At the end of 2014, Blizzard Entertainment celebrated the 10th anniversary of World of Warcraft. There can be no doubt that WoW is a juggernaut that changed how we play and how we think about virtual worlds and MMORPGs.
But not all change is beneficial and not all success is healthy.
Amid the accolades and self-congratulatory celebrations going on there is unreported dark side to the triumph of WoW and it has come at a high price. It is this: the fantasy MMORPG that some of us used to know and love has all but evaporated and turned from an experience rich with social interaction into one devoid of it.
As WoW has systematically obliterated every MMORPG that came before it, the fate of the entire genre is now symbiotically linked to WoW. Look at your average MMO today and chances are it’s just another WoW clone with a different skin, story and setting.
Just as a rising tide lifts all ships, the reverse is also true. This essay will attempt to explain the destructive legacy of WoW and in particular how Blizzard caused the widespread decline of social interaction in MMORPGs.
Blizzard’s Design Malpractice
I have always believed that WoW is a time bomb of design missteps that have been characterized by the fruition of unintended consequences. But there is one particular consequence that strikes at the unique proposition of MMORPGs that is so glaring, so inexcusable, and so utterly abominable that it deserves deeper investigation. Undoubtedly the biggest casualty of the Blizzard’s foray into the world of MMO development has been the massive erosion and outright neglect of the social aspect of the virtual world user experience.
The best barometer of social interaction in a MMO is the caliber of the community. One only has to look at the quality of the WoW community — easily the worst community in the MMO genre — for damning evidence of Blizzard’s design malpractice. As the early computer programmers used to say: garbage in, garbage out.
This article is mainly an attempt to chronicle the absence of social interaction in Blizzard’s WoW. I will tell you who did it, why it happened and the destructive legacy it has unleashed. First let me explain how the term MMORPG has been transmuted by the alchemists that reside in the ivory towers of Irvine, California.
The Legacy of WoW: The Great MMORPG Vanishing Act
Before we proceed, it will be useful to take a small side trip. Over the past 10 years, along with the casualty of social interaction, much of what we used to love about MMORPGs has vanished. Blizzard has managed to accomplish an incremental bait and switch with WoW.
Instead of the MMORPG, we have a “MMO” that claims to be a group experience but instead has created the environment where your fellow player is inconsequential and the opportunity for social interaction has been jettisoned in favor of a fast, streamlined combat centric experience.
Today in WoW, we have guilds — the supposed backbone of the MMORPG social structure — where members don’t know each other, have never played together and barely speak to each other.
Then there is the sorry state of role-playing in WoW the “RP” in MMORPG. The fact is that it barely exists if at all. Having no role-playing in a MMORPG makes as much sense as having no country music in Nashville.
I consider today’s form of role-playing in most MMORPG’s equivalent to cosplay. Cosplay is showing up with a costume and saying “here I am” which is exactly what most people do when they log on to their WoW characters. They simply show up in costume and board the Blizzard train and prepare to be entertained like the riders of an amusement park ride.
Real role-playing involves more than attending a Halloween party in costume. Role-playing is a state of mind where you believe you *are* your fantasy character and live out that character’s dreams and aspirations within that virtual world. Real role-playing takes effort and commitment. You get what you put into it.
The problem is that real role-playing is an anachronism in WoW and almost non-existent. This is because the hack and slash developers in charge of WoW at Blizzard are simply not interested in it, do not support in any meaningful way and do not encourage it. And because of this, role-playing has been relegated to the ghetto of a few “RP” servers.
The Blizzard legacy is that almost every letter in the “MMORPG” acronym has been watered down or exists in name only. Like the YMCA of today which has nothing whatsoever to do with young Christian men. So too the term MMORPG exists as a quaint acronym of days of yore.
The truth about WoW is this: it is a MMORPG in name only.
How Blizzard Chooses Projects
The key to understanding why WoW is bereft of social interaction is to examine who Blizzard is and how WoW came to be. The first step is to consider the Blizzard development philosophy on how their projects are chosen.
We have heard time and time again from Blizzard that they only create games that they are passionate about. At first glance, this is a commendable philosophy because obviously the more passionate that developers are about what they are making, the better the result will be. Daniel Pink in his book “Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us” has found that non-commissioned work that artists create is more creative than the commissioned work that they create.
Blizzard has leveraged this fact about human nature with very successful results compared to the rest of the video game industry (which operates quite differently) and the results are most often inferior video games. In the real world of video game development, a publisher comes up with the idea and then finds a developer to make the their game which is the complete opposite of how Blizzard makes video games. Blizzard only makes games they are passionate about.
At the time WoW was conceived, which is probably the year 2000, MMORPGs like EverQuest were in vogue at the time and considered to be cutting edge. It is easy to see why various Blizzard employees would want to make a MMORPG at the time.
Blizzard is a Video Game Company First and Foremost
In order to help explain the origins of WoW’s social interaction deficiency, it’s important to outline the vast difference in transitioning from making a single-player RPG into a making a MMORPG which was the case with Blizzard. Here are just some of the problems:
1) Because Blizzard is primarily a single player video game company, they had little to no expertise in with social dynamics and social interaction. Also, they have rarely hired role-players or social gamers that would have resulted in a more well rounded virtual world.
2) The lack of role-players and social gamers at Blizzard ensures that future hires will be screened by existing employees who are not role-players and social gamers, therefore they will be more likely to hire employees that think like they do which perpetuates the problem.
3) Due to the initial inertia of the achievement and combat design bias of Blizzard’s staff, even if they had hired role-players and social gamers they would not have risen in the ranks to the upper echelon where all the decisions are made about the future of the WoW franchise. (I have read many comments at Glassdoor.com that suggest today it is almost impossible for a new hire to get promoted to a position of decision making authority at Blizzard.)
The character of Blizzard’s original talent base and the company culture that has resulted has created an inertia that is not conducive to promoting social interaction. This is even more apparent when we look at the four fathers of WoW.
The Four Fathers of WoW
From the beginning, what we see in WoW has been an amalgam of the personal preferences and biases of its creators. Let’s look at 4 of the top design people at Blizzard who were responsible for creating and developing WoW over the years: Alex Afrasiabi, Jeff Kaplan, Rob Pardo and Tom Chilton. Most rose from humble beginnings and now have lofty titles at Blizzard with the exception of Rob Pardo who has since resigned.
The first three were all hardcore raiders in EverQuest which explains why raiding is the ultimate form of challenge in WoW. Raiding content got the biggest development budgets despite the fact that for most of the MMO’s history a minority of WoW players actually experienced raiding content. Now with the introduction of the raid finder feature anyone can find a raid and experience a watered down version of raiding.
The last, Tom Chilton, joined the WoW team when WoW was basically finished in 2004 and came from Ultima Online which was a PVP centric MMORPG.
In addition, the casual friendly aspect of WoW definitely came from Pardo. The story and narrative aspect of WoW came from Afrasiabi.
