Baraka_Guru

Blizzard released World of Warcraft in 2004. In computer gaming terms, that pretty much makes the game a senior citizen. Yet, 5 years, 2 (soon to be 3) expansions, and 11+ million subscriptions later, it's still going strong despite a number of more recent big-budget MMOs being released.

Where competitors such as Warhammer, Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings Online, Aion, and others, have failed (i.e. they have a fraction of the subscribers), there still remains a huge opportunity to dethrone the King of MMOs. Some 11 million subscribers paying at least $10 a month is no small sum.

So what is it going to take to do it?

• What is your wishlist for the "next-gen" MMO that will ultimately dethrone WoW?
• What are your gripes about WoW?
• What's missing from MMOs?

Me, I'm a classic PRGer. So I'd like to see a more immersive and expansive "adventure-based" MMO. The thing I don't like about WoW is that it's so damn busy. Everywhere you turn, there's some "mob" to run into. Azeroth is literally teeming with life, and that gets annoying because it's unrealistic. I want to be able to strike out into the wilds over great expanses without having to fight all the time I'm doing it. I want an epic journey. I don't mind running into things, but it shouldn't be every 10 feet. I'd rather more open spaces and perhaps getting mobbed when you do run into things (i.e. things that travel in groups). It should be the case that you fight more than one thing at a time in most situations. Build the game around that.

Also, the mobs are too bound to their "script." You can literally bludgeon an orc to death, while dozens of others will mill about within sight and earshot and not even know you're there. WTF? Oh, right, you didn't cause enough "threat." And you were too far away to trigger it.... okay....

Also, the quests are really repetitive. High-level quests have the same feel to them as low-level quests, except there are more "points" at stake. So what? You're doing basically the same thing. I want more quest innovation.

Okay, that's just a few. I won't steal all your thunder. What do you want in an MMO, and what will it take to make WoW look its age finally?

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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Stare At The Sun

The only, and I mean only mmo that could give WoW a run for its money is Star Wars: The Old Republic. There are a few reasons for this;

1. Bioware makes good games, but they can't end games/write endings worth a shit. No endings are really required in MMO's, hence, no problem. (Unless you consider end game/level cap the end, but that shouldn't be a problem)
2. Lots of voice acting. It will make quests actually worth paying attention to..
3. On the note of quests..they are really revolutionizing the quest system
4. Companions. They are giving people sidekicks. Pretty cool in my book.
5. Graphics. WoW is starting to show its age, and ToR looks to be a very nice step up without requiring a mega setup.

ToR isn't without its problems though. Lore and realism amongst them. First things first, lightsabers should be one hit kills, they are not. They should get around this by giving people personal shields (the tech was then abandoned/lost before a new hope). And several other small things, but I think they will do a decent enough job of addressing these issues.

Anyways, I think ToR is has a decent chance of taking in a base of atleast 3-5 million users within a year. Now that MMO's are more mainstream, I think that user base is a bit more realistic. I don't see it going much higher than that though.

Also, at the same time as ToR launches, a lot of WoW players will be looking to jump ship. I know I still play WoW, but if a new, better, more fun game came out, I'd leave.


The second option, is blizzards new MMO. Personally, I'm hoping its a steampunk MMO, but it's probably a sci-fi one.

In the way distant future, the Warhammer 40k MMO might be interesting, but, that's a long long way away (2011 at best, realistically, late 2012)

The MMO market is an interesting thing, regardless of what the WoW killer is, it needs to launch as a polished game that does not focus on "gathering" quests, and grinding.

Innovation is the key, and polish is a must. Combat must be fluid, and smooth from the get go. WoW has such a head start, that any studio is going to have their work cut out for them.

It's possible that a company other than blizzard will kill, or atleast seriously injure WoW. Other than Bioware however, I don't see it happening.

Just my perspective though.

Halx

In my observations, all the competitors to Blizzard have been their own worst enemy. There is no sense in trying to be a "WoW killer" because that kind of result is, honestly, completely up to luck. You'll probably give a billion reasons why WoW succeeded, but I dare you to follow them exactly and come up with the same success. If there really was a formula for it, well... there isn't. Rather, the previous "WoW killers" like Warhammer failed because they couldn't even survive in a world without competitors - terrible support, buggy, high latency, load-dependent gameplay, no solutions in sight. There are games like EVE that are still going strong because they do what they do right. So, my approach to this all is to not think in terms of the next WoW, but rather hope that the next game to come out actually has its shit together. Let luck and circumstance decide if they beat WoW or not.

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Reese

I don't think WOW is really showing it's age. The game's cartoonish gaphics and excellent animation gives it staying power. What's going to hurt wow is that it's becoming extremely formulaic. I think only Blizzard is capable of creating a WOW-Killer.

TOR is probably going to be liked by a lot of people. I'm skeptical though. I don't think I'm going to like it. Dunno why, The camera and animation just doesn't look very good to me and I've found if developers can't do that right, they're unlikely to get other aspects of the game right. (By "right" I mean to my liking...)

Honestly, I don't know what I want from the next big MMO. I just want it to be fun, and easy to look at for LONG periods of time.

