A few weeks ago at BlizzCon during an interview with WoWInsider’s Anne Stickney, Blizzard’s Alex Afrasiabi — the World of Warcraft Creative Director — made a rare and frank admission. He said that Blizzard has lost sight of the social world aspect of their MMO and that he was mainly to blame for it. Molten Core has frozen over.
The incremental yet relentless erosion of social interaction is something that many of us in the MMORPG community have been chronicling since the release of WoW in 2004. For some reason the developers at Blizzard have been unable to notice it until now. I am currently working on an article responding to Afrasiabi’s comments and what can be done to remedy this problem.
About a month ago I was contacted by a video game design student who goes by the handle Raistmere and studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is working on a project that examines the decline of social interaction in MMORPGs and requested an interview with me. I agreed and we completed the interview. You can find his interview with me here.
It was a fairly lengthy interview and it had to be condensed for his project. I will post the full length interview here on my site in a couple of weeks. Please head on over to his blog to read the article and other interviews about the subject.
-Wolfshead
I have pretty much given up on the thought that anyone will launch anything that resembles a virtual “world” again, that requires social interaction. Every MMO right now feels like a glorified lobby game, and would be just as good (if not better) if sold that way.
Those games can still be fun, but it would be neat to have the need for other people again in games. I don’t think most people want that though =)
Today’s MMORPG’s are MMORPGs in name only. I agree that most players have been brainwashed into accepting the idea that social interaction is limited. I talk about this extensively in my next article.
If I have a restaurant that servers burgers, milkshakes and fries and one day I stop serving shakes, eventually the people that continue to patronize my restaurant won’t expect shakes to be on the menu and will get used to that fact. In time they will forget that shakes were even the menu and a shake free menu becomes the status quo. This is what happened to WoW and all the MMO clones that copied WoW.
I believe the WoW devs always assumed that social interaction would be a big part of their MMO. Thanks to them ignoring the need to build social interaction into WoW and the laws of unintended consequences lo and behold 10 years later social interaction is almost non-existent in WoW.
WoW was so astronomically successful that the WoW devs like Afrasiabi, Kaplan and Pardo started believing they could do no wrong when they added in lots of social interaction killing features like the dungeon finder. Let’s not forget that Afrasiabi and Kaplan had no design training or even proposed theories of design as most MMO commentators have done for years. They came in straight from a raiding background (an activity that a tiny minority of MMO players engaged in) and went right to work. The success of WoW shielded their inexperience and incompetence for many years.
One only has to look at the massive failure that was Titan for evidence of this. These guys were supposed to be the best and brightest MMO designers on the planet. At one point, Rob Pardo was considered to be one of Time magazine’s most influential people on the planet. They spent 7 years and probably millions more than they spent on developing WoW and they cancelled the project. That epic failure is the big untold story of Blizzard and shows that as far as MMOs are concerned they are a one trick pony and certainly far from being the most talented MMO dev team.
That seems kind of overboard to call it an entire failure for a couple reasons.
First, it wasn’t an entire waste, tons of knowledge, ideas, failed experiments, etc. that came out of that 7 year development plan will undoubtedly be applied to everything else they do. To view that period as a total waste is a very bad way to look at it. You’ve got to turn problems such as that into opportunities.
Secondly, the last thing I would do is criticize a company for not putting out a game because they do not feel it’s fun. A majority of studios would feel the pressure to push something out to recoup loss funds. That’s not good for us. Blizzard is willing to start over. To your point, they did not achieve what they wanted and further to your point, if they’re the best, then why couldn’t they? But in any event, I feel like it’s kind of admirable to scrap it, you could argue it took more courage to admit that they didn’t hit their mark than peddle some sub par cash grab. Blizzard understands damaging their reputation for a quick gain is not the way to go. (not to be critical, but BioWare is an example of a company that has arguably committed that crime in recent years)
There’s a long list of games that should NOT have come out, but due to pressures to get a product to market, it did. The Duke Nukem remake is the first thing to comes to mind, but trust me, there’s a long list.
You make some good points. I think it’s commendable that Blizzard didn’t release a MMO that wasn’t up to their standards. But now I question what their standards actually are. The modern MMORPG has been gutted by Blizzard’s so-called “standards” with the lack of social interaction being one of the biggest casualties.
If Titan wasn’t fun then why on earth didn’t they make it fun? They were wanting for nothing in this quest as they had the talent, the resources and the time.
Why does every Blizzard product have to be a colossal hit? In a sense Blizzard has become a victim of their own success and now they will never release anything else unless it is an overwhelmingly monster hit. They could have released a boutique indie type MMO and let the chips fall where they may but their fear of failure and addiction to success paralyzed them.
I still believe Titan was a colossal failure and speaks volumes about their inadequacies as virtual world designers. Reality finally caught up with Blizzard. Without a revolutionary MMORPG like EverQuest to steal and innovate from they had only their own considerable resources to draw from and they could not replicate what they created in WoW.
The failure of Titan is one of the biggest stories in the MMO world of the year which has been largely unreported by the sycophantic video game media that would rather focus on gender issues and political correctness than providing authentic video game journalism.
