me wrong, I like WoW as a game; my current burnout is sure to last a few months and, barring I don’t find something that captures my imagination, I’m sure to renew my account down the line.  But as far as MMOs are concerned, it really is the only popular MMO. Looking back over the dozen or so titles I’ve played over the last ten years, I find myself adorning the rose colored spectacles of nostalgia for games-gone-by and “how it used to be.”  And these are my thoughts.

No other game can thrive in the shadow of WoW.

It’s true:  with WoW having the monopoly on MMO players’ hard earned subscription money, it’s near impossible for other games to sustain a large playerbase.  What’s more, with the pressure of Blizzard expansion releases and major game updates, many competing developers find themselves racing to push out a near finished or half finished products, just to contend with release dates.  When a player then leaves WoW to try out a newly released MMO, and finds that it’s buggy or doesn’t have much (if any) endgame content on release, they leave and go back to the familiar.  Which leads me to my next point:

The new-to-MMOs player that WoW attracted.

With twelve million subscribers, there are quite a few MMO newbies who have recently discovered the niche genre over the last five years thanks to WoW.  Many of these players did not start at launch either, and instead came into the game with Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King. They started their MMO careers in the middle of a well established and hugely popular title, one that had years of post release development to make it as rich as it is today.  Polished leveling, massive amounts of endgame content, well balanced classes, casual player content, achievements…. these are all things that come with time with an MMO.  Those of us who played WoW from day one know that this hasn’t always been the case.  WoW has undergone years of post release development to get to where it is today.

Now, when you have a player who has only ever known a polished, impeccable WoW for an MMO go and try another game JUST released in the genre, you’ve got trouble.  They expected a myriad of endgame content, polished gameplay, and a flawless experience.  What they got was horrid latency, bugs, crashes, falling through the world, and areas of the game lacking all content.  They pack up their toys and go home, because a game like this obviously sucks, right?  No matter that it’s just been released.  They tell their friends and guildmates upon their triumphant return about what a terrible experience they had with the new game and loe, the new game gets a bad rap on the web just weeks into it’s launch.

WoW has set the bar for easy and casual content.

Does anyone actually remember a time when MMOs had some challenge to them?  I do.  WoW has a second monopoly: the monopoly of the casual player.  Let’s face it: WoW is easy.  It’s so easy you can practically beat the entire game solo simply by rolling your face across the keyboard a couple of times.  Leveling takes no skill, and you can do virtually levels 1 through 80 entirely solo.  Once you reach 80, a day or two of easy heroic dungeon grinding and you’ve got a full set of one of the latest tiers of gear.  Raiding was taken down from 40 to 25 man dungeons, and all current endgame raid content can be PUGed (Ie. pick up groups aka not guild organized).   Where did the challenge go?

This has been a debate amongst the MMO community for some time: What constitutes “hard?”  For MMOs, it’s mostly time investment and group organization.  In Everquest,  raids took up to 72 people, and were done on world bosses (ie not instanced, most world bosses would not reappear again after being killed for days, some a week or more).  In WoW, everyone can have their piece of the pie in a minimal amount of time with virtually no challenge.

Let’s take another example: Dieing.  In WoW, dieing is a momentary inconvenience. You die, you spawn at the nearest graveyard, you run as a ghost back to your grave, and you resurrect.  A small amount of damage is done to your armor.  In Everquest, death carried actual penalty. You died, you spawned buck naked at your bind point (which, if you forgot to bind close to where you would be hunting… could be a few HOURS away), you had to make it back to your corpse to retrieve all of your armor and stuff, whilst things could attack you in your defenseless naked state, and if you made it back to your body alive without a cleric friend to rez you, you also just lost a couple hours worth of experience.  If you had just dinged to the next level before you died, you probably de-leveled as well.  If you died on the way back to your body, you lost more experience. In the early days of Star Wars Galaxy, if you spent months of your life building your character into a jedi all it took was one death.  Die one time as a jedi and your character was a ghost permenantly.  You were done, finished.  No more jedi for j00! (of course, subsequent SOE patches have changed this to make it easier/less harsh).

Some people argue that this is making a game unnecessarily hard, but I disagree.  People work harder at their roles in a group when dieing poses a real threat.  Death loses it’s meaning in games like WoW because their is no penalty.  So instead of grouping with another player to beat the pack of three mobs you need to kill, why not just rush in, kill one, die, respawn, kill another, die, respawn, and then kill the last one.  See what I am saying?

There is also no real reward for beating the top of the top dungeons, either.  So you’re in a full set of teir-du-jour armor?  So is everyone else.  Because the content is easy enough anyone can experience it.  In Everquest, if a player walked into a city with the top gear you knew about it, you could see a crowd of people gathered around him or her, drooling over how elite this person was.  Because it meant that person went to near inhuman lengths to get that armor, and people knew it.

I recently debated with a WoW player about hard content.  His argument was why would a company create a game where it’s top echelon of content was only experienced by 1-2% of the playerbase, as that’s not what someone pays for in buying an MMO.  I say that’s incorrect, as most people who buy MMOs are acknowledging in their purchase of the game that X amount of time is going to  need to be invested into the title to achieve Y goal.  It’s not the makers of the game who are at fault if that person’s expectations are unrealistic.  You need to have top content for top players or else there is nothing to aim/work for.  MMOs are a time sink.  Making them into something that can be done on a casual player’s two hours a week is making them easier.

