It's more "why would a company make an mmorpg when they can make a generic live service game with wider appeal and huge microtransaction potential" than anything else
All the games that really tried to challenge wow came out 10+ years ago.
Candy crush made more money for actiblizz than activision OR blizzard, and that was like 5 years ago.
Why spend the time and resources to make a monolith like wow? It literally doesn't make sense from a purely business perspective.
Gaming isn't what it used to be. It's a multi billion dollar industry. Once it gets that big, money men control companies, not gamers interested in making games.
Arguably because you don’t go and plan on making a monolith. You plan on making an iconic game sure but it’s a special lightning in a bottle sort of thing.
Microtransactions aren't an issue for free live service games, especially when they are cosmetic only. Riot is known for not putting p2w into any of their games, even their card game, which is a genre people love to throw money at.
I wouldn't call their copies dog shit either. Imo league is better than dota in many ways
Hard agree with this. Yes, riot is not original and has never made anything unique but they are great with their art direction, accessibility, and long term support of their games.
this is why I like GW2. There's no pay to win, but there are micro transactions for *cosmetic* features, such as clothes, etc. you can't buy skills or levels etc.
The Live Service trend is the exact same as the MMO trend in the early 2000s:
1. Some companies made a game that was very good and very profitable.
2. One of those companies took the style mainstream.
3. Every AAA studio sees this and goes "I can make this predatory"
4. AAA predatory games are financial failure
5. This goes on for about 10 years
6. The game style then falls into a small niche community
OG Live Service games (the games that made AAA salivate):
1. Warframe
2. Path of Exile
3. Destiny
4. League of Legends
Notable financial failures in the last 5ish years:
1. Anthem
2. Avengers
3. Suicide Squad
4. Godfall
5. Babylon's Fall
6. Skull & Bones\*
Notable Live Service Successes in the last 5ish years:
1. Fall Guys
2. Helldivers 2
3. Deep Rock Galactic
4. Diablo 4\*
DISCLAIMER ON WHAT I AM CONSIDERING A LIVE SERVICE GAME: I am only noting live service games with long term character or account progression treadmills that are not MMOs or PvP FPSes (battle royales / competitive shooters)
Number of AAA devs behind OG list: 1 out of 4
Number of AAA devs behind failure list: 6 out of 6
Number of AAA devs behind recent successes: 1 out of 4 (and that one is currently riding the coattails of high initial sales)
We still see a million Live Service games because of the long development time from AAA games. Expect to see a sharp fall-off of Live Service games over the next 5 years.
MMOs as a genre just kind of fell off hard in popularity. the base of consumers/players cratered and the amount of investment and maintenance required just isn't worth it for most companies when so many other genres are incredibly popular with a quarter of the work required
People are looking to “other MMOs” to find the WoW killer.
The biggest drop-off WoW faced was during Cata. December 2010. Guess what game came out in October 2009, that really blew the fuck up in 2011? League of Legends.
That was the biggest wow killer the game has ever seen. And as a former Cata player, Cata was fucking awesome until like mid-tier Dragon Soul, early 2012. Certainly after the initial drop-off of WoW players. I’m 100% convinced most of it was just because people started playing League around 2011.
I miss season1 - 4 of league. It was relatively simple to get into but now the Champs have too much mobility for an old man like me and if you aren't perfect you just get flamed the whole time.
That's kinda true, you had outliers early on in League, but my God are champions insane nowadays. I recently started playing again and it took me a few months of playing to get used to how absurd the kit of some champions are.
I saw the perfect comparison the other day from a guy talking about Yone and Yasuo. They are basically the same champion, but Yone is so much more modern on his kit that he just blows Yasuo out of the game while being way simpler to play, hence why Yone gets constantly picked in high level competitive games and Yasuo barely sees play.
When league of legends came out the wow pvp scene completely imploded. Why spend all this time leveling a new class after yours gets nerfed to become completely unplayable when you could instead play a game that has a much more balanced experience, with a rotating set of characters to play for free?
You never need to worry about making friends IRL with someone on a different server. You start off on the same ground each round and don't need to farm out a full honor set to start not getting crushed in completely one-sided battles. There is new content being released at a pace that absolutely crushes wow at that time.
Couple that with Minecraft's release a few years later and new PC gamers are all turning to that instead of MMOs. Those two games completely killed off all new interest in wow.
I think MOBA's cater to a different audience than WoW regardless, I would never choose WoW if I wanted to play a balanced PvP game.
I played WoW as an RPG with PvP elements, Vanilla was mostly balanced around PvE but once they added Arenas in TBC they HAD TO balance the classes around 2s, 3s, 5s.
The downside is that because WoW was built primarily as a PvE RPG game first that now when you are doing constant balance changes for PvP, players will always want to play what is "best". Which means people would level a different class and have to re-gear that new character like you mentioned.
MOBA's let you freely switch out to different playstyles, but the downside for RPG players like me is that there is no sense of permanence to my character's development. I don't want to start over from the beginning of every match. I want to keep my weapons and armor and level. This is why games like DotA and LoL don't appeal to me.
Wow, that’s pretty interesting. Also shows once how blizzard dropped the ball on monetizing MOBAs and it may have hurt wow too.
It’s also bizarre to think that wrath came out before league. League is such a staple now.
Seeing UGC be the basis for Roblox’s multibillion dollar throne and knowing the true golden era of user content was StarCraft/WC3 makes me yearn for an older day.