Given the background and proclivities of these 4 designers, is it any wonder that WoW became what it is today, a strange dichotomy of casual friendliness and on the other side a MMO focused on combat, achievement, raiding and PVP?
The key here to remember that Blizzard was and will always be a video game company first and foremost. Back in 2000 the MMORPG was considered a cutting edge entertainment phenomenon and everyone wanted to be a part of that — so they decided to make a MMORPG. Blizzard wanted their MMO to have broader appeal than the current industry leader EverQuest and the rest is history.
Unfortunately, an appreciation of the value of social interaction was not part of their plans for WoW.
Blizzard’s Design Ethos: Accessibility Equals More Profits
When WoW was first designed, it was common to hear Blizzard promote their “easy to learn, hard to master” philosophy. This seemed like a magical formula that had the ability to appeal to a wide spectrum of potential gamers.
They would also talk about the famous Blizzard doughnut hole. Back then they wanted to attract players with different skill levels with the expectation that players could easily travel from the inner ring of the donut to the outer ring of the donut and back if they so desired. From an article I published in 2011, I talked about how Blizzard had changed the recipe for their donut:
The real culprit here is a corporate philosophy that is based on growth. Subscriber growth. Blizzard’s policy has been to keep expanding the outer edges of its famous donut philosophy with marginal players of lesser skill and lesser time availability in order to get more profits. The result is a flattened pancake instead of a donut.
WoW was designed with the goal of making the MMORPG more accessible to the average person. If Blizzard were given the task of redesigning the game of basketball they would probably give everyone jet-packs and put the hoops 3 feet from the floor so everyone could score.
By lowering the bar of entry they believed they could make more money. If profits are your goal, this is the correct strategy. However if making a great MMORPG is your goal then this is a terrible strategy because in order to attract lesser skilled players you had to give them easy progress without the need for other players and the socialization skills that are required.
At last we come to the actual design theories employed by Blizzard and their effect on social interaction in WoW. While there are many design problems inherent in WoW, the two main culprits are easy soloing and concentrated combat
Design Flaw #1: Easy Soloing
MMORPGs previous to WoW were designed with the requirement that players needed to form groups to progress to the highest levels. This design theory is called player interdependence. In those original MMORPGs, players could solo but it was difficult and not intended.
Each player class had a specific role to play in a group. Each class had strengths and weaknesses. Classes complimented each other and the result was that the sum of the parts was greater than the whole. This synergy was the true magic of the MMORPG, the MUDS and table top pen and paper games such as Dungeons & Dragons that went before them.
Suddenly with WoW, there was a MMORPG where you could solo to the level cap and never speak a word to a fellow player thereby circumventing the design philosophy of player interdependence. Classes became more independent and self-sufficient. The notion of the player as a loner “hero” began to take hold.
While some MMORPG players felt a sense of emancipation from “forced grouping” as some have called it, the cost of that freedom changed the MMORPG landscape forever and paved the way for the anti-social single-player MMO that currently dominates the genre today.
Design Flaw #2: Concentrated Combat with No Downtime
From the beginning combat has been the central activity of fantasy MMORPGs. Due to the way MMORPGs are set up, advancement via the earning of experience points is all but impossible without combat.
When players were adventuring in dungeons in the early MMORPGs and in the MUDS before them, there was a healthy and reasonable balance of combat and downtime. After combat, players needed to regenerate their health, their stamina and their mana. It was during this down time that players got a chance to socialize. Socialization took many forms such players talking about tactics and strategy, completing maintenance tasks such as rebuffing and healing, and chatting with each other.
The precious interval between combat was the critical time where players would get to know each other and create the bonds of friendship that would keep them coming back for more and keep them subscribing.
With the introduction and refinement of WoW, health, stamina and mana regeneration became almost instant which has meant that downtime has been removed from the play experience leaving no time for socialization. In vanilla WoW, food and drink helped players to reduce downtime which even then was negligible. As it stands now, food and drink are no longer needed as player regeneration rates are almost instant after combat.
When opportunities for socialization are removed and marginalized, it is no wonder that socialization among players is non-existent within a MMORPG.
Frenetically paced combat has always been the Blizzard design ethos. You can see it in Diablo and the Warcraft RTS games where the player becomes a superhero and easily vanquishes hundreds of mobs in a single play session with no apparent fatigue or appreciable downtime.
Combine this with the rise of single-player video games, consoles, FPS games, and the current super-hero culture of Hollywood and you can understand why pure combat with no down time has become the dominant form of combat in MMORPGs.
A player has only so much time to play. So the WoW designers figured that they would fit as much combat as possible into an average play session to make the player feel like a hero. Something had to go and it was downtime. The unintended consequences was that socialization would all but vanish like an extraneous film scene left on the cutting room floor.
Why Do Players Put Up With It?
We’ve established the groundwork that explains why WoW was designed the way it was and who was responsible. Let’s look at how players have reacted to it and why they continue to support it.
There’s an ancient Latin maxim used in Roman Catholic theology that is applicable to this situation:
Lex orandi, lex credeni, lex vivendi.
Translated:
As we worship, so we believe, so we live.
This means that the quality of worship matters as there is a direct correlation to it and the resulting faith and religiosity of the believer. The same is true about MMOs. Good MMOs produce good players and good communities; the converse is also true: bad MMOs produce bad players and bad communities.
I believe this idea also applies to the current collective state of the MMO in the minds of the public. The video games and MMOs we choose to play and patronize ultimately determine what we come to believe about how they should be made.
As we continue to play a MMO, we come to accept and validate the mechanics and features it provides for us, so we expect them in our current MMO and in all other MMOs we play.
We as humans tend to reinforce decisions we have made in the past. The same is true of MMOs. Once players become wedded to MMO conventions they have a tendency to validate those conventions by continuing to participate in them. This demonstrates what is termed consistency and commitment. Dr. Robert Cialdini talks about this in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.
When we continue to play and support MMOs that are designed with certain values, we tend to justify our decisions and internalize the values that that particular MMO has imported to us. So if a MMO is designed with little to no reason for social interaction and we continue to play that MMO, we start to believe that social interaction is a needless distraction and an unwanted impediment on our quest for advancement.
The Generational Shift in the Player Base
It’s worth noting that the current generation of MMO players and designers has changed as well which may have put pressure on Blizzard to reduce socialization elements.
Today’s millennials have shorter attention spans and are notorious for having been fed a steady diet of undeserved praise compared to the generation X’ers and baby boomers that came before them. The millennials were also weaned on console games where there are no keyboards compared to the previous generations which grew up with PC’s to experience computer games. Gameplay is usually faster paced on consoles compared to computer games.
However, these generational preferences do not absolve completely Blizzard. They could have done more to promote socialization but instead they chose to ride the console gaming bandwagon by shamelessly borrowing design elements from console games systems and crudely inserting them into WoW.
