I don’t think so, the MMO-market is just changing and having a creative crisis.
Nowadays there are a lot Free2Play theme-park MMO which have a “high“ quality, and so deduct players from the MMOs based on a monthly fee. Who want to buy something, when he can get it for free? Also the user doesn’t play a game when he is at the highest level. He complains about the lack of content and starts a new MMO. Because there are enough to be played, not only WoW, Ultima Online and Everquest like nine years ago (that’s when WoW were publicized).
The other big problem is that MMOs don’t advance. They are stuck and nearly all are based on the same system like WoW/Everquest. Some games like Tera or Conan tried to change something. But only just a bit. So mastering a game isn’t so difficult for a player because he knows how it works (good to see at the Call of Duty Series: You’ve played one, learned all necessary skill, and every new game you just repeat your learned skills; so you become faster and reach the end more quickly). Even the world is nearly the same: a fantasy world with human, elf, dwarfs, etc. (sometimes they have other names). So the user has no reason to explore the world, because he already knows it.
But this is normal for every product (see Product life-cycle management). Normally it would be time for a relaunch.
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I loved pre-expansion WoW. But it's a completely different game now, and I haven't played in months.
For me, WoW's problem is that it really isn't a multi-player game anymore, outside of top-end raiding; you can level entirely solo (and pretty much have to, as people keep insisting that the game STARTS at max level so Blizzard keeps making the rest of the content easier and easier to do.) And even at max level, unless you find a like-minded group that will accept an under-geared scrub who hasn't researched all the instances, you can just queue for a random instance group which can be - and often is - completed without anyone saying a word.
I play MMORPGs for the community and the social aspects, and Blizzard really has tried to make that unnecessary.
I'm attracted to PFO, despite not being an enthusiastic PvPer, because of the commitment to taking time to reach max level, having a gentler power curve so newer characters don't feel as "left behind", and the real need to work as part of a community of players. I don't think any of that is antithetical to the themepark model, but I do think that the expectation that themeparks must all be like WoW has damaged the model.
I play MMORPGs for the community and the social aspects, and Blizzard really has tried to make that unnecessary.
DING DING!
It would seem GW is going to make it so that people need to interact and help (or hinder) one another (settlement wars, squad formations, guards, muscle, crafters etc etc), so I am hoping with every fiber of my being that PFO puts the multi back into MMO.
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Frankly in WOW, you WANT to avoid the social aspect as much as possible, because it has a playerbase of the lowest common denominator. There are times that general chat looks like the comments page on you tube. The game play isn't that interesting, and you have to play with people with internet anonymity disorder.
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Yes.
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It will take a long time for the theme park MMO to finish dying. WoW isn't goin to shut down anytime soon, but they have passed the point where they can adapt to a changing market.
I think it's probably a little presumptuous to see a 15% drop in subscribers for an MMORPG that has been around for eight and a half years as evidence that an entire genre of game is on the way out. Isn't the far more probable explanation that most games have a finite lifespan, and the fact that WoW has lasted eight years and still has more active players than most MMO developers could dream of, F2P or subscription-based, is simply evidence of how strong the market for a game like WoW is?
Those millions and millions of subscribers aren't suddenly going to disappear. They are still around, and their tastes have not evolved that dramatically.
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I'd say WoW's biggest 'fault' is that there's no 'choice' for the Players.
Hey, you're Horde ... eat a !@#$, you're our Red-Shirt Bad-Guys for this expansion.
Hey, you're Alliance ... eat a %^&*, you're going to White-Knight this expansion.
Honestly, if there was a fantasy MMO out there that had the sheer polish of WoW, I'd be there.
Then we got Battlegrounds. Then Arenas. It sucked for the most part, although Wintergrasp on RP realms was a lot of fun, because most people didn't turn up in PvP armor, and it was back to skill, tactics and team-work instead of throwing ever-increasing stacks of resilience at each other and seeing whose keyboard snapped first.
It was tacking on yet another grind for gear that was only useful within a single segment of the game and only for a short period of time at that, and may the Gods have mercy on your soul if you so much as skipped one week, because if you fell behind the grinding curve for better PvP Armor/Weapons/Gear, you'd inevitably have an even harder struggle to keep up with those people who could sit there and do nothing but grind under-geared folks into the asphalt for more honor/valor/maguffinite.
If we're going to PvP, NO PVP STATS PLEASE. No grinding for gear that serves one single purpose and that will be trumped by the next 'season'. If we're going to PvP, make PvP based upon our skills, our strategies and our teams, not upon an artificial and quite frankly irritating pair of stats that make it easier or harder for an opposing player to damage you/be damaged by you.