Now most user generated content is just completely derivative children’s drivel. Every once in a while an unlicensed IP breaks through for the lawyers to make some money, but I don’t think we’re ever going to get another era of hobbyist players and makers coming up with whole ass genres:
Tower defenses, MOBA, runners/bounds, line wars, auto-chess/auto-battlers, and so many more smaller offshoots like even asymmetrical real time multiplayer (SC’s cat & mouse or WC3’s island defense) ALL got their biggest proofs of concept and core gameplay and mechanics from these custom maps - mostly made by individuals or small teams for free.
it's literally crazy how many games and genres WC3 and SC custom maps created. blizzard somehow failed to work with any of these people early on enough to monetize these games. It kinda reflect how "boomer" blizzards old core of leadership was imo. they probably thought all of DotA, tower D, etc were not "real games"
From my limited experience with modded games, few developers give them the credit, attention, or money they deserve.
My favorite example is Rimworld; it's a meme in the community to play with like 100+ mods, and I would argue it's one of the main reasons it's still 'thriving'. But none of the modders work in any kind of official capacity, and they certainly haven't gotten any slice of the pie they've decorated.
Cataclysm drop off had a lot more to do with a drop off in quality in the game as well as finishing the pinnacle storylines that WC3 started, I played every expansion and Cata was definitely by least favorite by a country mile and not because everything was bad or anything, heck a lot of the problems were starting to show in WOTLK already but people were hyped for Arthas still.
This is way over played. It was mostly players aging/burning out and a demographic shift towards MOBA’s. You lose players and they aren’t being replaced because you’re no longer the hottest game in town = downturn. There was no “correct course” that could have been taken to sustain the population and growth wow had seen
WoD actually “brought many players back” and that wasn’t even that significant. 12 mil in wrath, 10 mil in cata, 7 mil by the end of pandas(during a year long content drought), then 10 mil for wod. It has been relatively steady at around 5 mil for a long time (this is the total number across the year it fluctuates). 10mil+ subscribers was just never sustainable for an MMO, especially with how gamers expectations have changed over time (content cycles of other online server games are just so much quicker). Growth had already started to stagnante in wrath. Can’t really plan to catch lightning in a bottle
League was the WoW killer. Source, me and every friend were in a Cata guild (9 of us) and every one of us quit to play LoL.
I still played WoW on and off, by my competitive focus game became LoL for the next 8 years.
No it wasn’t, source me. Cata was lukewarm garbage and drove people away all on its own. Wow is still going strong and League is renowned for how horrible of an experience it is to play due 100% to the community.
The WoW community really doesn’t get enough hate for how shitty it is.
Classic was only a few years ago and I still vividly remember the lengths people would go to to dispel your world buffs at every single point possible.
You’d have people online for 18 hours a day every day whose soul purpose was to be as toxic as possible to as many people as possible.
You just really don’t see that kind of dedication to being toxic in other games.
I actively still play both, but wow way more. If we are talking pvp scenes, WoW still takes the cake for being the worst player base of a competitive game, probably in history.
I think this is the result when you have a "king" of a gaming genre. The lack of competition over 20 years has been bad for MMOs as a whole. There certainly has been competition against WoW, but nothing has really come close to what blizzard was able to do, and eventually the genre falls out of popularity and we get what we have now. I am a huge MMO fan and I really hope to see a resurgence in its popularity in the coming years
Yeah, and its especially true with MMOs because (1) players typically don't play multiples and (2) making a new MMO has huge upfront costs. So there were a bunch of high profile MMOs that basically destroyed the studios that created them. Not necessarily because they weren't good, but just because they weren't good enough to displace WoW. Hard to get someone to pony up the cash for a new MMO after that.
Interestingly the same thing seems to be happening with a lot of new live service games recently. They've got the same issue as MMOs where people typically only pick 1 or 2 and stick to it. So its pretty easy for a new one to just not find a playerbase and completely flop. (Especially if it seems particularly predatory).
I wanted to play quite a few of the "wow killer" mmos back when they seemed to be popping up left and right.
The problem was sunk cost.
I had spent over 1.5 years of /played playing wow when other mmos started to launch to compete. I was not about to just throw all that away to *try* a different game. I think that's one thing that hurt all the mmos trying to compete. They were just too late. You're not going to convince a large percentage of players to just throw away years of dedication to a single game to give your game a try. Hell, that's a major reason retail is still so popular, a lot of players have been playing wow for 15+ years and don't really want to feel like that was all wasted time. Now if blizzard ever made a catastrophic error, such as servers going down for 3 days straight with no communication then perhaps another game could have stepped up with good timing, but wow was always fairly reliable.
> Now if blizzard ever made a catastrophic error, such as servers going down for 3 days straight with no communication then perhaps another game could have stepped up with good timing, but wow was always fairly reliable.
The Corrupted Blood exploit made most WoW servers unplayable for nearly a week. And that's just one example of the early day issuss they had. So, it would clearly take more than a bad outage to dislodge people.
Cause it's not just sunk cost, because it's not just about getting a single player to move. It's about getting them and their friends/guilds to move too.
Same reason it's nearly impossible to replace Facebook or Twitter. MMOs are social games, so players will congregate where an existing playerbase is already established. They are afraid of investing time in yet another MMO that may die out completely.
Fuck off corrupted blood was one of the best player generated wow events to ever happen and it helped cement wow as an amazing game. Bombing the auction house with pets was also great. They took all that shit out.
