Academics Speak On 'Life After World Of Warcraft' 171
simoniker writes "Are MMO populations 'tribal', and if so, what's the next tribal shift after World of Warcraft? At Gamasutra, academics including MIT's Henry Jenkins and Ludium's Edward Castronova discuss what's next for the MMO market, based on their research and play patterns. Jenkins states that WoW is getting _too_ much analysis from researchers right now: 'WoW deserves attention because it has so captured the imagination of gamers over the past few years. That said, I don't think it is healthy for the field of games studies, which is still emerging, to be so fixated on a single game franchise — no matter what the franchise. A few years ago, it might have been The Sims or GTA, now it's WoW.'" For more on this topic MMOG industry veteran Gordon Walton spoke on this topic last week at GDC Austin, and notes from that event are also available at Gamasutra.
World of WarCraft 2: The Attack of the RPG Clones (Score:3, Insightful)
Tribal? Hell yes! (Score:1, Insightful)
Try saying that World of Warcraft is the best MMORPG ever created, and watch people defend "their" MMORPG.
Read through the recent Protecting Final Fantasy XI From the Gil-Sellers [slashdot.org] Slashdot article and you can watch this happen. Just peruse this thread [slashdot.org] to watch people slam the game and tribe members springing up to defend it.
Yes, MMORPG players are intensely tribal and defensive over their choice of MMORPG. As for the rest of the question:
But it won't be revolutionary. It'll be a glorified WoW clone, with different graphics and some slight gameplay improvements. It'll be new enough to intrigue people, but familiar enough that they won't run from it.
There Is A Reason.... (Score:5, Insightful)
As for upcoming MMORPG's, none of them will command the attention that WoW has. If Lord of the Rings Online couldn't make a dent in WoW, especially given the long, great history of the Tolkien Universe, what chance does any other MMORPG have?
Warhammer might have a chance to top some of the other MMORPG's like EQ, Eve, AO, etc... But that is only because they copied a lot of the aspects of WoW and present a very similar style of game and universe. Don't believe me, look at the goblins in both games. It's like looking at cousins.....
So yes, WoW deserves to be studied to understand how they could capture and maintain an audience many times over any of the previous MMORPG's.
Re:Games with Endings (Score:1, Insightful)
Correct. And this is why they will continue to flourish. The "game"'s only purpose is to give the social communities that appear something to talk about, allowing desire for social acceptance to pressure people to retain their subscription.
I wouldn't be that sure (Score:5, Insightful)
When Origin invented the genre, they were literally the only player in town. They were so far ahead the other MMOs, that the others were just getting started trying to copy it. Even if you consider MUDs to be essentially the same genre, the difference between UO and your average text-based MUD, if nothing else in terms of number of players, was larger than between WoW and Anarchy Online nowadays.
Other people who arguably invented a genre, or made it mainstream, are still the Gods of Gaming in that genre. E.g., Id and FPS. You'd expect Origin to share that fate, wouldn't you?
You'd think nothing could possibly dethrone UO at that point, until Origin creates UO2, right? Well, we already know how that went.
Then came Everquest, and it was so popular it became synonim with MMOs. You didn't talk, say, about people losing their job and wife to MMOs, you instinctively spoke of them losing that to Everquest. It's also the game which caused the deluge of me-too MMOs. It was such a money-printing license, everyone wanted a piece of that market.
Worse yet, along came a long period of stagnation, and most new MMOs just managed to steal some of someone else's players, only to have them stolen by someone else in 6 months. It looked like there were a total of about 1 million MMO players total... and EQ owned slightly more than half of them.
Once you factored in their other games too, Sony _owned_ the MMO market.
Surely one would have thought nothing will challenge that until their own EQ2 came out, right? Well, wrong, actually. EQ2 peaked a lot lower than what EQ still had, never mind its former peak. It _still_ has less players than the old Everquest. (Not saying it's necessarily a bad game, as that's something highly subjective, just that subscription-wise it failed to be the block-buster everyone expected.)
Instead there came this WoW noone really expected that much of. What people wanted from Blizzard was Starcraft 2 or maybe Diablo 3, not a MMO. They hadn't proved that they know their elbow from their arse in the MMO arena yet. They had the Warcraft franchise and name recognition, but an unrelated franchise name only carries you so far: see TSO which flopped in spite of the The Sims franchise which had outsold all 3 Warcraft games _combined_.