Before the release of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, Blizzard’s Jeff Kaplan announced the inclusion of achievements as a feature in WoW. This was lifted directly from the Xbox 360 gamerscore achievement system and designed to appeal to millenials and possibly to onboard console gamers onto the PC platform.
The Exodus of Role-players and Social Gamers
MMOs are essentially online experiments in social engineering. MMO developers create self-fulfilling prophecies by virtue of the mechanics and features that can attract one type of Bartle player archetype and repel another kind of player archetype. Don’t like social players? Then simply eliminate the need for social interaction either consciously or sub-consciously.
When content and features are not designed to appeal to social players and role-players, eventually they will leave for another MMO or just quit. Consequently the only people left are the ones that you have been catering to all along: the achievers and the killers (PVP).
Blizzard has been under fire lately for not having enough “diversity” in WoW. While I am strongly opposed to the intrusion of identity politics and political correctness into the sphere of virtual worlds, I would agree that there is a glaring lack of diversity in player archetypes who play WoW which has led to a homogeneity and hegemony of achievers and killers in the player base. A virtual world that has more diverse player archetypes is far more interesting and provides a deeper play experience than one without socializers, explorers and role-players.
The Anti-Social MMO Phenomenon
In its current state, WoW is unmistakably an anti-social MMO. There is really no need to speak to a fellow player as you don’t need to speak to progress your character.
I’ve personally joined guilds both before and after the launch of Warlords of Draenor where it is rare to see guild members chatting on guildchat. Despite the propaganda and nostalgia for guilds that Blizzard would have you believe, this scenario of silence is representative of the average guild today. If it were not for various guild perks, most players would not need to join a guild.
Even in dungeon groups, there is no need to speak to anyone. Why bother to speak and make a social investment when you’ll most likely never see them again. If you were to spend time typing a “hello all” you might actually fall behind as the group races from mob to mob in their blood lust to complete the dungeon.
The Wages of Convenience and Trivialization
Feature after feature has been added to WoW that has killed the social component of a MMO and each one could easily have an entire article devoted to it. Features such as: personal quests, instancing, easy soloing, dungeon finder, raid finder, the auction house, flying mounts, fast travel and now garrisons. The list goes on and I have written articles on some of these abominations of convenience and instant gratification.
Then there are the socially binding features that have been removed: a serious death penalty, corpse retrieval, the need for pulling classes, the need for crowd control classes, the need to bind players to towns and cities, the need for resurrections and in general the need for class interdependency such as classes that can buff other players.
Features that create social bonding and cohesion have been removed and features that promote anti-social behavior and player convenience have been introduced. All in all, this is a recipe for disaster.
This is the state of WoW in 2015. And this is not me saying this; it is one of the spiritual fathers of WoW saying this: Alex Afrasiabi.
In a recent interview, WoW Creative Director Afrasiabi made a frank admission about the current state of the social aspect of the world’s most popular and successful MMORPG:
…one of the things that I feel like we’ve potentially lost sight of, and it’s my fault, more than anyone else’s — is the social world aspect of an MMO. Because we’ve made great strides in giving you more personal, meaningful stories to your character, but whenever you do something like that, in the manner that we do things like that, you risk removing the player from the social world.
It’s both shocking and refreshing to read this mea culpa. It is an acknowledgement that MMO pundits and essayists such as yours truly have been waiting for. If you don’t know what the problem is, then how can you fix it?
Credit is due to Afrasiabi as this is the first time that anyone from fortress Blizzard has ever acknowledged this problem.
Regarding Afrasiabi’s comment on “personal, meaningful stories,” I must disagree. In today’s WoW, a player is essentially a puppet on a string that is controlled by the scripted stories that the quest designer creates for them. How is that personal or meaningful? There has to be a better way.
I believe the better way is that players should be allowed the freedom and autonomy to create their own stories and their own histories free from the tyranny of the golden pathway of the “on rails” experience of MMOs like WoW. Stop building amusement parks and start building virtual worlds!
Koster Speaks about the User Experience
Regarding the lack of social interaction, even the great grandfather and Yoda of the MMO world, Raph Koster, said in a recent well-written 10 year anniversary retrospective about WoW:
And the game that was once called, by me and many others, “the least social MMO on the market,” is now the virtual home away from home for millions, as network effects, familiarity, and its ongoing dedication to a great user experience above all makes it makes the place we always return to.
Koster ends his retrospective with a chilling epitaph for WoW:
World of Warcraft effectively made MMOs perfect, and in the process, it killed them.
While I agree that WoW killed the genre as they set the bar so high that nobody could compete with them and in the process changed the rules of the game and the definition of a MMO itself. Perfect perhaps from a profit perspective, but far from perfect from a player and a design perspective. McDonald’s too has crafted a great user experience in the realm of fast food, but I would hardly call the Big Mac the best hamburger in the world despite how cheery their amusement park style restaurant is and how clean their restrooms are.
Consider a film you see at a cinema. What is more important? How the film makes you feel, how it entertains you, how it scares you, how it uplifts you? Or how clear the screen is, the power of the sound system, how comfortable the seats are in the cinema and how good the popcorn is? Blizzard got the screen, the sound, the seats and the popcorn right, the film — not so much.
What gets lost in all of the industry analysis is the actual experience of the player. The players true experience can’t be evaluated or measured by metrics. Perhaps this is the real problem as intangible qualities are impossible to quantify but we intuitively know when they are missing.
Gone from today’s MMOs is the sense of danger and excitement and fear that I used to experience when I played a MMORPG like EverQuest. The fact that you could lose two years worth of your playing time by losing your corpse in the Plane of Fear made for an incredible gripping and visceral experience. The reverse is true as well when you experience the joy and elation of recovering your corpse. WoW has never been able to recreate those raw emotions and the tragic thing is that they never even tried.
The Frankenstein Monster of Unintended Consequences
The WoW of today is a Frankenstein monster of unintended consequences caused by thoughtless design that Afrasiabi his compatriots concocted. For some reason, he, Jeff Kaplan and Rob Pardo thought that the social component of MMORPG would always exist as they proceed to “innovate” with feature after feature that killed group interdependency and social interaction. They were dead wrong.
When the obituary of MMORPGs is written these 4 people will need to be mentioned as being culpable in its demise. All of them knew the legacy that EverQuest bequeathed to them and they squandered it.
The Anti-Social Plague of WoW has Spread to the MMO Industry
The lack of social interaction is just not a WoW problem; it is now a industry wide problem as most MMOs have been patterned after WoW to some degree. Without a social component most MMOs are essentially online single player games where you may meet an occasional player who functions like a more advanced NPC than a player.
Many of us sounded the alarm bells about WoW. We wrote countless articles about the problems and we were constantly ignored. Even industry heavyweights such as Raph Koster and others who amply demonstrated the social paucity of WoW were ignored.
The fact is that Blizzard is an insular company. Rarely if ever do they engage with fellow designers on panels at game design conferences and allow themselves to be held accountable by their peers for their decisions.
