Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Blizzard masters another's idea again

Good old Tobold writes what I think again: http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2010/12/laying-claim-to-4th-pillar.html

You know I thought about this a few days ago and then Tobold goes and makes a post about it. Blizzard has this amazing ability to take any good idea and implement it faster and better than a game that started claiming the idea as their great new innovation. It happened with Warhammer Online’s queue for PvP anywhere/achievements and now it’s the 4th Pillar. This is why WoW will not be toppled by any one game, but it can only hoped to be chipped away at slowly… or perhaps replaced by this so called “Titan”.

Another fun thing about Blizzard is how they can destroy the blogging communities’ sense of self. Look at Keen for example. He has been one of the louder advocates for EQ/UO/DAoC open world style games. He then comes out a week after Cataclysm and says the Goblin starter quest, which is extremely linear, is the best quests in any game ever.

Blizzard creates a Dungeon Finder which makes it EASIER to play with other gamers and Tobold’s own readers say that WoW is just a single player online game now. WoW is much easier to play and group with other people now. In Vanilla WoW getting in raids was hard and most raiding guilds were elitist… but also the gate keepers to all the raiding content. Even now people are starting to PUG the new raiding content and PUG raids were a very common thing in WotLK. Being a part of the MMO is easier now than it was 4 years ago, yet people claim WoW is a single player online game.

The community is dead? Blizzard creates a Guild system which encourages you to stay in one guild, rather than hopping from guild to guild. Since the raid content isn’t the driving force for keeping guilds together they created other means to do it. Some of the higher level guild rewards are pretty cool.

The hypocrisy of the blogging community amazes me.

2 comments:

  1. It is no hypocrisy but honesty. Catacylsm questing is enjoyable. It's just not an MMORPG.

    It is as if my favourite racing game made an addon about playing a guitar. If that is good I'd say 'I like it'. But it's not a racing game anymore.

    I wrote before: Cataclysm is a success and the market gap for an AAA Polished Immersive Fantasy Sandbox MMORPG Virtual World has grown bigger than ever before.

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  2. How can you say WoW isn't a MMORPG anymore though? Because some of the mechanics change? Games evolve. If you look at action games from 15 years ago they don't look much like the ones that come out today.

    Everyone seems to be holding onto this idea that if it isn't Sandbox then it isn't a MMORPG... or whatever "crucial" feature they deem every MMORPG must have to qualify as such.

    I don't think the mass market wants a Sandbox MMORPG anymore. Atleast not a market with more than a million subs. I don't believe the new AAA budgets can make a pure Sandbox MMORPG and have enough customers to turn a profit.

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