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Cynthetiq

If you played wow from the beginning there were entire expanses where there was not a single mob to kill for big stretches. The world was quite epic and expansive.

But it got boring. It got boring to spend 30 minutes traveling to get to a an instance for a raid. There were no summoning stones, lock resources were not able to summon 40 people on a daily basis.

Even just flying from the top of Azeroth to the bottom took about 20 minutes.

So while it was expansive and more realistic, it was also very very desolate and boring.

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Baraka_Guru

But, Cyn, I'd rather see more of a balance. I'm not suggesting the world be empty for even a few minutes at a time. We run into things every couple of seconds (or a few seconds) in many if not most areas. Seriously, Azeroth doesn't have the resources to adequately feed the creatures that populate it. I suppose it's a good thing that we kill all that we do.

As it is now, it's kind of silly. It needs a better balance of adventure and action.

* * * * *

I too see ToR as something hopeful. Definitely in the right direction. It might even get me to jump ship.

Even if it isn't a WoW killer, I think it strikes a fine balance of classic elements and some innovation.

* * * * *

And, guys, don't hold back on me. What do you want to see? What are you tired with? What annoys you? What do you long for?

How do we make MMOs better?

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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Shauk

The world of warcraft killer wont be compared to world of warcraft, hopefully. Even blizzard themselves have some out and said that nobody is going to get anywhere by copying them.
They also said they're working on their own next gen MMO, because if anybody can cannibalize their own playerbase, it's them.

Stare At The Sun

One thing that I want to see..

Making a difference. I hate running the same instance over and over again without a lore reason why I am.

In WoW it is easy, just make all instances you beat keepers of time instances. You have to go back, and fight one extra boss at the end, a keepers of time boss.

It makes no sense that the lore of wow says all these bosses are dead, yet you can still go back and fight them.

Use phasing, or something of that sort to make players boss fights matter. If someone doesn't kill ragnaros atleast once a week, he raids org and rapes people for 6 hours straight.

That's one thing that annoys the shit out of me, no matter what you do, you don't make a difference. We've been running the same BG's over and over again, and noone ever wins. Player actions should matter.

ironpham

There is only one company that has the potential to create a game that can dethrone WoW (in my opinion), and that company is the very same company that makes WoW. A "World of Starcraft" or a "World of Diablo" would have the potential.

And, as far as features that would make the game/genre better:

I've found one of the more annoying things about WoW in particular is that eventually everyone looks the same (this was at least true for back when I played. I don't know how it is now). I think a good idea for a solution would be to allow the players to customize the way their equipment looks. I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying the designs Blizzard created for some of those epics are pretty badass looking. I always just found it annoying that my badass looking T2 Paladin looked the same as all the other T2 Pallies (I told you it had been a while since I played).

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Zeraph

I generally agree with you BG. I want to get back to more Pen and Paper roots (to a degree). I want to get rid of levels (pointless when you really thing about them all they do is divide the player base). I want many ways to gain power/experience. I want it to be story driven where the player actually has an impact on the game world. I want, good, meaningful pvp. There's already a bijillion deathmatch games out there.

I want huuuge customization, think city of heroes at minimum. I want crafting to be fun and worthwhile. Aion's gliding system (not their whole flying system tho) as partial mounts was awesome, include that. I want personal storylines/quests/npc archenemies/and companions I can design, probably all through an instance, but whatever. LESS instances! heh. There should only be instances when you have to have them.

The only reason old world wow could get boring (b/c of the big travel times and large expanses I mean) was because it was so dang level and item driven. If you base the game more on socialization, story, plot, pvp, etc. those problems cease to exist. Look at original EQ (before planes of power) that was 10x worse in WoW in that department yet those were the best gaming days of my life. People mattered in that game. I can still remember the crazy fantasy names of my friends (hey Nawflem!) from that game(10 years ago!) Not so on just about any other game I've played.

I've kind of already mentioned this, but after playing 10 years of games, dozens of MMOs, and playing pen and paper RPGs, the thing I'm sick the most of is levels! They are so effing pointless, arbitrary, and unrealistic!

Scorps

I don't think WoW will never be dethroned at least not anytime soon, there will be other games people may leave WoW for but its to big to just fall.

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Zeraph

Oh it will, thats what they thought about EQ and the Titanic but they both fell :P

Though WoW will prob be around for another 3-5 years.

Mantus

Borderlands by gearbox tweaked, cleaned up, balanced with a UT levels added for PvP play. I would be in heaven!

Baraka_Guru

Good point.

Around? Maybe. Where it is today? I find that hard to believe. In another 5 years, WoW might seem as old to us as Unreal Tournament seems today.

Unreal Tournament's a fun game--even today, maybe. And at the time of its release, it blew people's minds. But how many hours are you playing it these days? (Especially with Unreal Tournament 3 around.)

How is WoW going to look on its 10 anniversary?

Unreal Tournament (1998)

Fallout 3 (2008) [For 10-year compare and contrast]

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Cynthetiq

BG, compare it to Unreal 3 which is leaps and bounds visually different. Unreal 3 is a different game, not a patch or expansion.

