Star Wars: The Old Republic

[George]

I'll definitely agree that WoW ramped up expectations to an unrealistic degree for many publishers. There are a lot of games that tried something new, or had a gimmick they wanted to trumpet over WoW, but none of them really understood what was keeping people IN WoW: constant patching, re-balancing, content updates, and very clear, straightforward design philosophy via Dev blogs and forum communication, with a dash of good customer service. They definitely had their reputation bolstering them in the beginning, and WoW launched at a time when competition was light, but they have retained their subscriber base because they actually are dedicated and timely about updates. Too many times a modern MMO comes out, gets consumed utterly by MMO nerds within a month, and a lack of gating or a clear plan for future updates makes them swarm all over another MMO before returning to WoW.

[epmode]

it's really not...

True. I tried the beta shortly before launch it it felt like pre-BC WoW. But not in the awesome we-don't-know-what-we're-doing-let's-plan-a-trip-to-Booty-Bay-during-work way. Shitty quests set in a dead, strangely claustrophobic world.

[Chux]

I stopped playing because at any given time there were like 9 other players on a planet that I was on. It was B O R I N G.

[MechDeus]

They definitely had their reputation bolstering them in the beginning, and WoW launched at a time when competition was light, but they have retained their subscriber base because they actually are dedicated and timely about updates. Too many times a modern MMO comes out, gets consumed utterly by MMO nerds within a month, and a lack of gating or a clear plan for future updates makes them swarm all over another MMO before returning to WoW.

There's a lot of this. The biggest issue facing a new MMO is that it needs to hit the ground running at launch, as they don't have the luxury time WoW did when building itself up. It's not enough to have an MMO come out with content and a smooth launch, they need to be able to say they will have new dungeons and content in 2-3 months and consistently pull that off. When going up against a game that puts out good content on a tight schedule then you need to prepare like a Big Dogs shirt and go big or go home.

They also need to stick to tighter budgets and have 500k subs be a success, aiming for 1.5+ million people to cough up funds monthly for one month is just asking for bad news. Guild Wars did pretty good for itself by designing around no monthly fee, and that game was kind of garbage.

But just on sheer developer interest I'm hoping Sting makes an announcement about their Episode III MMO this year.

[Timber]

I stopped playing because at any given time there were like 9 other players on a planet that I was on. It was B O R I N G.

I was never on that dead of a server but once the server transfers hit the population on mine more than doubled. There's 200-300 people on the fleet during peak hours and unless I'm on after like 2 am there are always tons of people on the planets (and I'm sure that will go up on the lower level planets once F2P hits).

[Diff-chan]

World of Warcraft launched at a time when the MMO competition was actually pretty strong. In hindsight it seems light, but that's only because of what WoW did. The MMO landscape had a lot of entrenched games (EQ, DAoC, UO, FFXI, SWG, Asheron's Call, CoH) and had some big ones on the horizon. Yes people were seriously wondering if WoW or EverQuest 2 would come out on top.

The issue with TOR is that it's not good enough, but I don't know if any Diku-type game could be good enough for the MMO fanbase these days. WoW has ratcheted up what people expect so much. Developers spend tens of millions of dollars making tons of content and a few hundred poopsockers rush through it all in a week, then hit every gaming board in existence and talk about what a shit job the developers did.

The only way around it is to not design your game like World of Warcraft.

[Thief Silver]

How do you design it then? That's the million dollar question. WoW's model is the only one that appeals to a gigantic audience, it can be super easy to play for anyone, or challenging for the people who want to study and become amazing at the game. At the same time without requiring fighting game reaction times.

[MechDeus]

World of Warcraft launched at a time when the MMO competition was actually pretty strong. In hindsight it seems light, but that's only because of what WoW did. The MMO landscape had a lot of entrenched games (EQ, DAoC, UO, FFXI, SWG, Asheron's Call, CoH) and had some big ones on the horizon. Yes people were seriously wondering if WoW or EverQuest 2 would come out on top.

By luxury time I was referring to that the content releases didn't need to be so scheduled, things were released at a fairly languished pace back then which is why WoW had years to change its hilariously laughable talent trees and god-awful skill design that was reminiscent of Diablo 2's vomit-out-a-bunch-of-shit-and-pray-some-of-it-works. The game picked and chose what to take from other games and put it all together while, like you said, other companies just try to imitate this one game.

I remember the biggest difference WoW and EQ/FFXI/SWG was that it gave an immediate sense of power to me by fighting giant wolves and kobolds and other human-sized things that actually seemed like a threat, instead of baby rats and bunnies. Their underlying skills may have been put together by retarded monkeys but they clearly put a ton of thought into the world, how it would all work out, and how to reward the player and keep them coming back. MMOs like Rift that copy WoW and put a tiny spin on it are just destined for middle-of-the-road at best because they aren't looking to see what can be improved on the genre as a whole.

How do you design it then? That's the million dollar question. WoW's model is the only one that appeals to a gigantic audience, it can be super easy to play for anyone, or challenging for the people who want to study and become amazing at the game. At the same time without requiring fighting game reaction times.

By doing their own thing. The goal shouldn't be to take on the biggest challenger there is and topple them, it should be to put out a good game in its own right. It's the same way that Virtua Fighter doesn't replace Street Fighter, or anything else like that.

How about an MMO that gives an FFXII or FFXIII style of combat, where you control a small group of characters instead of just one and design preset tactics that can be swapped on the fly? I know there's a few MMOs that let you control multiple characters but I don't think they work like that, so it's another aspect that could be investigated. Or maybe even just having something like FFXIII's combat with one character when you can be any class and swap on the fly as needed in each fight. There's still plenty of paths that can be looked into and we're getting some great stuff like PSO2 and Tera.

The issue is that companies that want to try and dump huge amounts of money into an MMO are trying to play it too safe, and that's where they're failing.

[Yoshi]

There is way, way too much WoW praise in this thread. It's a commercial juggernaut, but its crafting and vendor model is terrible, and it caters to the lowest common denominator. What we need is something besides EVE to go way the other direction. Make it complex and require dedication. Let the dumb fucks and the people who only want to PvP or raid play something else. That's why these games fall apart for me at max level. There's nothing to do if you don't care for arenas (world PvP for life) or scheduled raids.

[George]

Very few games get away with being a second life these days. You won't see too many more of them simply because it's so easy to pigeonhole the demographic for such a game as extremely small, though no doubt fanatical. People would rather develop a segmented game tied together with some loose lore affiliation and let those individual elements cater to many different types of gamers.