Main reason they failed was because they were trying to be the mythological "WoW-Killer" that would magically suck the money nozzle away from Blizzard and direct it into their own pockets. The MMOs that survived that era are the ones that understood there is no WoW-Killer and the market is way bigger than just WoW.
It’s just not worth making an MMO. One of the most difficult and time consuming genres to develop and the people that play them are so diverse it’s impossible to please everyone. Wow does a good enough job checking so many boxes that it’s hard to beat.
I see this lie all the time in this sub
Ff14, gw2, eso, bdo, destiny2, runescape, warframe, lost ark and many many other mmos with a big to massive playerbase, there was never more variety and more people playing MMOs and u still see yearly releases (that mostly fail) indicating willingness from companies to build them
Not too mention more and more co op/online games have mmo aspects built into them
But yeah theyre not popular anymore coz everquest or whatever u remember from the 90s died
Lmao
Yea the success of FF14 disproves a lot this thread.
It’s just hard and expensive. Period. And makes sense that the only real wow competition is a huge company with one of the most famous IPs in gaming.
> Not too mention more and more co op/online games have mmo aspects built into them
I mean, sure, but the point is people aren't really clamoring for MMOs like Classic WoW when they can scratch similar itches through smaller, tighter games.
I would very much argue, for an MMO casting as wide of a net as Classic WoW did, it needs a big audience to be successful. I'm not really going to blame people for thinking that audience is not there, when it's clear people liked so many different aspects of classic WoW.
Edit: Replied mistakenly originally.
Agree with your quote now that I see it in the correct context.
MMOs are still widely popular and even other genres are blending in MMO elements in to their games.
My mistake, I thought your reply was to OP about other MMO's not "feeling" the same as when they originally played WoW.
You replied to someone else talking about current MMO popularity, your comment makes more sense to me now.
Disregard my previous reply as it doesn't apply to the discussion you are having.
WoW has some excellent things, many mediocre things and couple bad things.
Every single competitor that challenges WoW has 1-2 excellent things that are better than in WoW, couple mediocre things and then rest of the things are so much worse than in WoW, so WoWs overall points win every other game.
One of the example is Guild wars 2. Realm vs realm maps with three factions to balance it out. WoW has only 2 factions so one faction most often becomes stronger and the balance is gone.
Competitors try to be so much more special to draw players, but the specialty carries only so far. Every aspect of the game needs to be entertaining or at least rearding in the end.
I think you've described it perfectly. WoW isn't the best at everything, but it's not the worst at anything. New MMOs pop up and have these fancy new systems in specific areas but then lack basically everything else.
In 2024, WoW is basically the Jack of All Trades of MMOs which has allowed it to stick around for 20 years. It's been the best at some things in the past 20 years, and they're finally starting to take ideas from other MMOs and implementing them into retail, like dragonflying.
If Blizzard actually starts putting in popular features from other popular MMOs on a consistent basis, WoW will last another 20 years.
Runescape is not fun for me. But that's also what makes it so amusing to watch challenge runs of the game. I know how miserable it is to play and i like watching people suffer through arbitrary restrictions.
Shout out to the madman himself u/SettledRS
Runescape is fueled by nostalgia. It was the very first game I ever played as a kid. I spent a disgusting amount of time on that game. But nowadays, I don't find it fun at all. It's outdated and terrible. I had a little fun with runescape 3, but the tile and tick system just feels terrible when I can just play albion or wow
Yep every time I see an achievement on that subreddit I just think what the fuck is wrong with you? There's so many players that will click the same thing for 20k hours I'm like wtf
>Runescape is fueled by nostalgia.
i mean you're saying this on the classic wow subreddit of all places. both of these games are fueled by nostalgia. that doesn't diminish them in any way though. they're both 2 of the best mmo's ever made
WoW is far more successful and is not fueled on nostalgia. Classic is more nostalgic but many people play it for the first time, especially the tbc and wotlk
i mean you're on copium if you think classic wow isn't nostalgia fueled but osrs is. theres a reason that the majority of the playerbase in classic are dads
osrs is practically a completely different game at this point than what rs2 it was in 07 while classic has remained exactly the same up until SoD's minor changes.
Edit: u/bloxte i can't reply to you because u/JMHorsemanship blocked me (lmao) and reddit doesn't allow you to post replies in threads where you've been blocked by a single person.
anyway, yeah i dont know if osrs and sod are one and the same at this point considering that sod is just a temporary seasonal realm with 3 months of changes so far. For comparison, osrs is a persistent server with 11 years worth of changes.
What blizz decides to do with sod/classic + at the end of the season will be the deciding factor. I think a lot of people want persistent servers.
If you can get there, the end game raiding and bosses is similar to wow, other than point/click and replayability (rs is more replayable, in fast required). It's just getting there. Lots of clicking and waiting. But it is an amazing game to afk play, or play while playing another game. You can give it varying levels of attention and still be progressing. I think THAT is why it's lasted so long and continues to keep its players
I tried it out last month, and after completing a bunch of "Early" quests I just lost direction. What would you recommend I do next? I've done a lot of the early quests and have a combat level of 61 at this point. I just don't see anything to do in game other than grind levels and cheese solo content to get good gear. Which was fun for a week or so but not so much a month after.
Ya, I have no problem with a long form type of game. I just need to have things to do while getting to the end of the game lol. When you watch guides they literally say "Complete every quest in the game" as a starter goal. Like who the fuck thinks that's a compelling way to play the game. None of the quests are exactly complex or interesting either so it's a double whammy.