Not only it handed Sony its arse at its own game, it managed something that noone else had managed in years: it actually enlarged the western MMO market. About 10 times.
So now we think the same all over again. "Man, nothing's going to displace WoW until they launch WoW2." I dunno, we've been wrong about that at least twice before. (Or more than twice if we're talking about sequel surpassing their original. AC2 bombed so badly that it was shut down, for example. Essentially that sequel moved the AC franchise from being the second most successful MMO to being nobody.)
Before anyone accuses me of wishing that WoW fails or anything, note that I'm not against any of the games I've mentioned here. I actually liked WoW, though nowadays I'm playing COH yet again. I can see why WoW was successful. In this highly subjective taste matter, they sure managed to give the larger market segment, the casual gamers and off-line Oblivion-type gamers, more of what they wanted in a game. They "deserve" their current position. I'm just saying that noone, Blizzard included, has a certificate of ownership of the market. They all "rent" the #1 spot for a while. They can fall like everyone else, eventually.
In fact, I'm sorta surprised that WoW hasn't fallen back yet. Again, I don't wish it or anything, but it's not like they have a patent on what made WoW successful. Everyone else is free to copy the elements that made it sell well. It's just that everyone else seems to be surprisingly slow to understand it. Oh, they've tried to copy bits and pieces of WoW, but they just can't seem to understand _what_ they copy. It's... a bit like watching a clock maker try to copy random individual cogs from a competitor's clock, without understanding what they copy or the larger scheme of the mechanism in which it must fit in.
But eventually it's bound to happen.
For a $1.5B annual gross, damn right! (Score:5, Insightful)
I was following a game a few months ago. Solid looking graphics and network engine, decent sounding game engine. It looked like it had some great potential and they had a multi-million dollar budget. But they had absolutely no knowledge about handling their community or managing a MMO, and the whole thing crashed and burned a horrible death. They hired a fan from the forums to become their community rep. Nothing like taking a kid with nothing more than a high school degree and put him in charge of distributing knowledge to packs of rabid fans.
Had they brought in people with experience in managing MMOs, and people with an understanding of the underlying factors, they would have likely done much better.
-Rick
Re:I wouldn't say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I wouldn't be that sure (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, I'm sorta surprised that WoW hasn't fallen back yet. Again, I don't wish it or anything, but it's not like they have a patent on what made WoW successful. Everyone else is free to copy the elements that made it sell well. It's just that everyone else seems to be surprisingly slow to understand it. Oh, they've tried to copy bits and pieces of WoW, but they just can't seem to understand _what_ they copy. It's... a bit like watching a clock maker try to copy random individual cogs from a competitor's clock, without understanding what they copy or the larger scheme of the mechanism in which it must fit in.
But eventually it's bound to happen.
The problem is that it's not just one thing that makes WoW successful. It's alot of things that Blizzard is doing right all at once. The key though, is that Blizzard, despite what you read on forums, does listen to it's players. The game as it stands now is vastly, vastly different from when even I signed up in 2005 -- and they're laregly positive changes.
Ontop off all of that listening, the technical quality of the software from Blizzard is continually top notch. They've folded in popular mods (Scrolling Combat Text, etc), and there were mentions about built-in VOIP, so voice chat won't be limited to guild runs.
Really, it's Blizzard as an organization that someone would have to copy to unseat WoW from the fantasy MMO genre, not any specific attribute of the game.
Re:There Is A Reason.... (Score:3, Insightful)
The main reasons for its success are, I think, the quick pace of rewards and its friendliness to casual and occasional players. It is possible to have a very rewarding experience in WoW, easily play with your friends, and still "have a life." This isn't really the case for other MMORPGs.
Re:I wouldn't be that sure (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, and Alterac Valley for example is so lopsided that most Horde players simply sit in the cave because the Alliance has the advantage.
Furthermore, where is the WAR in Warcraft? Hi, remember the games of Warcraft? Remember the epic battles with various seige weapons and vehicles and the like? In WoW? Three years after release almost? Nope, sorry. AV is the closest we get and like I said, it's horrible.
You miss World PvP? They created world PvP "minigames".