The financial success of WoW shielded Blizzard from the ramifications that WoW has had on the industry. The deep vaults of gold that WoW made for Blizzard created a reality distortion field around the Blizzard designers and gave them the feeling that they could do no wrong and the result was that the band played on.
The Existential Sloth of the MMO Community
Not all of the bitter legacy of WoW is Blizzard’s fault. We bloggers, pundits and commentators are partly responsible too. We allowed ourselves to be seduced by the glamour of WoW and in the process we allowed them to continue on in their error.
There was a time when people actually used to write about MMORPGs with a depth that is almost non-existent today. We cared. We questioned everything. We had dreams too. This new genre was like a spaceship with a full tank of gas and we were giddy with wonder as we pondered what we could do with this power and potential.
Today, few if any ask existential questions about MMOs. We’re like jaded passengers on a bus, subway or airplane resigned to the fact that we are travelling a well-worn path from point A to point B. We don’t care about how much horsepower the engines have. Please don’t bother us, we’re getting our prescribed and routine dosages of opiates. The spice must flow!
Players Bear Responsibility Too
We as players must also accept some of the blame. Our human nature dictates that we often take the path of least resistance — even if it’s unhealthy for us and limits our long term enjoyment. Politicians know this all too well and tempt us with free stuff if we would only vote for them. Blizzard game designers are the same. They tantalize us with easy rewards and a pain free ride and in return we keep on subscribing.
Thoughtful players and MMORPG veterans know this is problematic but since WoW is such a mass market product, the average new player who has no knowledge of game design or the value of social interaction, accepts the bargain without a second thought and becomes unconsciously complicit in the slow destruction of the genre.
Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician said it best:
“The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.”
― Václav Havel
This sounds to me a lot like the average incurious WoW player who has inherited virtual worlds of striking beauty that we as pioneer players could only dream about. The problem is they have no idea of what went before them and what we experienced. They will never know the thrill of earning the right to exploring new worlds and the pulse pounding feeling of risking everything by dying and possibly losing years of your characters life. They will never know the memories, the friendships and social cohesion that was created because they have been coddled, pampered and essentially cheated by Blizzard out of a more meaningful experience.
The Danger of the Herd Mentality
A recent study from the University of Exter shows that following the herd can lead to bad decisions. From an article at Phys.org:
Research led by the University of Exeter has shown that individuals have evolved to be overly influenced by their neighbours, rather than rely on their own instinct. As a result, groups become less responsive to changes in their natural environment…
…By using a simple model of decision-making in a dynamic environment, the team were able to show that individuals overly rely on social information and evolve to be too readily influenced by their neighbours. The team suggest this is due to a “classic evolutionary conflict between individual and collective interest”.
A dominant MMO naturally attracts the most players which then creates inertia that attracts additional players. This results in a herd mentality that exerts social influence that increases social pressure to keep playing so you can be part of the herd. The herd starts thinking with a collective mindset instead of the player thinking for himself.
One only has to watch late night TV to discover that the public is easily deceived and highly impressionable.
Once WoW hit critical mass it became a cultural phenomenon that pushed a lot of Skinner buttons for people. WoW was a unique cultural magnet that attracted a herd following and it developed an inertia of its own. It was easy to sell your soul to WoW because it was a masterpiece of polish, beauty and combat that gave players enough pretty distractions that compensated for the lack of social game play.
From the outset, some of us were not fooled and we lamented the change in the behavior of our friends and guild mates. Players who were previously friendly and cooperative in EverQuest suddenly became selfish and single-minded in WoW. Their inherent personalities didn’t change; rather it was the MMO and the mechanics that changed and eventually it changed us.
WoW: a Victim of its Own Success
Blizzard’s single-handed transformation of the MMORPG genre from niche to mass market has had devastating effects on the quality of the average player. The success of WoW was made possible because Blizzard dumbed-down and streamlined the MMORPG experience to appeal to the palette of the lowest common denominator gamer. Suddenly the MMO community was flooded with people who had no appreciation of social interaction and those that did appreciate it were drowned out, ignored, starved out and left the genre entirely.
Social interaction in combination with other features such as role-playing was seen as a superfluous and anachronistic convention that was an impediment to the mass acceptance of WoW and it was either quietly discarded or conveniently ignored by the Blizzard devs.
Blizzard’s Lack of Vision
Without a vision you are embarking on a journey without knowing the destination. You are blind. If you are going to create a fantasy MMORPG you need to have a vision that is deeper and bigger than just saying your out to make “fun” and “concentrated coolness”. I can’t even remember the last time anyone at Blizzard even mentioned their borrowed “easy to learn, hard to master” mantra.
I couldn’t tell you what Blizzard’s vision is because I don’t believe they even have a vision today. If they have a vision its this: give the customer what they want or the customer is always right. This manifests itself in a dangerous design philosophy that encourages a sense of entitlement among players.
Instead of offering equality of opportunity, Blizzard believes in equality of outcome. Blizzard has always been obsessed with giving everyone a larger than life Disneyland theme park ride experience and every seat on that ride is the same.
Standing up and proclaiming “For the Horde” or “the Alliance” and telling everyone how “geek” we all are at BlizzCon is no substitute for a vision.
If your vision is not about bringing people together from all over the world and letting them escape into dangerous fantasy world then what is the point? At some point you have to challenge people and entice them to band together to face shared adversity. Surviving and thriving in a fantasy virtual world is not supposed to be easy.
Blizzard has earned a great reputation asking about every feature: “is this fun?” . I wonder what would kind of WoW we would have today if at every design meeting, they had also asked this question of every feature:
How will this promote player interdependency and social cohesion?
Can WoW Be Fixed?
I think it may too late for Blizzard’s WoW to be salvaged. The horse is well out of the garrison barn. Any change to create introduce more socialization would probably alienate those that are still playing and their corporate masters at Activision and the shareholders would not be pleased.
I had hoped that with their top secret Titan MMO, Blizzard would have learned many of these lessons and redeemed themselves. Sadly, that MMO was cancelled and with it a chance for redemption was lost. I believe that Blizzard will never make another MMO. That is a topic I hope to explore in a future article.
Conclusion
Although we live in a world that has never been more technologically connected, we are becoming more disconnected from each other and the people around us. Not all technology is good. Not all innovations are beneficial. The same is true of MMORPGs.
In the quest to improve other aspects of a fantasy virtual world, the Blizzard developers foolishly ignored the importance of the social nature of MMOs and boldly marched forward with innovations that created the unintended consequences of killing social interaction altogether. They probably assumed that social nature of their MMOs would always exist and that communities would always coalesce around their creations. They were dead wrong and the sorry state of the MMORPG which has morphed into a massively multi-player single player game is the result.
There is an old saying that goes like this: the journey is more important than the destination. In a good MMORPG both the journey and the destination are equally important. Sadly, in most MMOs all that matters is the getting the player to the destination as fast as possible. The social aspect of MMOs was but one facet of the journey has been carelessly eliminated in favor of excessive pandering to achievers via combat-centric game play and a bloated reward structure.