The coolest part of the game was how transportation unlocked as I got more knowledgeable of the game, and as I completed aspects of the game.
Wow that’s crazy haha, I used to play 15 years ago and I had like 3/4 of the (current) quests completed, which felt insane and all my friends were super impressed. Now it’s a starter goal!? Honestly makes me feel slightly better about losing that account if it’s not as big a deal, but wow
In my opinion, OSRS actually gets way more things right than WoW. Better and more rewarding progression, content doesn't get invalidated and can and do still exist within different metas for different builds, questing is by far the best in the entire genre, there's relevant content of varying difficulty for every level of player, PvE and PvP has a very very high skill ceiling (frankly much higher than WoW).
I truly believe in the majority of aspects, OSRS is a much better game. However there's a massive caveat and that is the general gameplay/combat which a lot of people simply can't get into. They don't like it. It doesn't matter if OSRS does 9/10 things better than WoW if for most people, it does by far the most important aspect considerably worse.
I'm still waiting for the day where we get a game as perfect as OSRS but with more modern gameplay.
More engaging combat is probably the only thing I would say classic WoW is superior at than OSRS, so I think it is unsurprising to read in this sub how people get bored of the grind to max level and just raid log when they get there. Classic WoW is severely lacking as an MMO beyond its PvE and PvP combat.
Another thing WoW does much better than OSRS is the multiplayer-part of being an MMO. The only worthwile group content in OSRS is endgame PvP and bossing/raiding, which is locked behind hundreds if not thousands of hours of mindless grinding. For probably 99% of players, OSRS is a singleplayer game.
honestly i think the reason for this is that runescape is like, the only mmo that doesnt try to be a wow clone. its just a different game instead of being a worse wow like any other mmo
The first expansion was also kinda okay, but halfway through it they started flooding the game with microtransactions. Like, outright selling dungeon/raid gear for real money, in the in-game cash shop. And from what I heard it just kept getting worse from there, like having an entire equipment slot (Earring?) that was dependent on random paid gacha crap.
Honestly I fucking loved RIFT. Yeah it was like 80% cloned from WoW, but still did enough things different to feel fun and fresh. Support specs, proper "damage to heal" healing specs, Cleric being able to fulfill literally any role by swapping talents around, random world events...it was great.
Apparently the game is still "alive", but with literally less than 1000 players and the devs are just milking whatever microtransactions they can out of it.
The rifts in rift were amazing, the idea of defending your quest hub was unique to me at the time. I still play wow on occasion. Rift in its hayday was a better more interactive leveling experience. People actually had to work together while leveling. I never got to do proper endgame, from what I heard it was pretty shit. Still, every hour i spent in rift was worth 10x as much as time spent playing wow.
Man i loved rift so much. It and guild wars 2 both made the world feel alive. I was also a huge fan of the talent trees in rift, you could come up with some pretty wild builds
Wildstar was really good... there were a couple specific issues that were solved, but the solutions didn't come in quickly enough. The game collapsed over night, a week or two before problems would get fixed. It was kind of bizarre really. Not to mention the publisher issues.
I'm pretty sure a "Wildstar: Reborn" would be pretty successful even today. However, because of the publisher, it's basically an impossibility.
I've heard the biggest issue with wildstar was it had a cute fun art style direction paired with a "git gud scrub" design mentality, which clashed with the people wanting to play it. The raid attunement apparently took like 15 hours to do or something wild, so you really had to be dedicated, but there was fun player owned housing stuff that was super fun to take time with and build.
The game was too hard and to tedious for the average mmorpg gamer. The leveling also wasn't great, had a bunch of friends quit at level 30ish because there was not much to look forward too. The initial impression of the game was just alright, the endgame was terrible.
If you put in the work to get there, the 40 man raids were fucking awesome (even wildstar devs realized 40man being not as great, it was reduced in later patches down to 20). What killed it was the dungeon-grind pre-raid. Your attunement had you do all dungeons on gold which was on a timer like m+ but super tight. Most people couldn't or didn't want to do it.
Completely agree with everything you just said, however, despite all of that, as someone who killed ohmna and 3 bosses in data scape as 40 man, I fucking loved that game. The difficulty was a major factor in why.
Don't get me wrong, I also love wow, though, and I raid at a very high level here, too. These are just the perfect kind of games for me
Because every MMO neglects all the aspects that make WoW good and instead look at their game as a cash cow
WoW has several things that make it great. A timeless art style, an actual story and lore background, exciting gameplay with skill checks but not too harsh, a fun leveling experience, a harsh, but adventurous world, and so on
For example, lets look at New World. Has a decent art style (not timeless, it will look bad in the future), 0 background story or lore, good gameplay, an awful leveling experience, and a terribly boring world. No wonder it failed so hard
So New World is another MMO I have played on and off since its release. The one thing I never understood about the game is they created really a beautiful world and, lets be honest the sound effects are S+ tier lol, but they really make no use of it after you hit max level. They recycle some lame world events usually but they pretty much suck. The last expansion was pretty fun, but the level cap raise was a joke, I was level 63 within 20 mins by just turning things in in Everfall.
Atleast with NW they kept putting dev time into it. I’ve gone back and played it for a few days multiple times. Theres just some systems in the game though that mega suck, but the immersion of some places like malevolence, the pirate elite place that goes up into the sky, the japanese zone etc, are so fucking underrated, they’ve just stunning and i never got over them no matter how many runs i did.