Obviously with a Multi-Million-Subscriber game, you can't have too many branching paths, but what a lot of players I speak to in-game and on the forums, there is a lot of b$#%$ing that the writers seem to think Horde Players WANT to be Villains and Alliance Players WANT to be Heroes.
The whole appeal of the original WoW Online Game was that it followed in the wake of the World of Warcraft III game, in which neither side was 'good' and neither side was 'evil'. Everything was shades of grey, each faction had reasons for and against their actions, and in vanilla the quests never seemed to point the finger of Evil at anyone directly, although you were often made to squirm over some of the quests.
Burning Crusade was fantastic, although some of the gear looked like we'd mugged Rainbow Bright ....
Wrath ... we start to see some 'Everquest' leaking into WoW, the Monstrous Races are the bad Guys, the Tolkien Races are the good Guys ... eh, drama is good for the story, so we let it slide.
Then Cataclysm. MOTHER. OF. GOD. Players were given no way to point out, as the people who pretty much SINGLE HANDEDLY BEAT THE LICH KING, THE DEMI-GOD OF UNDEATH, to their Faction Leaders that engaging in pissing matches over territory when the whole world was quite literally crumbling under everyone's feet was a bad idea.
Then comes Mists of Pandaria. The overall story-telling is awesome. What sucks is that it's an OH MY GOD grind for gear, several factions literally cannot be compeleted without first maxing out mini-factions within them, which makes it even more grindy-er, once again the Horde is rail-roaded into liking their despicable Warchief-Destined-To-Screw-Up-Like-His-Father, the (in)famous Mary-Sue characters of a certain person continually show up and rub themselves in our faces like an overly affectionate cat that needs to stop sleeping in it's own litter tray and the Alliance gets ... to pick up the pieces and be the bigger man.
I mean what?
Honestly, I love WoW, but it's obvious that it needs a major overhaul, or they need to make a WoW-2 and accept that the game engines can only handle a 10-12 year lifespan.
That's the thing with MMOs. We're not playing to grind. We're playing to have fun.
Sweatshops are not fun. Grinding for months only to replace your gear with the next patch is not fun. Having to perform the same dailies over and over and over and over because the only real 'content' in the game is at the very end is most certainly not fun at all.
A Sandbox is always changing, always evolving, by the Players actions and in-actions as well as scripts running in the background and actual Mod shenanigans. PvP is not my cup of tea, but even if I'm not up to my eyeballs in other player's body parts, I can still contribute, and there's an actual risk of losing everything to the opposing players if I don't do my part!
A Themepark is basically left to totter along on it's own, because there's nothing for the owners to do except keep replacing the dead gerbils when a server crashes or quests start to bug for players. PvP is not my cup of tea, and quite frankly I avoid it except for World PvP because as soon as the Battleground or Arena is over, the worst I'm going to endure is level 1 alt b$$**ing or yet another strategy session with half the PvP Team goofing off making fart noises in the Vent.
Nobody minds playing second fiddle to an NPC. We object to being ignored after saving the world how many times now? There is no history in a Theme-Park MMO because nobody is ever different. We all do the same quests, get the same gear, get rail-roaded by the same writers and experience the same soul-sucking grinds.
I'm with HalfOrc with a Hat of Disguise on a lot of points. I'm playing LotRO right now, which just celebrated 6 years last month and is poised for its next expansion, Helm's Deep. The gameplay is much more deep than WoW ever was (there are no more than 2 ranks of a single skill, but you still get multiple skills at most even levels). That said, when the previous expansion has you fighting Saruman and destroying his ring of power, you'd think you could get a little more respect from NPCs in the next expansion, who exile you from cities, challenge you to races to reclaim property, etc.
On top of that, the current expansion contains virtually no real raid content. Last expansion: a dragon and a massive 12-man instance. This expansion: 3 12-man "raids" where one is 5 trash packs, another is 2 moderately difficult trolls, and the last is something that is almost comparable to the dragon fight of the previous expansion. Everything else is 3-6 man, mostly 3-man, which means that certain classes can solo it.
Rather than saying a limit on years, I would place a limit on content. Once you double the vanilla level cap, you're done. Cut off. No more.
HalfOrc pretty much sums it up. I think the best fun I had in WoW was running around exploring things, getting lost, finding new areas I didn't know existed, and what not. (I got Explorer on all three of my mains - much easier doing so for my Shaman and DK with Water Walk/Ice Path than it was for my paladin - and pretty much always wore the title because it was the only one I really enjoyed getting, even if it wasn't all that prestigious.) I was never big on PvP personally and avoid it like the plague to this day (one of the main reasons I won't be in on PFO) but PvP wasn't the reason I quit Wow - if only because I only played on no-PvP servers - near as much as the immense drag of endgame, the utter demand of raid spec scores, and the repetitiveness of doing dailies for weeks on end.