WoW, in just 5 years has continued to push the envelope of it's graphics. One just has to look in Azeroth, travel to Outland, then to Northrend. While the style is the similar, the total amount of polygons, textures, etc are constantly being pushed the envelope.

When you walk in Azeroth, there's always a fog off into the distance. Outland and Northrend, you could push that really far out.

While my machine was able to do BC without issue with all the graphics turned up. I upgraded the vid card for WotLK. The Ony patch 3.2, whelps now make it look like I'm back at MC with all the visual lag. I wasn't planning on upgrading cards until Cataclysm or Diablo3 whichever comes out first. Diablo3 was a plan for a full PC upgrade.

Since Cataclysm is a full Azeroth rewrite, I expect it to take advantage of increasing the polygons and textures.

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Baraka_Guru

Yeah, I admit that each expansion looks nicer. But how much of that are mere improvements on the same basic construction?

The thing to look at as well is the difference in gameplay within games that have 10 years between them.

I don't mean to suggest that graphics are the only difference.

The next big thing will win us over mainly in the gameplay department. I'm quite confident of that.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Cynthetiq

How different is the gameplay in Unreal? Isn't it basically the same?

Isn't Team Fortress the Counterstrike mod just the same basic gameplay with some gameplay enhancements but mostly better graphics?

I'm not so sold on the game play department changing all that much. Driving games are still driving games, with some tweaks and changes. You get something radical like Burnout that turns that on it's head, but it's still a driving game.

The reason I believe that is that there is too much at stake. Games cost millions for development. No one wants to risk too much to make such a game changing paradigm.

Also, WoW has so many different aspects of it as far as gameplay is concerned. As I looked over a list of MMOs, while LOTR is on the top, I found it boring to play.

There are so many different ways to play WoW. Some of the friends that I know like to play the quests. They make character after character and do the quest lines. Others like to PvP. Others like gather mats, make goods and, to play the auction house. Some like to play the end content, and others like to be the best of the best and race to be the first to complete the end content.

While some lament at the dilution of gear, I must admit that it's not as frustrating running 4-5 hour instances every week (I'm looking at you MC) and still not get your full tier set after 8 months. The ability to get tokens for running and getting your gear via vendor is a huge game mechanic changer.

Now this wasn't in BC. I got tired of running Karazhan and eventually gave up playing the game altogether for 1 year. So I never go to see the end game content of BC. I believe that it was more due to 10 man vs. 25 man and being sat out most of the time, so I was bored. Never was able to get a 2nd 10 man group going.

While I lament the loss of the 40 man, since that was so epic, the ability to scale down to 25 to 10 is just awesome. I can play the content at a level that I feel comfortable with and move forward every little bit.

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Baraka_Guru

Pretty much, but when you compare UT to something like Fallout 3 (both top-rated games for their respective times), you see a host of gameplay differences. Even when you compare Fallout (1997) to Fallout 3, you see differences. Fallout was about the same time period in gaming as UT.


These are all games that are great for their time, but the difference in gaming experience is marked. I'm not just talking about control patterns, weapons, and whether they're in 3D. I'm also talking about the overall gaming experience: world immersion, how the world/characters respond to your inputs, the overall "feel" to the movement and controls. You can't say that the gameplay package in this respect hasn't changed much since the late nineties. Maybe we're reaching a plateau. Is that what you're suggesting? Maybe we are, maybe we aren't. Maybe the next big innovators are working to spring the next big thing on us.

This is partly true. I remember playing the first ever Test Drive (1987) and Need for Speed (1994). Driving is driving, yes, but you can't say the original Need for Speed is anything like Need for Speed: Underground or any of the games thereafter. The biggest differences in those games are gameplay related (read: they're more immersive).

Of course there is much at stake. But what makes more sense: innovating in an industry fuelled by innovation, or copying some other successful model where other copycats failed fairly miserably? It depends, doesn't it? Some companies don't mind reinventing the wheel and making money at it. However, others would prefer to take those risks and come up with the next big thing. It's only a matter of time.

And this is why WoW has had so much lasting power. Much of this was enabled by changes in the technology and distribution of gaming. But I can't see how this will last forever.

Maybe we have hit a bit of a plateau in terms of gameplay, but I refuse to believe it will last for long. I've been gaming since the Commodore 64 and Atari 2600 (maybe you have too). I was there when the Sega Genesis "blew the doors off of" the NES with its 16-bit graphics. With each hardware innovation comes a new generation of games made possible by better hardware capabilities.

It can be said that even hardware improvements are plateauing. Maybe they are, but there is still some room to move. We're just now heading into quad-core mainstream acceptance (and the multiple cores will only become stacked: octo-core anyone?). This opens up new opportunities for game developers to make smarter games in ways that were virtually impossible before: high graphics, highly interactive world environments, and high artificial intelligence all at once.

This begs for the next generation of gameplay innovations.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Zeraph

I give WoW extra time because MMOs are the exception to the general gaming rules. You can't compare MMOs to how games like Fallout and UO did back when. People get attached to their characters which creates nostalgia which keeps people coming back periodically even if they don't play much. This doesn't mean much for smaller games, but with such a huge subscription base its going to take quite awhile for WoW to run down. The other reason I give WoW extra time, is there's like, what? 1 good MMO on the horizon? TOR. And it takes a long time to develop new ones plus about another year of live time to take away/compete from WoW.