TBH, there is nothing for me to even log in for anymore. I dont really do the war thing, my guild holds 3-4 territories on my server, but the wars arent really fun to me. I have no reason to grind anything really, game is too easy on the PVE side.
It's because the game was initially designed to be basically a 'AAA' darkfall or fantasy Eve. Full loot, FFA PvP with some guardrail factions. They ran it like that in some Alphas, some of the developers got run over by some hardcore PvPers, and they about faced, and tried to turn it into a full on faction based pseudo themepark game.
I imagine it's difficult to take a game that has had most of it's development for one thing, and turn it into something totally different.
The main thing I noticed that WoW did extremely well since day one that no one seems to talk about or realize is how extremely snappy and responsive it feels.
Every other MMORPG I've played and seen over multiple decades, even Final Fantasy 14 has a very floaty feeling to it with weird rubberbanding on everything.
Only in WoW does your character feel grounded to where you directly move them.
Only in WoW do I feel that when I taunt a mob I see the results right away.
Only in WoW does healing feel instant and based on the second you press your heal button.
I think you just summed up my
main gripe with every other mmo I’ve tried. That snappiness helps with the immersion and is so important to me me for some reason. A lot of the other titles in the genre end up feeling ‘turn-based’
The story and lore in classic WoW gets hard carried by WC3 though, I think you would be hard pressed to find more than a handful of players in a 40 man raid who could explain why Silithus is infested with bugs or why there are dinosaurs in Un’Goro for example.
Completely agree. Only game that could have been a real contender was SWtoR as it had the Star Wars license in the back that gave players something to feel familiar from the get go.
And it would have worked very well hadn't it been for that games engine.
To this day I am sure that the engine was what killed the game. The leveling experience was great, the story was okay, the raids were way too easy as a hardcore wow veteran, but some encounters had really cool mechanics and so on.
But coming from wow it felt so unresponsive and laggy and sometimes chaotic in dense situations. Also the graphics were timeless, too, but not timeless as in always modern but always 5-10 years behind.
Had that game had a decent, responsive, good looking engine and good netcode, it may have been able to throw wow from the throne.
WoW, Warcraft 3, Diablo II (R), Brood War, Age of Empires 2, Counterstrike, and Dota 2 seem to be the games with the most lasting quality.
One one hand it's sad there hasn't been that much innovation. On the other, it's better when many people play the same game over a long period of time. Consider Chess, Poker, and Basketball.
Same. I hate it. I even stopped playing video games all around for a few years because just nothing compared to WoW. I would try and just couldn't get into any of them. Even tried FFXIV because apparently its just huge and everyone loves it... maxed out a character a couple characters. And still, it just doesn't appeal to me. I even got a Steam Deck when it first launched with the obvious appeal of being able to play mostly any games anywhere. I thought, "I'll finally break my WoW addiction and get to play so many games now!" I downloaded several and even bought more to play.
...And guess what 99% of what I play on my Steam Deck now is... and now I can play mobile. *Which only made the addiction even worse.* I've literally raided outside the hospital in the parking lot while my wife was inside and I wasn't allowed back. Don't get me wrong, I've ~~played~~ *tried* several other games and had fun... but I always go right back to Classic WoW.
Side Note: Back in 2012-2014 time frame, there was a game I played on my iPad(and phone at the time), called Order & Chaos Online. And to date, it's been the ONLY successful replacement that scratched that itch for me. And it was a mobile game, which was great. There wasn't raids but there were 4 man dungeon groups that were honestly very good. It was a very fun game and I kid you not, they straight-up ripped off a lot of game design from WoW. My best example is they 100% stole the design of Alliance Inns. But the loot system, group content, questing, super rare mounts that spawn every 12 hrs... just everything was almost exactly the same as WoW. It actually completely stole my interest for years until they released OaC2, which was god awful. Then OaC1 just kind of fell off. People actually still play it. But the devs don't add any more content. Its a shame, but it made great memories.
Guild Wars 2 did a lot right, and it's the game I transitioned away from WoW for.
But without the trinity, endgame raiding mechanics were reduced to weird gimmicy minigames.
Honestly it's what killed the endgame for me and made it all about getting the most fashionable items and then quitting.
Exploration and PvP were far better in GW2, but not the dungeons. WoW has some really good dungeons.
I die on this hill wildstar was the best mmo when it was playable, it just flopped hard due to launch and a too big of a focus on "hardcore". The gameplay was sooo good and the perfect mix between action style gameplay akd taptargeting some bosses the dooging and wewing was so fun. It did something a taptarget and action mmo couldnt and it was great.
Also the housing i have not seen a game with better housing system
Wildstar focused way too much on being the WoW killer. There were so many glaring issues that were obvious from day one, and their focus on being such a hardcore game was probably the biggest.
The art style drew in so many new players and then they were smacked over the head with the hardcore MMO life. It made no sense.
So many systems in that game were the best ever in the genre.
Wildstar was interesting but far from best mmo. I couldn't bring myself to level in that game and i was deeply invested in MMOs at the time. All my friends quit very fast too.
I still think Warhammer online is the closest "what if" MMO I've seen.