(If it went free-to-play all the way up all of a sudden, though, I'd probably pick it up again, as no cost means no loss and I'd still get some enjoyment out of occasionally logging in to run around and kill things, and getting back in touch with some old guild friends.)
I'd say WoW's biggest 'fault' is that there's no 'choice' for the Players...
I'd say it isn't just WoW. They have a tremendous array of choices: the problem is that those choices are inaccurate, missing the developed interests of their players.
Part of the problem is the very size of WoW and Blizzard now. But much of it can be seen in much newer titles.
I think the culture is in change, and due to risk-averse requirements set by investors large budget MMOs are going to have difficulty adapting. The response in design cannot be adroit weighted down by the reticence of their investors to moving from obsolescing 'tried and true' and evolving like the living animal they need to be in a changing environment.
If player cultures, impelled by internationalization (for an example), continue to evolve then the overly generalized MMeh games will be about as successful as fossils.
Other hand, some of these newer efforts will fail to adequately foresee the trend in their players and miss the mark utterly or end up being perceived as overly predacious.
Neverwinter appears to be attempting a hybrid approach by furnishing the playerbase with tools to build their own content. If enough talent takes advantage of their quest building tool (Foundry) their hybrid approach might work. The alarms I am hearing though is that the balance of the game is too linear and uninteresting.
Now, you know I am actively pro-GW so take this with a grain of salt, but I see no way other than a hybridization of sandbox with UGC as the most reliable way forward for the industry.
I do not believe a hybrid of themepark and UGC will prove adequate, especially where that themepark is shallow and linear.
MMOs, like every other product, have a life-cycle, and it seems to be moving from the Maturity phase into the Decline phase.
In Market Theory, products have four stages in their life: Introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline.
Introduction is usually monopolic/oligopolic, with lots of innovation, little profit, and slow-but-increasing growth.
Growth comes when the product has managed to settle in the market, and is marked by a sharp increase in profit and reach. Innovation slows down to accomodate the needs of the growing demand, the market grows in terms of consumers, and competitors start to join in.
Maturity happens when the product reaches its market zenit. Growth slows down as the market begins to saturate, profit begins to drop due to the increase in competition, and the entire line of permutation is made available.
From that point, two things can happen: Either innovation manages to push the product through into a new cycle, or the product enters its Decline phase, during which its market share progressively drops, innovation stops, competition begins to either die out or consolidate into fewer, more efficient producers, and the business focus switches into staying afloat rather than securing perpetual growth. This phase can be indefinitely long depending on the nature of the product, and social/cultural events may cause it to spin back into its cycle (hats are a good example).
If we check Themepark MMOs, they already seem to have gone through their Introduction phase (marked mostly by the successes of Everquest and WoW in the early 2000's), then proceeded into explosive Growth rates and finally reached Maturity somewhere in the mid-2000's, staying there ever since. All the signs are there: A huge number of competitors, many outlets, wide product lines with a large variety of permutations, little innovation, and a slowdown in market growth. I don't know about specific profitability, but market behaviour suggest that it must have shrinked closer to the equilibrium.
WoW itself as a product is most likely on the far end of its Maturity phase. The past three expansions have all happened after declines in the population, causing it to go up again, only to be followed by stronger declines afterwards. That falls in line with a standard diminishing returns on gradual innovations, which means the product is fighting off its Decline phase but going into it regardless.
The good thing is that such scenarios, in healthy economies, are often fertile ground for new products/explosive innovations to take hold strongly, as the market is looking for new alternatives to grasp on. So we're likely to see some pretty spiffy things comming out in the next few years (and also some scarecrows).
tl;dr: I think yes, but slowly.
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The question was "have Theme Park games run their course". My answer is "yes".
Making a AAA Theme Park MMO costs between $75 and $150 million. It requires 5-7 years to make one. Usually the team size is over 300 people in the middle part of the development (may swell considerably near the end as producers throw bodies at the content pipeline).
These are impossible teams to hide. The industry is too small. So most insiders know where those teams are and roughly what they are working on.
After Elder Scrolls Online is released there are no AAA Theme Park games in development except maybe a game at Blizzard (although I've convinced myself such a project, if it exists, will never see the light of day).