And lets be clear, when I (we?) say "fall" I don't mean overnight drop or even over a month. MMOs never drop out that quickly (even if there's an initial surge to try the new game, there's usually an "aftershock" of going back to the old before leaving it for good), even low sub ones. I think there are even some EQ, AO, AC, and DAoC servers still up. So coming up for a definition of failure might be important to this subject.

I put forward that to fall (not just fail, i.e. have been popular enough to fall in the first place) an MMO needs to lose more than 51% of its player base over a period of a year.

As to the concern that genres don't change much, and a racing game is still just a racing game; I'd say that an MMO is so much more complex than a racing game. It's really an amalgamation of nearly every genre. It reflects real life. It will never stop evolving. Plus, an argument can be made that most genres there has been a real life activity that it was already based off of. Racing is obvious, shooter games=hunting, etc. So in a sense those games have been around for quite awhile.

MMOs on the other hand, are only a decade old. The closest analog in history (D&D) is still only ~30 years old. Still very very young compared to the other genres. Sure most of them are centered on fighting, but that does not define the genre. Not in the same way a gun defines an FPS. I'd say MMOs are just in their infancy, and we have yet to see what they will turn into.

Cynthetiq

FWIW I've been playing before the 64 and 2600, basic text adventures and non-graphical games, from football to adventure.

The only frontier I see to gaming isn't so much the immersiveness as the Wii and Project Natal


Look at the gaming history cannon and you'll see that the games haven't changed all that much. The game is the same, the graphical wrapper has. Now that doesn't mean that small advances to AI and gameplay haven't been added, but the most important thing to most is the visual.

If it was all about gameplay then many of us would still be playing sidescrollers and shooters. Following what I mentioned, sidescrollers turned into 3D platformers, but what about shooters? They just fell off into oblivion.

Today's gaming isn't about the game. It's about a whole franchise and back story. It's a whole world you're creating.

This is why Popcap games and Facebook games have caught on like wildfire. There's no care about anything except to just jump in and play a game for a few minutes.

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ObieX

I think the only game that can kill WoW at this point is WoW itself. Everquest, for me anyway, just got to the point where there was TOO MUCH content. Before you could finish the current expansion there was already a new one out and the next well on the way. I just stopped caring about all the new stuff they were adding because i hadn't explored what they gave me already.
Thousands of new items and locations to learn? Everything you've explored becoming completely obsolete and useless. All the old zones/areas becoming completely abandoned.

WoW has learned from the mistakes of other games quite a bit. Their expansion content comes out at a nice, careful pace and has been thoroughly bug-checked. The old cities retain most of their traffic between expansions (mainly by keeping them the only place to access the Auction House.) They've made endgame content available to everyone with the addition of Heroic dungeons and Regular dungeons, using the same content on different difficulty levels. A large variety in pve and pvp play. They've also maintained a minimal amount of "feature creep" and "mudflation".

And, yes, there are many people who still play the original Everquest.

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Zeraph

I'd disagree, Cyn, to an extent (about the games not changing). Just the advent of the internet has made gaming more about playing with and against real people. That changes the atmosphere and gameplay quite a bit as your allies and opponents are now strangers (rather than friends sitting next to you or AI).

Also see games like Mass Effect, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Dragon Age, etc. These are games that have made vast strides and improvements to gameplay. Don't tell me that these are equivalent to mario bros or original Doom

Frosstbyte

I laugh hysterically at the proposition that WoW has in any way had "slow" or "tempered" mudflation. One piece of my gear now has more total stats on it than my entire gear set did at level 60. WoW's mudflation has been so out of control, in fact, that the devs have twice had to put in artificial band aid brakes on gear (tank gear specifically) so that they could still design challenging encounters.

That fairly minor side point aside, I don't think there's any use talking about a WoW killer. WoW has long since acquired a life of its own in terms of membership and playerbase. Its main competitors are going to be Blizzard's own properties, in SC2 and D3 when those come out. I doubt very much you will see any game achieve the same level of marketplace dominance until Blizzard releases a new MMO, and even then, WoW's going to be pretty crazy hard to top.

Zeraph

I don't know. I think bioware has a very similar following/rep for making quality games as blizz. So if TOR comes through I could see it being the next big thing.

D3 maybe, slightly, but SC2? Doubt it, totally different genres. But you definitely have a point. I think those games will help dilute/weaken WoWs sub base. Then when something like TOR comes along with enough clout it could have the strength to knock WoW on its butt.

Frosstbyte

Maybe this is just my personal bias, but I don't think a star wars mmo will have the same level of appeal across a wide audience as azeroth's easily digested fantasy world. I don't doubt it will be popular and I don't doubt it will be successful but I don't think it's going to reach the same audience as wow.

Zeraph

I'm sorry, did someone just doubt Star Wars' mass appeal?! :P

There was way more doom and gloom about WoW's beta. People thought the cartoonish graphics and all the fudged up lore would put the masses off. Boy were they wrong.