Thanks to irresponsible developers, social interaction is almost non-existent today and seen more of a nuisance by both by players and developers. This is a real shame because the MMO industry has lost something really special in the process — something that single player videos games will never have: a sense of shared purpose where people need each other and have to come together to collaborate, cooperate and surmount challenges together. Social interaction — the only unique proposition of the MMORPG — is almost gone.
Even more tragic is that courtesy of the Blizzard MMO blueprint, the new MMO player of today will probably never know what it is like to experience the joys of friendship and camaraderie that once was possible. Without the cohesive and magnetic nature of social bonding it is no wonder that most WoW players lose interest and unsubscribe after content is rapidly consumed.
For too long we have had no major developer in the MMO development community that has championed the cause of social interaction and created a balanced approach to creating fantasy virtual worlds. The problem is that most MMO developers are hired from the video game community and since single player games are what they make, there are precious few people who have the skills to understand, appreciate, design and implement social interaction in a MMO. Besides, the average game designer was probably weaned on WoW which puts him at a disadvantage from the get go with regard to the appreciation of social interaction as a design goal.
I have said this many times and it still bears repeating: The friendships and social bonds that players experienced in EverQuest have never really been equaled by any other MMO since. 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. No MMO developer has been able to create it and even worse none have bothered to try as they are too busy chasing the golden WoW dragon.
Despite the lack of social interaction, somehow millions of people convince themselves to play WoW each week and find some value in it. Perhaps the alone together aspect of WoW echoes the alone together phenomena of people fixated on their smart phones that you see so often these days in public spaces. If this is indeed the future of the fantasy virtual world, then it is a bleak and impersonal one that I want no part of.
For me, just being alone together is not enough. Shouldn’t fantasy virtual worlds aspire to something bigger and better than that?
Quite often, I get heartfelt letters from my readers lamenting the state of MMORPGs today. Many of them complain about the lack of immersion and the lack of social interaction. People who crave social interdependence within a MMORPG are out there and they are just waiting to return to the genre once something worthy shows up.
Even the MMO press which is in decline is coming around and starting to ponder the lack of social interaction in this genre. It’s really gratifying to see that there are people out there that are deeply concerned about the terrible curse that has befallen this genre . It gives me hope that perhaps some day, a new MMO developer will arrive on the scene that will restore the need for social interaction to its rightful place and not take it for granted like Blizzard and its counterfeiters have.
-Wolfshead
After migrating to a new WordPress them, somehow comments have been turned off. I have turned comments back on. I apologize for any inconvenience.
Wow. I was skeptical st first before reading your article, but I think you hit the nail on the head. When I look back at my mmo gaming career, I realized that the most fun I’ve had was with games that specialize in social interaction, like DDO. While not the most impressive glitzy game on the market, it had the best player community I had ever experienced. I met some cool people there that I still keep in touch with on Facebook today.
One of the issues that you touched on was that the players share some blame and responsibility for the decade long mmorpg implosion. While WoW certainly fostered the following, I’m not sure WoW is to blame for the current infestation of instant gratification twitch elite players that plague the current mmo demographic market. Even with games that have some semblance of social interaction, group content is still plagued by the elite gamer that kicks people from the group because their “build” is subpar and the elite is more interested in racing to win rather than helping and developing lasting bonds of friendship. This may have more to do with our current generation mentality more than WoW creating and influencing this mentality.
I hope more games like the upcoming Camelot unchained will get back to basics with a focus on the social interaction, and in depth character customization. Players will need it to survive in a harsh world with punishments and penalties. WoW completely killed the idea of character attributes and stat customization which I think everyone longs for. Which is ironic because Diablo 1 was all about stat distribution. I myself have been longing for an mmorpg that brings back the glory days of MUDs and eq1.
Great job on the article. It is spot on.
Thanks for the kind comments Joshua! It’s good to know there are others who are concerned about the lack of social interaction in MMOs.
“While I am strongly opposed to the intrusion of identity politics and political correctness into the sphere of virtual worlds…”
I would direct you to this article which explains my thoughts succinctly: “http://boingboing.net/2015/06/26/race-video-games-witcher-3.html
Thanks for the link. After reading the article, it hasn’t changed my mind about the scourge of identity politics that has been injected into video games lately. Why does everything in our world have to be examined through the lens of Marxist theory that killed almost 100 million people in the last century alone all in the name of equality? Why does everything today have to be about finding inequality in race, gender, sexual identity in every aspect of life? I reject all of those classifications. I refuse to be ruled by the tyranny of false concepts and hollow grievances that have no bearing on the reality of humanity.
Life is not fair so get over it. You can either spend all your time complaining about how you got shafted or you can stand up and do something about it and make a good life for yourself.
Legitimate criticism is one thing regarding video games. But this constant hand wringing over the lack of video games is downright appalling. Let’s see the social justice warriors make their own videos games. No, they won’t bother because its too lucrative to be a muckraker and a grievance peddler. Shame on every one of them
I honestly think that there are far too many people with too much time on their hands worrying about utter inconsequential nonsense. The problem with the Internet is that anyone can write an article and complain just about anything to make a name for themselves. The Internet has become the business of manufacturing outrage.
I was just curious about the loss of RPG in WoW. Role-playing, at least to me, implies that one steps into the shoes of the character, and sees how his/her actions affect the world around him/her. Do I help that little girl bring back her cat or no? Or, do you warn a colony about an asteroid that will kill all of them, or do you let them die? That would be very hard to implement in an MMO, seeing as you would have people who favor on, or the other. In a single-player RPG, such as Mass Effect or Dragon Age, the choices you make carry real consequences within the world.
This is a great point. The problem is that players don’t see any consequences for their decisions in most MMOs. No matter what they do, no matter how they behave, the world is unaffected.
For example, you can run practically naked in any MMO, past guards, into temples and the guards or priests don’t even bat an eye. Try that in the real world and see what happens.
The justice system in Elder Scrolls Online is a good start in making players accountable for their actions. It is just the start and far more needs to be done.
Role-playing has no real effect on the virtual world except for other players. Even using emotes which is the most basic form of role-playing is hardly acknowledged. (I know that some MMOs have rewarded players for using emotes but this is rare and pretty much unheard of.)
The developers set the tone for the MMORPG. If they don’t care about role-playing and fail to promote and reward it, then the players won’t care about role-playing either.
I guess so. But in an MMO, the developers can’t really make the world respond to your actions, and thus liberties have to be taken (such as running naked). The more they start letting players affect the world itself, the less MMO-y it will eventually become. In an MMO (in general), you, as a developer, try to keep people in a group. But, five people will likely have five different thoughts on a single matter; allow all of them to have their own way, and the players might feel disconnected from each other (“Well, THAT guy didn’t care about the bunnies. Douche.”) if they can follow their own path. The developer can limit it to only two possible outcomes, but then there really is no ‘RPG’ in it, now is there? This is just my opinion, after all, but it seems to be a very fine line to tread.