The business model has proven to be a failure(*) for everyone who came after Warcraft. The list of games that tried this and failed includes (but is not limited to)
* Warhammer
* Age of Conan
* RIFT
* Aion
* EverQuest II
* Star Wars: The Old Republic
* The Secret World
* Matrix Online
* Dungeons & Dragons Online
* Lord of the Rings Online
* Vanguard
* Tera
Conservatively, you're looking at more than two billion dollars invested for zero return. As a result, nobody is going to invest the next $75-$100 million unless its a vanity project. Without a budget of that size, you cannot make a AAA Theme Park MMO. Therefore, the category is effectively "dead". Until and unless someone comes up with a way to make Theme Park content at a fraction of the price, with a sliver of the development team, there won't be new Theme Park games in production.
(*) Many of these games may continue to be operated and may be cashflow positive. They are "failures" in the sense that the up-front development cost + marketing will never be recouped. They were funded on the expectation that they would generate multiples of that up-front cost in profits. After their initial surge and then collapse, they operate with stripped teams who can't develop the kind of massive content extensions needed to keep acquiring new customers at a rate high enough to sustain growth.
The question was "have Theme Park games run their course". My answer is "yes".
Making a AAA Theme Park MMO costs between $75 and $150 million. It requires 5-7 years to make one. Usually the team size is over 300 people in the middle part of the development (may swell considerably near the end as producers throw bodies at the content pipeline).
I'm not particularly savvy about videogame business practices, but I've often heard the comment thrown around that a big chunk of AAA budget goes straight into marketing.
Do you think this could actually be a big cause behind such enormous budget inflation (and thus maybe a valve with which to work in order to bring them down into profitability), or are AAA MMOs, as in the actual game and its assets, really that costly to make?
Well, think about it. Making a single new monster is a pretty involved process. Today, few companies put anything as public domain. If they did, there could be standardized patterns, modding communities, and awesome libraries to use. But the current style copyright is apparently worth more. If no games get made, well.
I think it's probably a little presumptuous to see a 15% drop in subscribers for an MMORPG that has been around for eight and a half years as evidence that an entire genre of game is on the way out. Isn't the far more probable explanation that most games have a finite lifespan, and the fact that WoW has lasted eight years and still has more active players than most MMO developers could dream of, F2P or subscription-based, is simply evidence of how strong the market for a game like WoW is?
Those millions and millions of subscribers aren't suddenly going to disappear. They are still around, and their tastes have not evolved that dramatically.
And here I am, once again, agreeing with Scott. What is the world coming to.
WoW is nearly at the best it has been. It is the most polished MMO out there, with the most options to spend your time. It's not perfect ( and I really hate the feeling of "do your chores" with the daily grind needed to get anywhere ), but it's a good game which simply has gone on for a long, long time. Most of the suscription losses were in the east, where other MMOs are catering more to the local audience.
That being said, the free-to-play model is of course chipping away at their market. Personally, I'd rather pay a monthly fee to get everything available than playing a diminished game and being wheedled out of small amounts of money to unlock comfort features. But that's just me.
As for the question if themepark MMOs are dead, I think Ryan is engaging in some wishful thinking. Kinda like the people who have declared the PC dead as a gaming platform for a decade or longer. ^^
I think it's interesting that WoW is shedding players - maybe not catastrophically so, but it's still happening - after eight and a half years on sale when EVE ONLINE is still attracting new ones and going from strength to strength after exactly ten years on sale.
There are some major differences between the two games: WoW is fantasy, relatively easy to pick up and very 'easy' to learn. It had 12 million players at its height, and including inactive accounts has probably sold closer to 20 million copies. EVE is SF, has a learning wall instead of a curve and is complex. It appeals more to the hardcore player. It's only recently passed half a million players. However, I would argue that the biggest difference is how much control the game puts in the player's hand.
In WoW, as someone put it upthread, Blizzard decide what is going on, what changes are being made and shove it in front of the players. They certainly pay attention to trends and feedback, but the relationship is in clear: when you play WoW, you are playing Blizzard's game and if they do something you don't like, tough. You also have to pay quite extortionate amounts of money for expansions every three years or so.
In EVE, the players are much more included in the process. The game's 'storylines' are mostly driven by the player-managed corporations and what the players themselves decide to do. CCP do everything, especially balance and gear changes, only after closely consulting the players and fanbase (even flying player representatives to their HQ in Iceland to talk things over). If they balls things up, they repair the damage ASAP. All players also get all expansions - usually two a year - completely free of additional charges.