Thus, all games post WoW launch have been suspiciously easier, perhaps to compete for the casual player subscription base.

Chuck Norris, also known as “there goes the neighborhood.”

Any player across the realms of WoW can tell you that trade channel chat is perhaps the most intellectually devoid verbal diarrhea one has ever had the pleasure of reading.  Simply step into any major city at any time of day and your once peaceful chat box is instantly filled with a cacophony of retarded children on the topic of the moment, anything from religion, to politics, to your mother, to Chuck Norris, to the latest internet memes and, as always, an update on who’s a ninja.  WoW brought MMOs mainstream and, as such, you have more people than ever in your personal playing space… and there goes the neighborhood.

MMOs used to be a niche appeal sort of thing.  With the advent of MUDs, to Ultima Online, on through to the first 3D MMO experiences like Everquest and Asheron’s Call, most of the playerbase were twenty and thirty somethings, and the type of people who grew up on pen and paper RPGs and Magic the Gathering.  This group of people held these game experiences with high regard, an online social experience coupled with a living, breathing world much like those in fantasy novels or in the tabletop RPGs. General chat channels were usually filled with people exchanging information about aspects of the game, helping each other out, etc.  Occasionally you’d experience other people roleplaying and, whilst I was never a roleplayer myself, I could appreciate what RPers added to the overall environment.  People were patient with each other, wanted real adventure, and took their time with things.

In WoW, when not expressing their horrid political views (which always end in a punctuated “lulz”) we have players who are impatiently tapping their foot over a new-to-dungeons players, calling them a noob and telling them (helpfully) to “learn to play, lulz.”  Ask a question in the channel about a quest or item, and you can be sure to be greeted with a “Check wowhead.com, fag.”  More under 18s than ever are playing MMOs, particularly WoW, and the mature, respectful, roleplayers seem to have all but disappeared.  Most stayed behind, loyally, on MMOs living past their prime like Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot.

The failure of other MMOs.

Over the last couple of years a few games have been released worthy of mention: Vanguard and Age of Conan.  These should’ve been top contenders to share in the MMO glory at the top of the food chain alongside WoW or, at the very least, not crash and burn.  This wasn’t the case sadly.  When I canceled my WoW subscription I thought I’d go see what Vanguard had become.  I downloaded the game, renewed my old account, and logged in.  There were FIVE people on the ENTIRE continent.  No more than TWENTY on the entire server. What happened?

The Vanguard forums were dead, and according to those still around SOE was concentrating it’s business on developing an MMO for 2014, rumored to be Everquest 3.  The game was no longer receiving regular updates, and it appeared as though SOE had simply put this glorious-in-concept MMO out to pasture to live out the rest of it’s time and die peacefully.

I had high hopes for this title before and after it’s release.  It was an AMAZING concept, a rich world, a Brad McQuaid creation.  And it’s not to say that WoW was Vanguard’s failure, because it wasn’t.  After all, you can’t blame WoW that Sigil developed a game that would run on a computer that was invented two to three years in the future (and even my current beast of a laptop could only run it on low settings).  And you also cannot blame WoW that Vanguard still lacks endgame content three years from release.  But this is the state of MMOs that are not WoW. They lose subscriptions, they lose funding, and eventually they fade into being just another dead title in the genre.

Warhammer, a game that tried to be so much like WoW they even went to great lengths to completely copy the design style, is also dead.

Age of Conan is fairing a bit better.  Servers had been merged but it at least created a sense of a living world, as you can see other players quite frequently going about their day.  There is still an active community and an active development team.  My Laptop had no problems running it flawlessly on the highest settings,  and I was surprised to even hear about an expansion due out this year.  AoC may still have a hope for not completely failing but again,much like Vanguard, it’s lack of content at release and the bad press it got for it has really put a dent into what it COULD achieve. You can see it’s still in the recovery phase from a poor launch and, whilst you do see oter players in the world enjoying the game unlike Vanguard, it’s not the bustling metropolis that is WoW.

Oddly enough older games have an easier time holding on to  loyal subscribers than do newer, failed MMOs.  You still have loyal, active communities in Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot, as well as a scattering in Star Wars Galaxy.   Vanguard is a ghost town, as is Warhammer, and Age of Conan looked to be going the same way at release but make actually make a comeback in the coming year.   I think it’s hoping to much to herald any game awaiting release as the “WoW killer.”  WoW isn’t going to die.  No game will ever be released that will simply overtake WoW and pry it’s 12 million subscribers from it’s cold, dead fingers.  It will be interesting to see if WoW can match the longevity of the previous most successful MMO, Everquest, still going in it’s 11th year.

I think all that will simply happen is a developer will create an MMO that serves to satisfy another niche MMO desire other than high fantasy, and this game will do well as it will provide different content.  Not because it’s better or more successful or destined to be a WoW killer, simply because it’s different.  Many MMO players are looking towards Star Wars: The Old Republic to achieve this niche position, due out in the next two years.  We will have to wait and see.

Until then, you’re either playing WoW or playing by yourself.

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Posted Gaming, Nerdom |