Allowing players to do small things that make them feel like their actions matter but not big enough to destroy the entire world by themselves and disrupt the experience for others. However, smaller things done by players could eventually add up and eventually contribute to bigger consequences.
I’m talking about things like turning on a street light, laying a wreath at a grave-site.
How about being allowed to give some money to a beggar, who then runs off to the inn, buys himself some ale and gets drunk and starts singing?
How about feeding a stray dog some meat? Then the dog becomes attached to you and becomes your friend for life. Conversely, failing to feed the dog causes it to die.
These things could easily be done by companies like Blizzard who have the resources but instead they are working on creating more gimmicky boss fights for raids or another motorcycle. 🙂
Regarding players affecting the game-world in permanent and significant ways…
Do you know anything about Chronicles of Elyria?
Also, I wonder if Revival might have a design that allows for significant player impact as well.
It’s not just the lack of social interaction that is the problem. It’s that when people do interact in Trade Chat, they rarely talk about the game itself. Instead, these players argue about religion, politics, racism, the Ferguson shooting, and basically other real world issues that don’t belong in WoW or any other games. I know because I’ve seen this myself on my server. When I play an MMORPG, I play it to get away from the real world but these trade trolls bring these real world issues with them into the MMO which really angers me.
This is a very astute observation! My next article which I have been planing for a while is going to examining this issue in greater detail.
I agree that many players are not doing their part in staying in character and being part of a believable and authentic virtual world ecosystem. As I mentioned in this article, most players just show up and make no effort at all to be a part of the fantasy virtual world. In many cases they detract from the immersion by bringing in all kinds of real world issues that completely negate the immersion that the developers have tried to create for the players.
Sadly many developer are guilty of this as well and I think it is only going to get worse as social justice warriors have started to set their sights on the MMO genre to ply their trade. Unless players start standing up and defending the integrity of the virtual worlds they inhabit I see a a bleak future for MMOs.
One example that comes to mind where there is hope is when there is a well-established and passionate fan base that surrounds a particular intellectual property. I applaud the Lord of the Rings Online community for caring enough about the Middle-earth and J.R.R. Tolkien to help to monitor trolls and enforce chat channel rules. Thankfully Turbine has to be accountable to Middle-earth Enterprises which at least has some standards for ensuring adherence to Tolkien’s lore.
Tangentially, I still think that private servers are the way to go. Not pirated ones, but official sanctioned ones. Even “guild servers” or the like. Self-select your companions, and while the world might be largely occupied by NPCs, at least the only trolls you’ll find are ones you can kick out.
Maybe that won’t work for WoW, and maybe it would need a sort of back end “multiverse Auction House” to make an economy function, but I think that there’s promise in smaller, player-controlled servers.
And we come back to this again Tesh! =)
I agree – that way you can do housing, because you have 200 people in the entire world and there is room for it. You can kill bosses dead, explore, impact the world and actually be real *heroes*. You can’t be a hero among millions in an MMO, but you can in your own little private sandbox.
The entire experience would be enriched for all.
It was the first time I read on this blog and I really liked the article. It brings the problem to the point and I would just hope, future developers would read it too and learn a lesson from it.
For example, making a “tank” bag in random dungeons even prevents players from grouping up together, because otherwise they won’t get this bag.
I get what Blizzard wanted to achieve with it, it’s just that they put the cart in front of the horse.
That’s what I like about RIFT, you can group up with friends at least, but sadly this game is not much better than WoW. I don’t know what the developers did wrong there, but the community is even ruder than in WoW.
Nice players are dying out, and they will keep dying out until nothing is left of them if nothing changes.
It’s sad how many times I’ve had the argument about roleplaying in an MMO. Or even if roleplaying should be a part of an MMO. I tend to play sci-fi MMOs like EVE previously and Elite: Dangerous today. A game that was able to launch with absolutely no social features, though fortunately a few months after launch some lean features were added and more are on the way. At least they’re addressing the issue.
My own way of dealing with the sci-fi thing is that people ARE roleplaying, even if they don’t realise it, they’re playing a starship captain or an alliance leader just through going through the motions of captaining a starship or leading the alliance whether or not they step into the role or not, the act of doing puts them in the role.
I agree one of the tragedies of WoW is that it seems to have defined what an MMO is for most people. WoW and its clones are seen as the only possible variation and more innovative games like EVE and Elite: Dangerous which take different approaches are challenged on whether or not they’re allowed to use that moniker because their approach isn’t WoW-like.
Fortunately other variations DO exist and I wish them every success. But love it or hate it, WoW has left an indelible mark on the industry. I hope it can recover.
I posted recently on mmo-champ a text on a similar topic: “Does Blizzard actually like RPG?”, but I didn’t knew their 4 core designers were so little into roleplaying.
In fact, when you look at Blizzard’s games, ALL OF THEM are fast action games. Hack&Slash, RTS, Fun CCG etc. WoW was really the exception and that’s why they’re slowly turning it into one of their “normal” kind of games. They just don’t know what else to do.
Aside from destroying any hope of a “real” MMORPG, at least in the near future, saddest thing imho is they don’t even seems to understand why their game is so hard to update, that a themepark require never-ending fuel while a virtual world “only” require tools for people to play with. Just compare how long people are playing a onrail game like Assassin Creed and how long they are entertained with Minecraft or Skyrim!
Hi there, I read the article and it’s spot on. It’s basically a shorter version of this article but it’s all good 🙂
Here’s the article link:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1761053-Does-Blizzard-actually-like-RPG
Great article Wolf, definitely struck more than a few chords with me. Mind you I think maybe you take it all a bit too seriously. It is after all, only entertainment, and as someone so succinctly noted, “It’s only pixels man, nothing to get too worked up about”, though to be fair, I personally don’t always adhere to this wise advise. 😉 I would be most remiss however not to mention that your article was well written and an easy read.
Never played WoW even though I’m a huge fan of the early Warcraft games and the original Starcraft. BTW, Starcraft 2 was a huge disappointment to me, but that’s a discussion for another time. Anyway, here are some thoughts on my own mmo experiences.
Guild Wars 2 – You have to really applaud Arenanet for making one of the most accessible mmo’s in existence. Easy to learn, easy to leave then jump back in to, and completely casual-friendly. You never have the problem of players interfering with each other’s quests or steeling loot like you do in games like swtor. That said, GW2 is almost the ‘anti-community’ of mmo’s. The perfect example is how people will converge for a world boss or recurring event like a pack of vultures, and when done scatter to the four winds without saying nary a peep to each other. As the Geek gamers noted in their review, you would think players would group after an event to finish a map, but this seems to rarely happen. Also, the player’s personal story is completely soloable until the final act which is for all intents and purposes a dungeon. In this very popular and populated mmo, I’ve never felt so alone playing it. Finally, I would mention that GW2 used to have an amazing role-playing community, but it was hurt considerably by Anet’s deployment of the mega servers last year.