EDIT: that isn't to say I think it will be a "WoW killer," I have a sinking suspicion TOR will end up too much like LOTR (I still have hope for it tho). But I don't doubt its mass appeal. So far it is the only MMO that I have heard people talk about IRL, before its even been released, and without me having brought it up.

Cynthetiq

Your average player getting pwned 18 times in 5 minutes is off putting to many starting players in the playing against strangers. I know many players who don't bother to do any PvP gaming from WoW to CODMW2

It's a bit more exciting with co-op play but trusting my game time experience with someone who doesn't know how to play and keeps getting me killed is equally frustrating.

This is why wow-heroes and achievements have a place in helping determine if someone is at least makes a simple cut with gear check and having at least some experience.

Now the content release is an interesting component, because those long time players know that once patch release happens the older content turns into dead space. Finding 5 man for Outland is time consuming if you aren't in a guild. and why you doing that anyways when you can just grind out the levels and move on to the next zones. TOC and Ulduar are still sought after but who wants to go to Naxx anymore.

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Baraka_Guru

Heh, WoW can be a lot like the real world of job hunting: everyone wants experience, but if you aren't given a chance, how will you get any experience in the first place?

I suppose there are "training guilds" out there. Maybe I'll give them a shot one day soon. My priest just hit 73.

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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Cynthetiq

I just thought of this as I was starting to finish up quests in Icecrown. Get yourself there. You'll see some very different kinds of quests. Some quite innovative.

It's a phased area so you'll see nothing for the beginning, but then as you move from phase to phase, you'll see the place teeming with undead. And then, when you aggro them, you'll probably die because they don't just sit there while you pound on the one guy... they generally mob you.

They fixed alot of what you're talking about in WotLK as far as questing is concerned.

The other part about phasing is that you can't leap ahead like you did in other zones where you just completely leapfrogged a set of quests. No here the entire area doesn't spawn anything if you haven't completed quest chains. This is a little frustrating when it comes to questing with friends since they can be in a different phase than you.

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snowy

I will agree with this, having played through WotLK. I really enjoyed questing in this expansion. I am really looking forward to Cataclysm, and though I don't play WoW now, I plan on going back sometime in the future.

I'm not sure there is a WoW Killer. I've tried other MMORPGs...none of them get the mix as right as World of Warcraft does.

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Redjake

WoW is quality in every aspect. As soon as another developer can ooze quality in every single aspect of a game, we'll have a WoW competitor.

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Off the record, on the q.t., and very hush-hush.

Reese

The thing about WOW and Blizzard is that if something causes their game to start failing, They will change it. Be it graphics, balance, or gameplay, they'll at least work on changing it enough to keep people from leaving. Other games abandon their work after a few years, Starcraft had a patch 11 years after it's release, Diablo 2 had a patch 9 years after release and expects another this year. I can't think of another free to play online game with that kind of dedication. It should be even stronger for a game that's taking peoples money every month.

I guess I can throw some things out there I think would be cool in a game if they could ever be done right.

I want soft level caps. Cap the quest XP at 50, raid quest up to 55 and when you get there the XP per level just skyrockets where only a few HARDCORE people are able to get 60 before the expansion hits and gives quest XP to 55 and raid quest XP to 60 and hardcores being able to grind to 65 or so..

I want to see HUGE procedurally generated worlds, items, creatures mixed with innovative story telling and questing and graphics. Procedurally generated "good" graphics? haha...

Ever-changing landscapes and stories. Procedural generation could do this. Raid a town, Do you take it over and take a % of the income or just burn it down? I want to see a lot of Megaton(fallout3) like changes in an MMO, preferably with even more of an impact to the game than that decision which I shall not spoil. I'm not saying it should be an easy task to make big changes such as moving or taking over a town. I just think it should be possible.


Things that my next MMO MUST have is a solid, user friendly, responsive user interface. WoW has a great UI and it's made better by tons of addons to make any flaws easier to deal with.

The next MMO I play needs to have good animation and camera. I just cannot play a game with flawed animation or camera for very long especially 1000s of hours. Character movement animation is the most important. A character that "floats" because his run animation and actual movement speed aren't synced is one of the most annoying things for me. I can't enjoy a lot of games to the fullest because of horrible 3rd person character animation. Oblivion, Fallout3, Everquest, SWG, COH all had crappy PC animations. I forgive FO3 because it could be played as an FPS but Melee SUCKS in first person and that hurt Oblivion for me but I only managed 110 hours in that game. WOW did animations right. Characters stuck to the ground, laggy people didn't blink across your screen, Animations flowed together well enough. TOR looks good in this department mostly, The strafing and full speed walking backwards sucks but It's not nearly as bad as some games. I'm not a big fan of the free camera either. I like my auto adjusting smart camera from WOW more than anything.

Damn, That last paragraph is too hard to read. I was just gonna delete or re-write it but meh, I'm lazy. If you can decipher it, GG. If not, NP!

__________________
“It is better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick” - Dave Barry

Lasereth

Lots to talk about here. Great topic!

