I don’t know… It seems to me that the problem is not WoW itself… I mean, you just cannot say that a game performing so great for so long is a failure of any kind…
The failure would be other developers failing at making an MMORPG that would not be a pale WoW copy, with something new that make people think “hey, that’s great, I’ll just stop playing WoW and play this instead, it’s so much better !”
Though I agree with the guy when he says that the key to make a WoW-killer is to build a world gamers will want to explore, because it feels awesome ! In MMORPG, there is RPG, and what is the point of an RPG if not growing from peasant to awesome ? (Except for some tabletops, like Call of Cthulhu where the whole point is that you are meaningless, worthless… Thank you Lovecraft).
Hope you enjoy the reading.
I agree with the piece 100% until he started advertising his own game (world areas that scale with you? Sounds like they can’t make enough content).
With Vanilla WoW, I rarely did any raiding. Raiding was tough since it required 40 people. I also didn’t feel any need to do that. For me, the game was simply fun to run around in the world and to do the dungeons. I remember how dangerous it was in Hillsbrad Hills in Vanilla WoW as a low level character to do quests. For the Horde side, there was a quest where you had to get spider silk and the silk would rarely drop. Yet, you were in the open which was dangerous on a PvP server.
I enjoyed the quests and just playing around in the game. Sometimes I’d do dungeons but dungeons were a massive time commitment which I liked because they were special. I liked how long it took to travel around the world actually. It was a journey because you might run into the opposing faction or something else interesting happen on the way.
Kern is right about the questing in WoW. He needs to add in the PvP changes too. WoW felt spontaneous with town battles and all. All this disappeared with the PvP battlegrounds. The town battles were some of my most favorite moments of the game. PvP battle zones and, especially, PvP rewards killed all the cool PvP combat that made the world interesting.
I think the story of WoW is also that accessibility has diminishing returns. Accessibility is great, but it can become too much. One great example is 2d Mario. Super Mario Brothers was PERFECT in its difficulty. It’s massive, massive success shows just how accessible it was. But in future Mario games, the games become boring because they are too easy where you get 1000 1-ups from the first few levels. And when you die completely, you have a save game and just reload. It makes the Warp Zones not as special. I really like the difficulty curve of Super Mario Brothers 3. When you died completely, you started over on the world with all levels reset except for fortresses and their gates. Completing fortresses allowed you to bypass levels that had returned. I also really loved how the greater power-ups (like Frog suit, Hammer Brothers Suit, etc.) were rarified in the later stages of the game and, thus, became special. I always get excited when I get a Tanooki Suit or Hammer Brothers suit. In current Mario games, they throw the cool power ups around like crazy which makes them less special.
The ‘endgame’ of Vanilla WoW being that massive 5-man dungeon of that evil Ironforge, that dwarf city in the mountain (where the main guy has a Leia like princess slave) was a fantastic experience, and I never saw any dungeon experience that could compare. It was sooo cool how if you brought a rogue, you could unlock the gate and get a shortcut. Now, due to ‘accessibility’, that area is a joke.
I still think the arcade game mentality is the solution. Arcade games were the definition of accessibility since anyone could take two steps to the left and play the competitor’s game. Yet, arcade games kept you coming back again and again. Arcade games were hard. Yet, they were accessible.
I think there is a difference between accessible and easy. Today, everyone assumes ‘easy’ = accessible which isn’t the case. You can have accessible games be challenging.
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