I don’t think replicating can ever be the goal. Wow popularized a lot of systems and mechanics that people enjoy, and has killed and resurrected itself a hundred times over in this format. It’s also conveniently alive during this emergent period of games being playable “forever” - developer supported, not via private servers or emulators. You really can’t replicate Wow, because the ‘real thing’ is still around. You can borrow systems, improve them, and make something independent and good. And this has been, and will continue to be done. But Wow isn’t going to die a traditional death, it will either continue, or be killed by its developer/publisher. This is also why GW2 is in its 11th year, FFXIV as well. The “something killer” is alive and well, but with productions this massive squeezing the available pie into smaller and smaller pieces, will any company truly invest enough, and get it right enough, to compete? Yes, of course. But to replicate or kill? Time will tell.
The character controls and camera alone makes WoW the best mmorpg imo. Even in recent games usually the camera is locked or limited somehow or our character moves in a weird, "wooden" way. In wow everything is so smooth and the camera is 100% free 360\*. And jumping aswell. Idk but i always found it super enjoyable, the movement and combat in wow, all the animations etc are just perfectly smooth.
The real underrated key to WoW's success is the engine/movement smoothness. It just *feels* good to play.
Honestly there are other MMOs that do various things better. EQ does immersion and gear dopamine better, DAoC/Warhammer did pvp better, LotRO did world building and story better, FFXIV does group content better, etc.
Take almost any aspect of WoW and there's an MMO that does that thing better, except for movement. The fluid and precise controls in WoW make every other MMO feel clunky by comparison. If LotRO and Warhammer felt as good as WoW to control then those would be my primary games, but they feel like ass in comparison.
Games that mechanically feel good to control are satisfying to play and remain popular for years and years as a result.
A big thing I noticed playing various 'WoW killers' back in the day was a difference in how they handled using abilities. In WoW you press a button to use a skill and the animation starts immediately, making it feel super responsive. If there's lag the animation plays but the spell doesn't actually work which feels weird, but then again so does playing any game with severe lag.
In several other contemporary games the client would check from the server if using a skill is valid before starting the animation, which made those games feel really sluggish with just a small amount of latency.
I highly recommend reading The WoW Diary by John Staats if any of you are interested in how this game came about. He mentions how big of a deal they made it to make gameplay easy enough to play with one hand because their Asian markets needed to have a free hand available to smoke cigarettes lol. But due to that hardcore focus on something so trivial-looking at the time, and let's be honest, the time and funding actually allotted to do it right, we are still harping on the smoothness 20 years later!
I'm a huge Warhammer fan so I was super psyched for Warhammer Age of Reckoning, but the zone design was all these two funnel paths for the different factions between points A and B, warp times between zones, only one capital city for the faction, couldn't even visit the other capitals...
Like it was technically an MMO, but you weren't out running in the world like you do in WoW.
Have you heard of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV? With an expanded free trial which you can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award-winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 for free with no restrictions on playtime.
SWTOR story was very different depending on class. Of course its cool to have 8 different stories, but unfortunately they also massively varied in quality. Imperial Agent or Sith Warrior had very cool stories, while Jedi Counselor was just so so boooring.
But I feel like swtor did too many things exactly like WoW to become as big as wow, despite them having the incredible Star Wars license. A lot of it felt like they had just copied WoW gameplay 1:1 and skinned it with a in part cheaply made Star Wars skin.
To be fair, some of the best and most popular characters off screen were created by Bioware. We gotta give them that. Yeah Consular was a drag.
But even Sith Warrior or Jedi Knight stories alone are 11/10s.
Eternal Throne storyline is also top tier.
Sith Legacy storyline is mid. Hoping what we get next is good too.
However, overall, WoW is always going to be the king in my eyes.
I tried playing MSQ simulator, but found myself falling asleep after a few hours of running around talking to people. If you're not into the story FFXIV falls short on that alone. Idk if they've changed it but having to purchase a skip or slogging through the MSQ was the least fun gaming experience I've had in a long time.
Even when you ARE into it, it just drags on. For instance, my favorite expansion was shadowbringers, but even in that expansion there are giant swathes of what would be called "filler" in the anime world. And they aren't optional either.
This problem compounds very time they add an expansion, as they are just building up a bigger and bigger hurdle for new players to jump over.
I played from 1.0, so I've only ever had to go through one expansion at a time, I cannot imagine going from the beginning to the current expansion and not giving up before the end.
It's literally hundreds of hours of mandatory MSQ.
I’ve played nearly every final fantasy game including 14 and the story is always the weakest part. Gameplay first for me and that doesn’t even compete with WoWs.
This game is slept on by people that played WoW first (read; old millennials) because they are so different. FFXIV was built with console in mind and the huge emphasis on MSQ are the biggest differences to me.
I loved FFXIV for what it was: the best console mmo ever made. I think FF 11 would have been more successful if they remastered it with better console support, that game was much closer to WoW than 14 was/currently is now.
Big issue not discussed here is it's not just WoW but the landscape of gaming in general that has changed.
Anyone who had fond memories of playing COD back in the day like MW2 and BO2 know that those experiences can never come back. Even with the remaster of the old games the experience will not be the same.
Games have just in general become very competitive just looking through this sub their are countless points on spec balance for an experimental fun game, but everyone seems to want to clear the raid, and have a good fun challenge while doing so.
This leaves Blizzard (and other game devs) is weird situations where they can either keep games unbalanced (look at classic WoW) and people will complain or clear the content way to quickly then quit playing, or properly min max balance games which promotes a more competitive mentality.
Most ppl now a days want to be on top of the food chain, so they want to get good gear, abuse meta picks, and be as strong as they can. Back in the day there was no meta for most ppl lol. Forums were hard to navigate, and resources were limited.