First is why WoW became so popular. I think it had a lot to do with multiplayer online gaming getting pretty big right in the early 2000s when WoW was announced. WoW is developed by Blizzard who is undoubtedly the biggest and most popular PC developer in the world. The game already had an incredible amount of hype before it was released because it was a Blizzard game. Combine Blizzard quality with the fact that the world was "ready" for a huge MMO and there you go. It sounds weird but in the late 90s and early 2000s, not everyone had PCs, and not everyone spent a lot of time on the PC. In the early to mid 2000s, this began to change. E-commerce started booming, MySpace and social networking sites started to flourish, and all of a sudden every kid was on the PC all the time, and this is only around 2002-2004. In 2004-2006, people old, young, of every country started using computers every day. Look at Facebook. Everybody is on it. Everybody. Everybody has a reason to be on the PC a lot now, which makes them more susceptible to activities such as MMORPGs.

Blizzard either knowingly or unknowingly launched a perfectly polished, cartoony, run on any piece of shit PC developed by the most popular PC developer ever, right at the time when it became socially acceptable to spend hours upon hours on the PC without being looked at funny.

This is why WoW succeeded. WoW launched at the right place at the right time with the perfect combination of quality, polish, low system specs, and casual content.

So, if you think about it that way, WoW can't be beaten because the world will never be in a place like that again. It IS normal for people to spend hours on a PC everyday now and Blizzard got first dibs on reeling people in.

Now, my complaints about WoW, even though I haven't played since BC came out. I played the game religiously for years. I was a hardcore raider for over half of my time spent playing it, and a hardcore PVPer the other half. I loved the game, I loved playing it and spending time with it, it was my life. I don't regret it, but I do have insight into what could have kept me playing it even today.

1. Character customization. WoW has none. Grats I can change my hair and face. What? We should be able to change height, girth, weight, faces, hair, everything. Every night elf looks the same and that takes away from the experience.

2. Armor and weapons. Sure they look cool, but everyone has the same shit. There is no reason for tiered armor sets in WoW. Why can't there be multiple viable armor sets for a level 60 warrior? Why is it only 1 set that should be used? If you mix in match then you look like a circus freak. Players should be able to wear unique armor that not every night elf warrior in Stormwind is wearing. I played Everquest for a year straight when it came out and from level 1-50 I never saw a single wood elf ranger that looked like me.

3. Classes and races. Here is the big one for me. Why are we limited to so few class and race choices? Everquest excelled here. In WoW you could pick from 5 or 6 races and 7 or 8 classes when it came out. In Everquest there was twenty different races and twenty different classes to choose from. You wouldn't believe the pride of being a wood elf ranger when you saw another like yourself maybe once every few days. In WoW you're a carbon copy clone, swimming in a sea of night elf warriors everywhere you turn. This takes away from the game and needs to be addressed. I know it's very hard to balance 20 classes and races, but man does it add value to the game. This could be fixed by having master classes. At level 40, a warrior turns into a Knight, Berserker, or Fighter. Then a Berserker at level 60 can turn into a Myrmidon or Axemaster. Being a night elf warrior from 1-80 is boring, especially when every other warrior on the server has the same body as you, and on top of that they're wearing the same armor. Blah.

4. The world needs to be bigger. Yes, bigger. WoW seems huge, but when compared to Everquest, it's an absolute joke. The world of EQ was so huge that it felt like a real world. WoW feels like a console videogame with different levels. In EQ, sailing across a vast ocean to a different continent took 30 minutes at the least. This sounds tiresome and boring but it gave a sense of awe when playing. What if something happened out here? I can't see land in any direction. We're actually in dangerous territory! Danger doesn't exist in WoW. That's another problem. I didn't really like EQ taking away 50% of your EXP for that level upon a single death, but it did add a sense of realism and stakes for the world. You cared more for your character because you had something to lose.

Exploration is absent in WoW. You can run across a zone in 5 minutes or less. Zones need to be big enough that they take much longer to traverse. Can you imagine walking across a giant jungle that took 20 or 30 minutes to get through and eventually stumbling upon a city that you had never been to before? Exploration doesn't exist in WoW and there is no reward for it. When a new zone comes open you just run through on your mount, get the flight paths and continue on your way. This detracts from the game. The environment needs to be awe-inspiring and simply breathtakingly huge. Playing WoW doesn't feel like being in a world, it feels like being in Mario with flight paths taking you from level to level. Travelling from Stormwind to Ironforge doesn't feel like an epic journey, and it should. Traveling period should feel epic in a fantasy game. I understand Blizzard's decision to shorten travel time in the game so people can get stuff done faster but in my opinion it really does take away from the grandiose feeling of exploration and trekking.

5. Crafting is pathetic in WoW. The only way to obtain really cool items in WoW is to get them from raiding or other dungeons. Why can't I craft my own awesome items? What if I don't want to raid to get a cool item? Why can't I started up my own business selling useful items to players? This is partially included in WoW, but it's nothing compared to how it could be. I also hate the bind on equip system and soulbound on pickup system. Loot is too easy to come by so it's basically trash once you've outleveled it. Items on your character should be magnificent and extremely rare and mean something once you obtain them. They are assets. You can trade them and sell them and buy them. It creates a player-driven item economy which is how it should be, not an economy built on low level greens and gathering professions.