EVE also evolves pretty continuously: they've totally revamped the graphics engine several times now, essentially transforming the game dynamically into its own sequel, so it still looks awesome. WoW is starting to look seriously tired, so Blizzard really need to do something similar (I know they've done some modest visual updates, but it's still a very old-looking game). I also think that CCP's approach of giving power to the players is an important evolution of the MMORPG genre, and something that WoW should look at. Rather than forcing your cheesy stories down players' throats (and, let's be honest here, Blizzard haven't produced a decent new storyline in many, many years), why not let them take charge of the process? Have your Horde players determine when and where a new war will be fought, or have your Alliance players propose building a new city or something.
Ultimately, players invest their time and their money in a game for a reason. EVE seems to reward that investment handsomely through strongp player involvement in the evolution of the game. WoW, on the other hand, seems to be a much more passive experience: you play WoW for a while, hit max level, do a few quests, get bored, log out and maybe come back for a bit when a new expanson comes out. WoW has become routine and a little tired, and Blizzard should look at shaking things up a bit more and the whole approach they have to the game.
Only that EVE has way, waaay smaller suscriber numbers and is completely niche, so there is basically no base for comparison on their models.
Well, think about it. Making a single new monster is a pretty involved process. Today, few companies put anything as public domain. If they did, there could be standardized patterns, modding communities, and awesome libraries to use. But the current style copyright is apparently worth more. If no games get made, well.
True. I would say, though, that we're seein some appreciation growth toward having games with strong modding communities lately. Perhaps it still is something that happens mostly on the indie side of the business, but big franchises like Civilization, Elder Scrolls, or pretty much everything made by Paradox really put a lot of care into making their games accesible for the community.
I keep thinking this is the way of the future, at least for medium-to-small sized studios. After all, the level of quality that user-made content can reach these days is sometimes on-par with stuff the creators themselves made, with several times the amount, and it does extend the life of the game tenfold (SimCity 4 being a great example of this) while creating a very involved community that practically sells the game for you.
Though looking at it carefully, I can see why a company would prefer to avoid such situation, as it can mean less chances for further monetization in the way of DLCs, expansions, and sequels. And considering how enormous the budgets can get, perhaps such venues are necessary to make the investment reasonable.
I think it's interesting that WoW is shedding players - maybe not catastrophically so, but it's still happening - after eight and a half years on sale when EVE ONLINE is still attracting new ones and going from strength to strength after exactly ten years on sale.
EVE just cracked 500,000 subscribers recently. They're doing fine, but it seems silly to look at that and say, "Oh, that must be where the market is," when more than double that number just left WoW - and that latter group is likely to be receptive to a new, high-quality "theme-park" MMO experience.
The point is not that EvE is ginormous or niche. The point is that EvE is, storyline wise, a player dependant shared world. If enough of the playerbase gets bored of blowing each other to kingdom come, EvE is in trouble - and CCP knows it.
WoW makes no attempts (last I heard) to allow the playerbase to do much more than socialize with now-very-dated avatars once they have done their chores and/or the innumerable grinds to whatever the current caps are.
LoTRO at least gave access to neighborhoods. SWG had vast swaths of terrain open to settlement across multiple planets (not to mention, at least when I played it, one of the best crafting systems ever done).
Only that EVE has way, waaay smaller suscriber numbers and is completely niche, so there is basically no base for comparison on their models.
On the contrary, the two MMORPGs have been around for roughly the same time period (EVE for just 18 months longer) and it's certainly worthwhile to look at why one of them is going up and up and the other is going down. The underlying issue of long-term popularity is the same for both of them, and CCP appear to have cracked it whilst Blizzard are suffering (relatively). You can't just say, "WoW is 8.5 years old and has just had its day," when other MMORPGs have lasted longer and maintained interest.
Clearly EVE is more niche in its appeal, but it's doing something right to maintain and expand its horizons. WoW is clearly failing to do the same thing, whether it's releasing major expansions too slowly (whilst there are more regular content updates, substantial expansions only come out every three years or so, which is ludicrous), not giving the players enough agency or say in the game, or failing to keep up with the times. If Blizzard can crack that problem, there's no reason WoW can't become even more popular and last for years longer (and even if this is the start of a very gradual decline, WoW will probably go on for another decade at least in any case).
City of Heroes lasted as long as WoW has currently, and from what I understand, the player base was fairly consistent (not as large as WoW, of course), but not really steadily increasing or declining. All that CoH did was provide new quests and zones (and the story lines and environmental changes that went with that) and the occasional new power set. Most of the appeal was the player base and the social interaction. CoH arguably had more tools devoted to such things than WoW does.
I'm told that CoH was still profitable, but the publisher got rid of the development team to focus on other games.