Star Trek Online – I like this game despite its flaws. For a Trek fan it can be great fun and incredibly nostalgic, and it has been the defacto home of the Star Trek IP for years now. That said, it plays like a single player game against the backdrop of other people doing their own thing, as the game is heavily instanced and the vast majority of the content is completely soloable.
Star Wars: The Old Republic – Much controversy surrounds this game, and to completely vet my thoughts on it would be long and way off topic. That said, from my experience with the game, it’s not the lack of social interactions but rather the quality, which I’m sorry to say has been mostly bad. Of the 6-7 mmo’s I’ve fleshed out, swtor has the worst community by far, or to put it another way, the vast majority of my bad mmo social experiences have been in swtor. As someone else noted, “SWTOR caters to the lowest denominator of low-IQ, ADHD-medicated, self-entitled fanboys with disposable incomes to pay to win.” The bad social aspects of mmo’s can be found in swtor in spades: 1) Toxic, totally unmoderated general chat full of trolls, elitists, racists, and misogynists. 2) I’ve never seen a game so full of people in a hurry and impatient to get somewhere, completely missing the point that like any good theme park mmo, swtor is a journey and not a destination. 3) For every good social grouping I’ve experienced for heroics and flashpoints (dungeons), I’ve had one that was equally bad or worse, mostly due to greedy and impatient players. People will kick you from a group for the most trivial offenses, and go ballistic if you take a ‘need’ on a loot item that they will most likely outlevel within a day. Go figure??? As one woman so succinctly noted, she’s hesitant to group with strangers because it might be the event that totally ruins her evening game session. Finally, I would mention that the social points system is terrible. It takes way to long to level it, and in any case the social armor items that you can get have since been relegated to secondary status by the increasing importance of the swtor Cartel Market (cash shop). Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot to like about swtor, especially if you are a Star Wars fan, but it does seem like you need to have a very thick skin to play it at times.
BTW, as an older gamer, I keep thinking of someone’s golden comment: “Why any adult would want to play an mmo and take abuse from some snot-nosed kid is way beyond me!” lol Why indeed???
PS…..I neglected to mention that I also very much enjoyed your exposition on mmo ‘raiding’. Speaking as someone who has never been a big raiding fan, to my mind it seems like a poor excuse for endgame content. In fact I would argue that the only viable endgame content to be found today is in sandbox mmo’s like EVE Online.
Excuse the long reply but I found the article very interesting and well written, and I believe it deserved an equally explicit reply.
I fully agree about the social aspect of the game. I remember the first time I ran Deadmines (which coincidentally was my first time playing an MMO); my fingers were sweaty from the anxiety and the focus. I also remember the sigh of relief after killing Van Cleef. This was an achievement and meant something. You would add players to your friend list if they were semi-decent but more importantly if they had a good attitude. The same goes for my first PvP encounter. I remember my heart racing because when I killed that Orc, his two comrades were searching around for my stealthy rogue and knew my name, so next time they encountered me they would grief me. There were “real” stakes at play based solely on human interaction.
Back when server community was actually a thing, names were remembered and you knew that X guy is a scammer, Y is a ganker Z is a bad player that tries to blame the class for his mistakes etc. You felt “obligated” to interact with your server and your actions really mattered. It wasn’t uncommon for people that had a bad reputation, to transfer their character to another server because there was simply no alternative if they wanted to continue to play the game.
On the other hand, I disagree with your views on the RP aspect. MMOs are inherently impossible to enjoy as an RPer because they simply lack immersion. A prime example of that is TESO. A game that walked on the red carpet of the ridiculously popular Skyrim and failed. This was not (just) because of the bugs but because people mistakenly expected that they would enjoy killing that super hard Draugr King, only to realise that 20 corpses of the same NPC were laying there from previous players. It’s just in the nature of these games to not be particularly RP friendly.
Take your example about feeding the dog which would follow you around. How long before it was a fad and everyone and their mothers were running around with a dog behind them? How many times would that dog spawn for this to happen? Something that on paper seems a great idea when considered long-term kinda loses its glimmer.
And One last thing. Lately, I’ve been playing on a private server of the late Warhammer Online MMO. This game had a small but very loyal following that stood by all the crap that EA threw in their faces and a year and a half after its demise has formed a server where people get to enjoy their beloved game, once more, for free. This has been one of the, if not the most, friendly communities. And the reason why is simply because there is nothing to win or lose but your relationship with the rest of the people that loved that game as much as you did. Basic things, that have been long forgotten in a corporate Titan (sic) like WoW.
Crom, I agree with you completely about ESO. It was my biggest gaming disappointment since Starcraft 2. To me it was extremely boring and so not fun, way too linear, bots everywhere, and the player avatars looked dreadful. Also, I thought swtor did a much better job than ESO of maintaining the illusion that you are special, even though thousands of other players are doing the same thing. Not only was ESO a big fail as an Elder Scrolls game, it was a big fail as an mmo as well. I used to think Zenimax/Bethesda could do no wrong before this mess of a game. Lo, how the mighty have fallen. BTW, I had to mention seeing your name Crom – I finally got around to watching the original Conan the Barbarian, and it’s making me want to try Age of Conan. 😉
PS Wolf, I thought that was fascinating what you said about the mostly political reasons for raids being the endgame staple of theme park mmo’s. I’m reminded of what a wise man said about how technical decisions are often made for very non-technical reasons.
Yeah ESO was definitely disappointing. Well, we can still hope for a new TES game with small scale co-op 😀 . I agree about SWTOR; I think it’s probably the closest an MMO has come to feeling like a true RP experience, with the voiced quests and the personal storyline, which was fantastic. I think it was probably the best leveling experience I had but after that there wasn’t much to experience.
AoC is an interesting game. I would say it’s rather unique especially compared to all the WoW clones that spawned around that time. If you can get used to the combat system (I wasn’t very partial to it) the game has a certain flair and it’s brooding atmosphere and realism are sure to occupy you for some time.
It is a game that I try to get into every once in a while but I think I lose interest because the leveling experience is not particularly engaging. The strong point is its maturity and I am not talking about the gore but how the game generally is not very flashy or “cool”. It’s definitely a niche game by now.
I am not sure in what state it is as I haven’t played in a few years but, hey, it’s free so you only have a bit of time to lose. I would recommend you try it out at least to experience the starting area (Tortage) which was truly magnificent. I wish the whole game was as well made as this.