Thanks for the reply Wolfshead. I’ve been visiting this site for a few years now and have always found your posts interesting and worth the time to read. For the briefest of backgrounds, I’ve been playing WoW since it’s launch. It was my first MMORPG; by no means my first game or RPG, but it is the game that first gave me that “Dear God, all those people running around are other players” shock.
Being 30, I’ve been at it since the NES days, and appreciate the history and nostalgia of gaming. With that said I’ve read about how special a time 1999-2004 was for EverQuest and had the experience to re-live a time I missed through Project 1999, a server that recreates the game as it was at launch, and have been for the past few years.
It has been a pleasure exploring that world. I’ve always found the game design philosophy of taking power away from the player super fascinating and feel the original EverQuest best exemplified what can happen if you pursue that route. (I host several podcasts, one of which is gaming/MMO among other pop culture related and that topic comes up quite often)
What Blizzard did with EverQuest’s original design was pure fan service with the greatest of intentions but the result (and even more so, what it has become) is a different thing entirely. Is it fun? Sure, if it’s what your looking for.
Is Blizzard a flawed company, sure- everything/one is, but it’s a company that has a vision and pursues it stubbornly. With that said, the experience I think you and so many others are looking for is not going to be provided by that company. Focus needs to be taken away from wondering when is Blizzard going to provide the interpersonal, cooperation driven, virtual world that you and many are looking for. It may be unfortunate, but when a company reaches a certain size, small niche projects typically are not the focus. At this point, that may be as unreasonable as waiting for [insert worlds biggest band] to go on a high school gymnasium tour.
Do we have the right to the yearn for a game that causes us to rely on our fellow gamers to overcome challenges and build a world together? For sure, I do every day! But it may be time we stop expecting Blizzard to be the one’s who provide it to us. Furthermore, if we’ve lost hope in that, we probably shouldn’t vilify them for it either, it was never really promised to us from them in the first place.
– Mike
mylofone.com
themeetingstone.com
flickheads.com
hyporcrisyradio.com
How many people are necessary to stop calling something a niche market? One million? Two?
If Blizzard actually set out to create an MMORPG that is a highly immersive believable virtual world that places the players in the shoes of their characters where people actually need each other to survive in that world… it would bring in millions and millions of people.
Not only is there a fairly large market of people looking for that kind of game, but there are even more people who aren’t actively looking for it who would also be reeled in because of Blizzards popularity. The even better part is that they would probably enjoy it too. I think that’s “one” reason why WoW became so popular, because the company itself was already so popular.
So why is it that they don’t? Do you think they are biding their time? Just waiting for when an MMORPG like that to blossom so they can swoop in for the kill with their own? 😛
Oops, forgot a word in the very last sentence of my other post. hehe
Just waiting for when [there’s] an MMORPG… yada yada yada
”
If Blizzard actually set out to create an MMORPG that is a highly immersive believable virtual world that places the players in the shoes of their characters where people actually need each other to survive in that world… it would bring in millions and millions of people.”
I discussed this elsewhere, but the key problem is that to do that you need a *relatively high ratio* of dev team + GMs to players.
When there are clear social trends developing, unanticipated by the dev team, dev team / GM members have to:
(1) notice the trends
(2) decide what in-game patches would help support (or suppress) the social trends
(3) implement and release
This has been the approach of Ultima Online, but they got LOTS of players very early and didn’t increase the size of the dev team / GMs to compensate. As a result, they lost control fairly quickly after beta and are generally thought to have done a fairly half-assed job at responding to the emergent needs of the player community. They were very definitely trying, but there weren’t enough of them to even notice what those emergent needs were, let alone fix them. Meanwhile, they chased the money tree of more and more servers and more and more players.
In short, yes, you’d get millions of players, but you’d need thousands of dev team members. Think about this from a monetary point of view and you’ll start to see the problem.
@Nathanael
Since most (if not all) companies tend to be too invested in money, causing them to overlook many important factors, I guess we can only hope for someone to develop a highly advanced script, or eventually maybe even an AI, to handle DM responsibilities and so on.
I think it would be kind of fitting if developers made it so that the script/AI was thought of as a deity in that virtual world, working its magic behind the scenes in secrecy without people knowing the full extent of its “powers”.
A few novels and other works have mentioned this kind of solution before, a “system” of sorts that handles most responsibilities. Unfortunately, we still need better technology until it comes to fruition.
Before that happens… hopefully developers can try for some kind of merging of two ideas, GMs assisted by highly advanced scripts perhaps?
“The social aspect of EQ was the intangible and inscrutable cohesion that united all of the other aspects of a fantasy virtual world and made EQ so magical and memorable.” I agree completely with everything you say about the social aspect of MMORPGs and what has been lost.
I had 4 or 5 close friends in EQ. Knew a little about the 70 or so active individuals in my guild, recognized by name another 50+ players on our server.
I have been active in WoW an equal length of time. Have no real buddies or close friends and probably know or are acquainted with less than 20 people.