On the contrary, the two MMORPGs have been around for roughly the same time period (EVE for just 18 months longer) and it's certainly worthwhile to look at why one of them is going up and up and the other is going down. The underlying issue of long-term popularity is the same for both of them, and CCP appear to have cracked it whilst Blizzard are suffering (relatively). You can't just say, "WoW is 8.5 years old and has just had its day," when other MMORPGs have lasted longer and maintained interest.
The fact that a thin handful of games have lasted that long while maintaining a highly profitable player base doesn't mean much. The fact that none of them have come anywhere near WoW's subscriber base says a lot. Besides, it's abundantly clear that millions of people believe that WoW still holds their interest (as noted, most of the lost subscriptions were non-Western).
I don't see a crisis looming for WoW. And I certainly don't see a dramatic shift in what the majority of MMO gamers are looking for. I think most of those millions of WoW-subscribing gamers want a natural, modern progression of the sort of game they've been playing for the better part of a decade.
I think most of those millions of WoW-subscribing gamers want a natural, modern progression of the sort of game they've been playing for the better part of a decade.
Do they? Most - though not all - post-WoW MMORPGs have basically used the same template as WoW but have not succeeded, or if they have it's been at a tiny fraction of the popularity. The question is are they too similar to WoW, so people don't want to play a clone, or are they simply not WoW and people just want more of the same? That's certainly a question Blizzard must be asking themselves as they look at how to take WoW forwards, whether it's through a total revamp of the game or simple iterative updates and changes.
The fact that none of them have come anywhere near WoW's subscriber base says a lot
Blizzard were quite canny in how they set up WoW. Their three WARCRAFT RTS games sold millions upon millions of copies, providing them with a way (particularly in WC3) of setting up the storyline and world beforehand. In terms of structure and set-up, WoW basically 'borrowed' a lot of ideas that EVERQUEST had been road-testing for six years beforehand and refined the hell out of them. Finally, they marketed the hell out of the game pretty much like no other MMORPG before or since (THE OLD REPUBLIC perhaps excepted).
Almost all the other MMORPGs that have come along since haven't had that same combination of factors supporting them. The only one that did was THE OLD REPUBLIC, which had the two single-player KotOR games setting things up in them and also a massive marketing budget, whilst also borrowing and refining ideas from older games. However, that didn't work for reasons BioWare are still puzzling over (probably a combination of STAR WARS fatigue, the fact that the KotOR games had been popular but not WARCRAFT RTS-levels of popular and some inherent design issues).
This is why it's going to be interesting to see how THE ELDER SCROLLS ONLINE does. It's also had some single-player games establishing the world and lore (and SKYRIM and OBLIVION's sales and profile have been colossal) and I'm sure Bethesda are going to market the hell out of it. I think TESO is going to be the last hurrah for the WoW type of MMORPG, and possibly the last game of its type before Blizzard themselves decide to move on.
WoW also came on the scene exactly when everyone and their brother bought a PC. Those who went before, such as EQ, did not have the advantage of a huge number of absolutely new players. By the time WoW came out EQ's graphics and interface conventions were very tired. Sure they were working on EQ2 but by then WoW had the reins on the horse and saddlebroke.
I don't think WoW is all that good to keep 8 million people much longer: the community is what has kept them there, their friends. And those friends are more and more scarce.
I do doubt any game will match WoW's numbers any time soon. I do think there may be many smaller games which together will have similar numbers between them.
I think making predictions that some type of game is finished is reading tea leaves to support ones own desires. CRPGs were once thought to be a dead genre, then Baldurs Gate came out. Space sims were thought to be dead and gone, now Star Citizen and a new Elite are in the works. Turn-based games were thought to be dead, every years lots of them come out.
I wouldn't discount themepark MMO's just yet. And I'm pretty sure that whatever will be the popular social game to replace them, it won't be sandbox MMO's, because their appeal has never been high enough.
Don't mistake the packaging for the product. The themepark aspect of Star Citizen seems to be the singleplayer element. The persistent shared element appears pretty sandboxy/PvP, but isn't to be an MMO, just multiplayer. Camelot Unchained appears pretty sandboxy/PvP. I suspect R. Garriot's new game will also be fairly sandboxy multiplayer, but not really an MMO as well.
I think the idea that themeparks have a long life ahead of them are tendered by folks afraid of letting go. Fossils. Failure to adapt. Too big to live, struggling to survive.
Do they? Most - though not all - post-WoW MMORPGs have basically used the same template as WoW but have not succeeded, or if they have it's been at a tiny fraction of the popularity. The question is are they too similar to WoW, so people don't want to play a clone, or are they simply not WoW and people just want more of the same? That's certainly a question Blizzard must be asking themselves as they look at how to take WoW forwards, whether it's through a total revamp of the game or simple iterative updates and changes.