Refer to previous comment. We don't want minigames. WTF are minigames. Screw that. We want WAR. Incidentally, Warhammer: Age of Reckoning (WAR) intends to deliver where WoW failed miserably. The jury is still out on that one though.
Honour system is a joke? Scrapped, in exchange for a token system.
Token system? Where have you been? You still have to grind honor points, not just tokens. And BTW, many players liked the old honor system more, even though they knew they'd never be able to achieve Grand Marshal etc. But it made those titles and achievements MEAN SOMETHING. Right now any total nub can grind out honor by sitting in the cave in AV and get the epics. (Yes, they are adding a way to prevent this, but it's a band-aid fix and not a real solution)
Unorganized instanced PvP too much of a hassle? Have short (on the order of minutes, seconds if you're up against a 'lock) 1v1 - 5v5 arena matches.
Clearly you have no clue whatsoever what you are talking about. There is no 1v1 arena. There is no 4v4 arena. There is 2v2, 3v3 and 5v5. While I do like the Arenas for the most part, they are grossly inadequate and still do not make up for the lack of real WAR in WARCRAFT. You get a team together, you get teleported automagically into a locked-in arena, and you get to be owned by classes who are clearly overpowered (there's your lock reference).
Farming for the 1% elemental drops sucks? We'll split them up into more common drops (motes), so your farming doesn't suck as much.
Farming still sucks. It is not fun. This is not a plus.
Crafting seems useless as a moneymaker? Epic crafted items now require a BoP drop, so you can now actually make money from your profession.
Yes, you can make money from crafting. However, you can't make much. Generally on the order of 50-100g per piece (the price of the primal nether varies by server). I can make more money than that in less time farming mobs in Shadowmoon Valley. So if you are crafting to make money, and only to make money, you're doing the wrong thing.
Hybrid classes and off-specs getting the shaft? There are different versions of the new class armor sets for different specs.
Yep, it only took 2 years for this to happen. Practically didn't have to wait for this at all!
Instance runs taking too long? All the new 5-mans are split up into wings a'la SM, so that you can run one in less than an hour.
I have no idea which "wings" you are talking about unless you mean something like Tempest Keep: Arcatraz and Mechanar are separate wings of Tempest Keep (even though they are different instances altogether). Oh and by the way, each one of those requires more than an hour to complete. And they ALL still require clearing trash mobs which really suck and blizzard calls "pacing mechanisms". That's the worst possible thing to say to your playerbase. "We just don't want you guys to go fast, so we arbitrarily slowed you down." Gee, thanks. I feel really good about that.
Want epics in 5-mans? Okay, we'll add a heroic mode, but it'll be harder, and you can't expect to go in green quest rewards.
And you'll have to grind hours upon hours to get into heroics. Oh and btw, new players, you're screwed because everyone is already in heroics and they don't want to run non-heroics anymore!
Having trouble getting a group? We'll tie entry into heroics to specific reputation grinds which can only be done in instances, so peop
Re:"Games Studies"? Are you kidding me? (Score:4, Insightful)
First, game studies is not the same thing as a major program in videogame studies. Most of the academics involved in game studies have other home disciplines, whether anthropology, film studies, communications, computer science, sociology, comparative literature, economics, or what have you. Talking about the over-focus on one game or another is a top-level discussion among researchers across disciplines, not a question of what to be teaching undergraduates. Research fields are not the same as undergrad programs.
Second, I can imagine at some point there actually being an undergrad program in game studies. I know that there are minor programs. Like English or other degrees that don't seem to have immediate relevance, they are usually made far more relevant when mixed with a different graduate degree. An undergrad in game studies who then goes to law school might work on game-related policy, censorship issues, game-dev labor disputes, etc. Another one who then goes to business school might work on game-dev management issues, etc. Another might get an MFA or a CS MS and working on design or programming issues at a high level.
Games are significant. We're now seeing in adulthood people who grew up with them as their primary entertainment activity. Digital games structure thought, attention and activity differently than any other media before them. They merit study.
Re:life after... (Score:1, Insightful)
"Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken"
Re:I wouldn't be that sure (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I wouldn't say... (Score:2, Insightful)
What? The original Warcraft was ground breaking. There was nothing else like it when it first came out.