WoW did a lot right but I think a lot of it was simply when the game released. It does have the best control scheme in the history of RPGs IMO. The camera is beyond perfect and the fluid animations are still above average (gasp). When you fight in WoW, you're actually fighting, shooting spells, swinging swords, etc. Other games are still struggling to make this work.

I'm sure I'll add more to this later.

__________________
"A Darwinian attacks his theory, seeking to find flaws. An ID believer defends his theory, seeking to conceal flaws." -Roger Ebert

Shauk

I have to disagree with you on everything there.

not gonna do a point by point but turning the game in to work isn't fun, it's bullshit. I don't want a virtual job, and I find the exploration in WoW to be fine, I understand the concept of instant gratification and it's not that... There is just no point in having an MMO where people have to wait 45 motherfucking minutes for their healer to travel across a fictitious ocean to stab some motherfucking loot pinata in the asshole with a buster sword. Seems like groups tend to have ADD and shit anyways and get tired of waiting for that 5th party member after 5 minutes as it is. The zone transitions are the only thing that piss me off, particularly in outland where I go from a red fiery barren wasteland to a blue mushroom lagoon to a freaking purple lightining storm of a zone so abruptly I feel like I turn my screen in to a bag of skittles.

WoW isn't the 1st game or mmo for that matter to promote hours of time invested, it's far more forgiving and you get much further for the time you put in, that's it's success. EQ, UO, SWG, FFXI, all major hits, all had many many players who spent many hours, but they were PUNITIVE AS FAWK in the gameplay mechanics.

EQ had you running around in the dark looking for your goddamn corpse like a naked baby
UO was just brutally lawless and it was nothing to lose all your gear to some jerkoff who was having a bad day
SWG forced your login habits via maitenence & depreciation of your career based structures
FFXI just took a shit in your mouth anytime you died with a nice smack in the face and xp deduction (yay deleveled!) punitive crafting system (yay i just lost a month's worth of farming in mere seconds on a failure) completely unintuitive (oh guess I have to look up a guide online to avoid trying to make things that are int he sweet spot and wont destroy all my items or the ones i can make but wont give me a skillpoint)

The classes & races make sense, given the pre-established lore, I mean for crying out loud it was based on an RTS game, that right there usually means they're about as shallow as a kiddie pool when it comes to character development. This is why blizzard RTS games shine against the competition, they have character development and hero based game mechanics that draw you in on a more intimate level with your characters, even the grunts had personality, you spent time clicking on them over and over just to hear them get pissed off at you. But they hear you, they're doing whatever they can now to go ahead and appease the ADD gamer or the people who are like "AMG I HAVE TO BE MOR SPESHUL THAN YOU" and write in a bunch of new "lore" to allow for... tauren paladins, amongst other things... *sigh*


My problem with wow (despite the fact that I keep playing it off and on purely out of fictional social obligations) is that the traditional MMO model is built on community and intimacy.

The "Vanilla" generation of wow is looked back upon by many of us vets because of that, getting an epic piece of gear was just like "HOLY SHIT GUYS! LOOK AT THIS OMGOMGOMG" because it was you vs 40 people vs bosses that didn't have a bunch of "how-to" videos and strat sites.

You'd see someone wearing epics hit the auction house and literally people would just stop and shit bricks and start spamming "damn you have nice gear, wish I had that" etc...

people dueled in front of their respective capital cities and earned their cred that way in the pvp community, bg's and ranks came out, I got Knight-Champion, on a high pop server, I was going for rank 10 but I couldn't swing it as a full time student with a part time job, I didn't get any sleep. That race was self induced torture, and I loved every second of it.

Now? you run a fucking nonheroic 5 man and get epics, who the fuck cares? Legendaries don't even have the same meaning, Sulfuras and Thunderfury weren't just a personal effort, often times they weren't even just a guild effort, but a server effort. The call would go out on the realm forums and people would offer their help in the quest to finish those iconic weapons.



Now? nobody knows who you are unless you're a freaking self absorbed movie editor or real life celebrity who dropped his characters name/server info in an interview (yes I play on the server with Chris Kluwe of the vikings)

Blizzard gives you the ability to microtransact the death of the community

$$ race change
$$ name change
$$ gender change
$$ server change
$$ faction change

who the fuck is going to keep track of that?

the achievement system is pretty much worthless, Why have "points" if there is no way to redeem them?

Cynthetiq

I'm with Shauk most of what you said is very much pre-BC and definitely pre-WotLK. Even the idea where they gave you no flying mount until 77 was an interesting mechanic. It was annoying but it did bring back a lot of the original game flavor of exploration. I can't tell you how many different mountains I climbed and hidden areas I went looking for just to get the Explorers achievement and tabard. The Achievement system is kind of yet another game that some people play and they tagged it up with some nice little things like 310 flying mounts.

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Baraka_Guru

Comparatively, it seems WoW is designed for more action-oriented, pwn-seeking, stat-boosting type players. At least it is more catered to that. I have little interest in raiding and arenas. I don't get all geared up about getting the best gear. I don't subscribe to multiple RSS feeds at Elitist Jerks.