Or is it that inertia is very high when discussing MMORPGs, and that people need a really good reason to move from WoW to a newer game, and that recent entrants into the genre have not provided a sufficient incentive to cause ten million people to dump the years they've spent on WoW in favor of the next big thing.
WoW probably will have to lose a large majority of its subscriber base before another game can take its place.
WoW also came on the scene exactly when everyone and their brother bought a PC. Those who went before, such as EQ, did not have the advantage of a huge number of absolutely new players. By the time WoW came out EQ's graphics and interface conventions were very tired.
Possibly. WoW was (and remains) very forgiving in its system requirements, meaning that even people with cheap and nasty PCs could and can play it, which is a big bonus. Newer MMORPGs are still pretty forgiving - THE OLD REPUBLIC is a fairly ugly game compared to what PCs are capable of - but they still tend to demand a more up-to-date rig.
Or is it that inertia is very high when discussing MMORPGs, and that people need a really good reason to move from WoW to a newer game, and that recent entrants into the genre have not provided a sufficient incentive to cause ten million people to dump the years they've spent on WoW in favor of the next big thing.
That's certainly a big part of it, together with nostalgia. I've put eight years of my life into the characters I have on my account ( actually five years, I sold the first account profitably ). When I bought Guild Wars 2 a few months ago, I simply didn't feel like beginning completely new with a game which didn't really offer something unique. Even if the WvWvW aspect seemed interesting. SWTOR was a giant let-down for me, so I blame the game more than myself in that aspect.
The question was "have Theme Park games run their course". My answer is "yes".
Making a AAA Theme Park MMO costs between $75 and $150 million. It requires 5-7 years to make one. Usually the team size is over 300 people in the middle part of the development (may swell considerably near the end as producers throw bodies at the content pipeline).
These are impossible teams to hide. The industry is too small. So most insiders know where those teams are and roughly what they are working on.
Ryan has Neverwinter's release changed your opinion? Why or why not?
I do think overall the theme park MMO is a dead genre for the future. As mentioned above, the investment requirements for a truly WOW style game (size and scope of the game world, variety of player options, etc) is very large and is plagued by the problem of video games in general. Technological advancements have improved the potential of games, but every advancement has increased the number of man hours required to take advantage of it. I don't actually know the number, but I would guess that 200,000 man hours is not unrealistic as a minimum for a AAA game.
I do think that WoW hasn't done itself any favors by making it easier to play the game without making friends. An MMO's strength is the other players and the social experience, making that easier to avoid takes away the primary strength an MMO can have against non-MMO games. Sure, Farcry is cool, but once I've beaten it, I'm going to look for another game. If all my friends are still on WoW, I'll go back. If I have no friends on WoW and I've accomplished my primary goal, why would I go back to it?
SWTOR's primary failure was to make it a good single player experience and be largely devoid of interesting things to do with my friends. The initial game release was interesting to level, but almost nothing to do afterwards, and the best parts of leveling were done alone.
Currently I am enjoying Planetside 2, which is again, entirely about the social experience. If you play solo, the game is pretty bad IMO, you can easily end up alone facing off against 5-50 people who just destroy you. It's a team game, so you're best off finding a team you enjoy and working with them. They still need to improve the overall experience though, but they are working on it.
Oh, WoW is 8 years old. The only games that are that old that might have that many people still playing are probably from the Sims series, or other Blizzard titles.
I think we can all agree that we play MMOs, Sandbox and Theme Park alike, to have fun.
If an MMO is going to make you work like you live in a Sweatshop ... it's not going to be fun for long, especially if all that hard works gets replaced with the next batch of 'new' gear that completely overpowers it.
WoW's expansion shenanigans where the 'greens' from the new content are on par with, if not better than, the mid-range of Raid-Gear you got from the final patches of the previous expansions.
I can only hope that in future MMOs, the developers look at this and go "Hmmmm...." and realise that UPGRADING your gear doesn't necessitate replacing it. Obviously you'll need to replace your gear at some stage, either due to theft or it reaching the limits of it's upper range, but having to grind for weeks or months, only to get this casual back-hander from the game itself, can be intensely frustrating.
Give players choices in how they handle situations in the game, within reason. Your character is sent in to 'end' an uprising. You can kill 'em all, which seems to be the lazy method, you can try to talk 'em down, or you can intimdate them into listening to the powers that be.
Even if there's no way other than combat, give players a chance to at least verbalise in the game that they don't like this, or they do. Give players a 'karma' system where not only what they do, but what they say, can have an effect on how the NPCs percieve them and react.