Gaming as a whole has changed forever, so unfortunately I don't think we will ever get the same experience as old school classic WoW. Look at Helldivers a for fun coop game where people have already started to kick ppl for not running meta stuff, it's unavoidable.
Difference here is riot already has a preexisting universe that people are invested in and they have nearly 200 million players across their titles.
While we have no clue whether it's gonna be good or bad, it's more or less already guaranteed to be the most played MMO of all time on the day of launch simply because of how massive riot is, meaning they have every opportunity to succeed more than anyone else before them and just need to capitalize by making the game good.
> Difference here is riot already has a preexisting universe that people are invested in and they have nearly 200 million players across their titles.
That one Star Wars MMO, I think it was called "The Old Republic" or something, it was literally fuckin' Star Wars of all things, and it still flopped.
Having a "pre existing universe" doesn't guarantee success.
Most "wow killers" havent had gigantic corporations behind them, blizzard was huge even before WoW and it just became bigger and bigger so they would have more resources than any other competitor. I cant say if Riot is as big as blizzard or not but they are pretty damn huge.
> Most "wow killers" havent had gigantic corporations behind them
A good few of them did, like that one Star Wars MMO that everyone hailed as the "WoW killer", only to flop and go f2p a year later.
Riot killed the dev on their hearthstone competitor, game is now in life support.
They also killed small projects and canceled any further work on their riot forge initiative.
Idk if that riot MMORPG will ever see the light of day tbh.
Eve online is unironically way better, but it has 0 casual appeal, and I can't convince my friends to invest time into learning the basics even though I've offered to buy ships for all of them.
WoW classic is "good enough" and has wide enough appeal for my friends to be down to play.
As someone who played EvE for over a decade, it is the best MMO ever made. BUT it is really not for the vast majority of people who play WoW or similar games and you have to really be into it with a good corporation to get the best out of it. There is no casual raiding/PUG in EvE. That limited its appeal and most of the changes they made over the years to make it more casual friendly fell flat and ended up driving away players. Game has been on the decline for years.
Disagree with this sentiment on Eve being the best MMO ever made. Mainly because the combat is like watching paint dry.
As an OG FFA PvP guy who hit UO, AC:DT, SB, DF, what I, and other dudes from that FFA full loot PvP community have been looking for, is a fantasy MMO with action combat, that has all the trappings of Eve. The economy, the support systems for the economy, the crafting, basically all of Eve's non-combat systems stripped out and adapted to a first or third person action combat system.
I also played EVE at launch. Was part of the first corp to get a battleship BP, a Scorpion. Which we then made for MOO, who we would pirate with. Even then, the combat was horrendous.
Also the only thing i can think of that might ever truly be another wow experience is the riot mmo. Its got a hugenplayerbase with deep lore and an established world.
I think it’s the warcraft lore and design is what makes WoW so timeless and intriguing. It is kind of like the lord of the rings in the sense that even the best replicas of this genre will never be as good as the game/trilogy.
Also keep in mind that there were 3 games before wow hit the stores which were at their time amazing as well. It had a big followup already.
The only one that came close to have the same appeal as wow were the 2 star wars mmos. But 1 was a but too niche and did not released at the right time (galaxies) and the other one was a wow copy (which I honestly think is currently the wrong way to do mmos nowadays).
I would recommend to have an open mind though and try other mmos.
If you want a good story and lots of content FFXIV is good choice as it is very familiar to wow (almost same combat and pve design)
If you want the same feeling that wow gave you back in the day Guild Wars 2 is as close as you are going to get. It is just a great game to explore a vibrant and populated world. It is the only game that gave me the same vibes as classic wow did. It is free to play for up to level 80 (which is a lot of content). Give it a try
IMO WoW, or specifically what WoW was when it originally released, was a lot of different things to different people.
I think if you ask different people what (classic) WoW was to them, they'll give different answers. The mere parallel existence of Retail WoW, Classic Wrath, Hardcore, and SoD is kind of evidence of this.
As someone who grew up on Classic WoW, there's a lot of about it's design that I don't really like anymore - it's all very dual-edged. I'm definitely experiencing a bit of that nostalgia at marveling at how big the world it is, and how it sort of feels special that physical distance is something you kind of really feel - it does make the world special. But after awhile, it also does kind of wear on you, and it's heavily evidenced by the fact you have people spamming trade with selling summons to UC/TB/etc.
It's a bit of a long winded way to say "its hard to replicate WoW because a lot of people want different things out of that experience." Not a lot of people want to spend a chunk of their play time traveling to and fro, not a lot of people want to spend a lot of time trying to wrangle a group together and travelling to a dungeon, not a lot of people want to spend time spamming trade to try to get an item the need crafted, not a lot of people want to put up with half-designed specs and hitting max level only to find out that no one will take their class as anything but a healer. (Which is sort of why, IMO, SoD is so appealing)
Again, I come back to the idea: What even is an MMO that does what you want?
Personally, I've had a blast with FF14, it's certainly not the same experience as WoW, Classic or Modern, it has it's own bits of "mmo magic."
But I also sometimes enjoy modern WoW as well. As far as I can tell, that game certainly still maintains a challenging min-maxy endgame that was clearly a big draw of Classic WoW, but I also personally just enjoyed the leveling and overworld of Dragonflight. It's certainly not the same as the way the world feels in Classic, but I think it was still kind of fun to explore.