In a game with the quality and appeal of wow, I want more adventure, exploration, realism, and ... epicness. I want a more immersive experience where I feel like I'm in a dangerous world as Lasereth pointed out.

Now that I think of it, we're spoiled: we have a public transit system and a teleportation service at our fingertips. It's like we're too afraid of the fantasy world, and so we keep our waterwings on.

I understand why they're there. But surely you can make a game experience with some balance. Do you really need to go everywhere and anywhere at any given time or any given night? This isn't Toronto or New York City. This is (ostensibly) a vast fantasy world. Why is it so... hospitable?

Maybe I'm not after a game with wide appeal...fine. But what should I be playing instead of WoW? Is there something of comparable quality that has what I'm after, or should I bide my time and wait for someone to fulfill my wishes? Maybe I should have given LOTR Online a bit longer.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Lasereth

You both disagreeing with me is exactly why WoW is so popular and why it will never be beaten, even by its own successor. Blizzard has given the majority what they want.

---------- Post added at 10:50 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:49 AM ----------

YES.

You're exactly right. There is no adventure, exploration, or realism in WoW. Sure there's epicness, but it's because of who you're playing with and the accomplishments you've achieved, not the actual game. And I totally agree with the transportation. Let us port and fly everywhere because god knows we don't want to EXPERIENCE THE WORLD OF AZEROTH!

__________________
"A Darwinian attacks his theory, seeking to find flaws. An ID believer defends his theory, seeking to conceal flaws." -Roger Ebert

Cynthetiq

I really disagree.

Take a walk in Icecrown in your best gear at level 80 once you've phased into the zone that has all the wandering dead. You'll last maybe 5 minutes. Its just not safe to walk in that zone, even if you bring a healer with you. One can easily get overwhelmed. I kept getting killed last night for stupid reasons, but that was me making stupid mistakes that I could make in Outland at level 70 that I painfully paid the repair bills for last night.

Your complaint of out leveling your gear, well if you've trying to level a new toon, you can get BOA (bind on account) gear that transfers to your other characters, so you don't worry about the gear while leveling. Just level and grind through because most are just trying to get to lvl80 anyways.

WotLK changed WoW more fundamentally with the tokening system to get different equivalent gear, creating heroics and hard modes, which drop better gear from bosses and bring back life into instances to continue the challenges.

I expect Cataclysm to do more of the same.

---------- Post added at 11:09 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:59 AM ----------

and c'mon taking 20 minutes to getting to Scarlet monastery is not fun. you can't even say that with a straight face that every time you wanted to play the first 20-30 minutes of your gaming time would be eaten up by having to commute to your destination... really? are you serious?

Several months of getting to Dire Maul for 10 man raids, and then getting to MC and taking 20 minutes to get there. So the tank you're waiting for finally logs on, and you still can't play for another 20 minutes because he has to get to the destination?

I can't tell you how boring it is sitting there waiting... and waiting some more... when you are in lower guilds that have to pug people. Raid time at 7 with first pull at 8:30 because you finally got all the people you needed? That's boring and wasteful of everyone's time.

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

Baraka_Guru

I just find that WoW has taken the "RP" out of RPG. It's more of a fantasy FPS or action game.

When you start using language like leveling, grinding, DPS, tank, BOA, "must be geared," pug, LFG, LF2M, etc. etc., it kinda takes the roleplaying out of it and makes it a game about points, stats, and wo0t!

Maybe I'm just a different kind of hardcore. I'm more of an RP'er than a PVP'er or statmonkey.

I need a game for my kind of hardcore. Lasereth, you want to help me design something? :P

Why does the game have to be about destinations only? I know WoW is built around that. But games don't have to be.

I'm willing to drop my dime on the first MMO game developer who can adequately and elegantly design elaborate random encounters and offshoot quests/adventures based on randomness and your characters' input/reactions.

The Scarlett Monastery is basically a theme park.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Cynthetiq

back in the day it was the only place that helped on grind out gold to get a mount. and gold was really hard to get back in those days. Now with Hallow events it's still a drag to get there. Today the lifted summon stone requirements so it will get ported over just like you guys hate. But see that's the rub, you don't have to take such kinds of transport, you can walk, you can ride, you can fly (except in azeroth)

And I think that's just a different kind of hardcore. The EJ guys have their theorycrafting and spreadsheets, it's WoW hardcore. DDO tried, I found that boring like LOTR.

As I explained to a good friend of mine who insisted that questing was the only interest in Wow, when he saw some lady fall of the pipe getting from one Naxx room to the other. He said to me,"But she's level 80 why can't she play better?"

I explained to him that anyone can get to level 80. It takes real talent to be able to gear up via instances and get into the end game raids. At that point, you get to see yourself against other players and compare your play style against a different talent build. Things like wowstats allows you to super analyze how you fared against a boss in comparison to another of your class.

In PvP you can square off against singles, teams, or whole groups of people. You can do it in many different games from flag caps to resource caps. Strand of the Ancients allowed for defend the castle and use of seige weapons. The Isle of Conquest lets one lay waste from above in zepplins to the pvpers below. Wintergrasp was just an expansive pvp zone that was just epic when it was in it's heyday with up to 4 40 man raids against 4 40 man raids.

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.