A fighter who objects to rampant slaughter might be mocked by the more ruthless NPCs, but more peaceful or diplomatic NPCs might open up new quests or give discounts, or even just positive responses towards him.
Guild wars 2 does the questing better... you get a problem, such as "keep the road safe" and you have five or six different ways to reach that goal, such as lighting torches, reviving guards, killing monsters, clearing away carcasses that attract monsters, andso on. Sure, there is still a lot of fighting you need to do, but still.
There are pluses and minuses to both Themeparks and Sandboxes.
I played EVE for about 18 months, and while that is not a long time, I did get a chance to experience several different aspects of EVE gameplay (not much in null space as I never got into a corporation in null space). You have stuff to do, which is the minimal theme park elements, but after that you are on your own. And that was fun for about 6 months. Then you start itching for a bigger game than what you are familiar with. Between 6 and 12 months players will choose to stick around or go play something else. You get freedom to do whatever you wish to do. But you can't do everything you want to do, as the tools have to be available in the code to do some of those things. You lose the guideposts and mile markers Themeparks provide so you don't know what your next steps should be to do whatever is next.
From the charts I have seen on Themeparks most crash at about 3-4 months after the first waves of players hit max and the economy starts to unravel. Themeparks let players gain steady content updates (if the developer is planning far in advance) and predictable paths and patterns. The downside is the repetition can become a drag quickly after completing the initial levels. Conan was awful about this. Every toon had basically the same leveling path from 1-20 before you could even get off "Tutorial Island". SWTOR was even worse, as each faction only had one leveling path for the entire 50 levels (you could do some instanced PVP, but that was about it...a few dungeons and a few instanced group events).
Both have trade offs, but I am looking forward to what PFO becomes. There are several promising games on the horizon, but the hype seems to always be bigger then the reality. TESO, Shroud of the Avatar, and The Repopulation look pretty interesting (I backed Shroud), and several more Sandboxes are pending.
Recent RIFT layoffs are part of the business and design problem of themeparks. Scott Hartman:
UPDATED: Scott Hartsman, who served as executive producer on RIFT prior to his departure in January of this year, commented on the layoffs in a public status update on Facebook:
"Same as last time - If I can help at all with intros/anything, please find me. This model of game making is so fundamentally broken."
Ryan has mentioned some key points about the problems of Themepark business models, game design and the mmorpg market reaction of gamers:
1. Huge Investment:
i) Cost in the +50m$, 4-6 years by which time market and tech conditions change with large 50-100 high teams.
ii) Large software projects become more complicated with the more developers on board which therefore actually INCREASES the time required to develop!
iii) Increases pressure for a huge marketing budget
2. Effect on Game Design:
i) The higher the investment the higher the risk therefore the game design requires the higher market share to offset the risk and return funds as quick as possible. Therefore the conventional/safe design is used.
ii) If a bad launch creates a bad impression then this is dire for the game in such a competive market, so even more pressure on EVERYTHING being polished and working at launch. Hence probably why a ton of staff are laid off above? Also means the tutorial is probably the most fun part of the game (lots of levelling and new skills) or the end-game raid is fun for retention and inbetween is a complete drag (grind)?
iii) Even more assets are required to be crafted by the devs to top the previous mmorpgs on the market.
iv) Problem of hardware share in the market also.
3. Effect on player market:
i) More of the same type of hype + standard mmorpgs produced
ii) Play the game then unsub ready for the next one
iii) Go back to the mmorpg with the old network of friends
iv) MMMORPGs are not really very exciting waiting years to then only play a few months.
v) F2P with much less than 10% monetisation means it's a buyer's market more I think?
vi) Actually think this guy's idea about mmorpgs is really good:
So the entry point to make an interesting design mmorpg is too high for most devs is one of the major problems.
As more mmorpgs have been developed the market has changed and the ROI of creating "more of the same" appears less worthwhile it appears the above has eaten itself.
The reason players seem to play themeparks then move on: They're too finite, not targeted enough and not very different experience from non-mmo genres that have better gameplay and possibly more interactive and with less of the hassles of mmorpgs. And probably not that exciting socially these days either?
Ryan summarises the difference between themepark and sandbox and the market trends:
PaizoConPathfinderOnlinePresentation
My quick summary for the four table-legs of mmorpg:
1) Business Model
2) In-Game Economy
3) Tech basis
4) Social Network
I think 1-2 and 3-4 relate to each other. The actual tabletop of the game is a whole other diccussion! Anyway that's a quick way of looking at it possibly.