What a good article! I started playing Wow with a small group of friends in 2004. I quickly became hooked because of the social aspect of the game. I would get home from work and log into wow and pop on to the guild Vent server. We would spend hours chatting and helping build our guild….pvp nights, leveling characters, finishing up group quests and raiding. You are absolutely right about the social aspect of the game….it’s gone now. In the quest to make everything more accessible for users they killed the social aspect. For me it started at the end of ROLK when they added dungeon finder and raid finder. You no longer had to travel in the game…you could stand in one spot and push a button. I stopped playing at the end of Cataclysm and briefly played in MOP. WOD pulled me back in along with a handful of friends….we played together for several week but quickly fizzled when we ran out of content. There didn’t seem to be any challenge left in the game. I think you are right…the game is to a point where it’s not fixable. I started my 7 day trial again tonight after not playing for 5 or 6 months. Not a single person I knew was online……. my guild master of 7 years had posted in the info tab that him and his wife had deactivated their accounts. I briefly tried to play the new content…… I built my shipyard and made it to the new zone. When i finally realised that the shipyard is just another facebook mini game….I logged off and deleted wow from my computer. Without the social part of the game there just isnt’ enough to keep me interested.
Thankyou Wolfshead for this thoughtful article which brought many fond memories and emotions forth within when reading it. I could not but help to think of the archetype of the hero, and how in groups we discover that we are heros as we work to surmount the pressing challenges around us. This realisation can not be conferred by a developer, but must be a realisation borne of the social process in MMOs as you mention. Like you I hope that a daring developer might bring back player interdependence in a world where we can truly feel the emotions that make us humans, rather than being beguiled by dopamine addiction though virtual Skinnerian ploys.
Wow (no pun intended). You said it all – and then some. Thank you for such an in-depth analysis!
It’s so good to read what many of us have thought about WoW’s direction for a long time (at least since Cata’s release), although I was thinking that, with their apparent determination to destroy the game with all they’ve removed (particularly the ability to create unique characters with the old talent system), they were trying to strip as much of the game down as possible (including ‘dumbing’ it down) to turn into f2p.
But with your explanation of their mentality, I guess that’s put paid to that suspicion.
After years of subs, buying mounts, pets and 5 expansions, it’s now a case of, “friends to the end, but this is the end, my friend”.
I won’t be buying Legion and will cancel my subs when they expire in a couple months. What irritates me the most about Blizz is the way they feign interest in player feedback, suggestions and complaints and then gloss over concerns at BlizzCon or deliberately ignore them.
Blizz (to my mind, at least) has become like the Third Reich – and it’s not a company I’m willing to support anymore.
Nuff said.
Wolfshead,
I mentioned Chronicles of Elyria, but as well, do you know about The Saga of Lucimia?
Both are MMORPGs in development that appear to have some of the design goals that you are promoting.
I’ve been looking around at some of the MMORPGs being developed and am finding some very interesting projects.
Great article, but I do have a small gripe. It’s easy to sit back and unleash a storm of criticisms Blizzard’s way, the real challenge is offering viable solutions. I’ve read your blog for a long time and you always come back to your frustration with Blizzard’s lack of implementing solid role playing within the context of the game. Yet you’ve never given a way to approach this that would solve this problem. Yes it’s called MMORPG. The RPG element is displayed as a means to participate and be a part of the world. It’s a nice thought to wonder about WoW being a place where people go do raids, dungeons, and quests all while staying in character, but it’s unrealistic. I’ve been a part of Blizzard’s RP servers and it’s an amazing experience. But to say that because no one indulges in true role play anymore that WoW should no longer be classified as an MMORPG I think is a little shortsighted. RP is VERY time-consuming, down to creating your character, their background, outfit, finding out their personality, it’s not a simple activity. I reject the popular notion that millenials are entitled, spoiled, and bratty. It’s judgemental and borders on elitism. The world is different than the days of Ever Quest. The world and economy is different. People don’t have the time to sit and dedicate hours to role playing where a simple task like doing a dungeon takes an entire day because of all the rp. I understand the frustration with the lack of role playing, but don’t be fooled into thinking that in order to truly enjoy an rpg game or considered yourself a stout rpg gamer that you have to role play otherwise you’re a phony who simply cosplays. I play Skyrim and Wow and while I may not be actively role playing with other people I do things where I role play with myself. Everything I do in game is tied into my role play persona down to my class choice, transmog, the mounts I ride, the tabards I wear. My entire character is designed as if I were to role play but don’t indulge in it. Again, too time consuming. I’ve also outgrown it personally. You might call it cosplays but I’m not just dressing up, I hold the mentality of an RP constantly. I know a few friends of mine that do the same. Anyways, just something to think about.
WoW has been broken for a long time now. When it released, I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever seen. I never thought anything would take me from Everquest, but WoW was -magical.-
It had all the allure and social experience I loved about EQ in a new shiny package. It was group oriented, I couldn’t even get Bingle’s dang tools back by myself, and the dungeons were challenging and fun. Mister Smite in deadmines smacked us good quite a few times!
Cut to 3 years later. I saw the patch mentioning they were removing elites from the open world to make it more accessible to players. I turned to my friend and said “oh man, it’s downhill from here,” and it was. I quit wow shortly after and recently returned a week ago with my wife whom I actually met on wow 8 years ago. We were both blown away by what it had become. We quickly got to level 75 in the blink of an eye, one shotting mobs and never talking to anyone or joining any groups the entire time before we stopped and said “What the hell are we doing? this is boring.” Then quit again.
WoW truly has driven the genre of MMORPGs into the ground, there just are no good ones left anymore.
Pantheon Rise of the Fallen is the only light in the darkness, and it’s on a very low budget. However I think Brad McQuaid never lost sight on what made an MMO an MMO. That social interaction that encouraged friendship and camaraderie. Check it out 🙂
Dark Souls has replaced WoW. It has a multiplayer online component to it and it allows for crafting of gear and proper spec for success. The most important factor is challenge. The game is not for noobs. WOW players are anti-noob bullies. Dark Souls is the anti-noob game.
If you were a noob playing DS on Xbox Live and get invaded noobs will get one shotted over and over.
Wow has removed the population of bullying noobs, now it is noobs everywhere and playing a game made for noobs.
I agree, with a slight caveat.
The thing is, WoW’s greatest asset is also what may have done the game in.: Blizzard kept trying to please everybody.
Now of course, chasing after the market is a commendable thing for a company trying to earn profits, but people sometimes forget that a company’s goal isn’t to make money but to make customers. Blizzard seems to have lost sight of this. Their current version of WoW has alienated around two thirds of their playerbase, the complete opposite of what they wanted to achieve by trying to please everyone.
Wasn’t there a saying about not pleasing anyone when you try pleasing everyone?
In that light, I would add that Dark Souls isn’t the only thing that has replaced WoW. Minecraft has also largely displaced it, being a persistent dynamic game with online multiplayer capabilities, and I would say even more so than Dark Souls which has a comparatively niche audience.
So now they have at least two different titles pulling customers away from their franchise. On the one hand there exists a brutally difficult hack n’ slash dungeon crawler that rewards skill and persistence. On the other hand there exists a game that allows for and encourages player creativity in shaping procedurally generated worlds. Different markets, but they serve their purposes better than WoW does.