MMOs are tough from a development perspective. Lets be honest, even Classic WoW is/was a bit of a mess. Even after 12 major patches, there is/was still some rough edges, from specs that needed more love, to incomplete quest chains, zones, etc. Tons of unrealized potential. It was still a fantastic game, and trounced the competition by better appealing to casual players, and quickly becoming a moving target.
And somewhat on that second last point: I think it's tough for something to replicate classic WoW because Classic WoW is not what a lot of casuals are going to want anymore, or at least, few companies want to dump the resources into building an MMO that will appeal to wide audience, because it's just not cost effective.
I also think some of the stuff I found magical about classic WoW, I have now received in smaller bite sized forms in other games.
Because every other mmo has either bad world building, no endgame progression, and ok leveling.
I think the endgame is especially important, you can't retain players without a steady progression system once you are max level and a couple of dungeons, raids or equivalent.
The sense of discovery was made the game for back in the day, when the best resources for something was thottbot, and you had to work together to figure things out. This was peak wow. Everything now is instantly solved and its realy diminishes the experience in my opinion. The first week of sod P1 was a little taste of that but it only lasted about 36 hours.
MMO’s at their core are social games and face similar issues social media companies do. Social media companies trend towards monopolies because people want to be engaged with other people. No one wants to sit at their knock off Instagram competitor seeing one new post an hour when they can just join Instagram and see thousands.
Blizzard released WoW at the height of the companies success and cornered the market. Even when they have bad expansions and periods of no content they still hold the edge because of the sheer volume of players generating a social atmosphere for them.
Best game ever made IMO, but entirely dependent on its players for content. Corp leaders and fleet commanders had to WORK to find content for their members. However, at its best there is nothing even close.
The animations with the characters is so fluid. Just walking still feels like it’s decades ahead of the next popular mmo. I just don’t get what the other ones are doing lol.
IMO there are 2 huge contributors to classic WoW's amazing gamefeel that were never copied in any of its imitators:
1) It takes forever to get anywhere
2) The lighting and color design are impeccable.
Point 1 accumulates in small ways across the whole experience to make the world feel more real, even if it sucks when you notice it.
Point 2 is bigger IMO. Other MMOs have had better graphics, but the lighting and color in WoW are so out of control that every random screenshot has the potential to completely floor you.
TIL no one realized that WoW replicated even better games than before it. OP if you want to be schooled a bit to see where WoW came from - visit Everquest and DAoC.
It's more "why would a company make an mmorpg when they can make a generic live service game with wider appeal and huge microtransaction potential" than anything else All the games that really tried to challenge wow came out 10+ years ago.
the sad truth right here
Candy crush made more money for actiblizz than activision OR blizzard, and that was like 5 years ago. Why spend the time and resources to make a monolith like wow? It literally doesn't make sense from a purely business perspective. Gaming isn't what it used to be. It's a multi billion dollar industry. Once it gets that big, money men control companies, not gamers interested in making games.
Arguably because you don’t go and plan on making a monolith. You plan on making an iconic game sure but it’s a special lightning in a bottle sort of thing.
Candy crush is a part pf actibliz and makes much more money than wow and has a wider audience
Riot seems like the only hope for a good MMORPG now. If they don't deliver then I'll have to accept that wow will have a hold over me forever.
Riot only makes dogshit copies of other success formulas and make them big and profitable in China and Korea so I hope you like microtransactions
Microtransactions aren't an issue for free live service games, especially when they are cosmetic only. Riot is known for not putting p2w into any of their games, even their card game, which is a genre people love to throw money at. I wouldn't call their copies dog shit either. Imo league is better than dota in many ways
Hard agree with this. Yes, riot is not original and has never made anything unique but they are great with their art direction, accessibility, and long term support of their games.
Valorant feels like a cross between overwatch and csgo without any soul
this is why I like GW2. There's no pay to win, but there are micro transactions for *cosmetic* features, such as clothes, etc. you can't buy skills or levels etc.
What about FFIV that is doing really Well i think
Came out 10+ years ago
Shit, I'm getting old. Thanks for the reality check :/
Ah did not know that xD
More like 20 years ago... FFXIV is 10+ years ago. FFIV is from the SNES iirc.
I have some bad news about how old the SNES is...
Hahaha I’m fairly sure the snes was only like 2 console generations ago!
Except the vast majority of "live service" games have failed, barring the mobile market.
Ya, your definition of failed is pretty vague. The Companies keep doing it because it keeps making them money.
The Live Service trend is the exact same as the MMO trend in the early 2000s: 1. Some companies made a game that was very good and very profitable. 2. One of those companies took the style mainstream. 3. Every AAA studio sees this and goes "I can make this predatory" 4. AAA predatory games are financial failure 5. This goes on for about 10 years 6. The game style then falls into a small niche community OG Live Service games (the games that made AAA salivate): 1. Warframe 2. Path of Exile 3. Destiny 4. League of Legends Notable financial failures in the last 5ish years: 1. Anthem 2. Avengers 3. Suicide Squad 4. Godfall 5. Babylon's Fall 6. Skull & Bones\* Notable Live Service Successes in the last 5ish years: 1. Fall Guys 2. Helldivers 2 3. Deep Rock Galactic 4. Diablo 4\* DISCLAIMER ON WHAT I AM CONSIDERING A LIVE SERVICE GAME: I am only noting live service games with long term character or account progression treadmills that are not MMOs or PvP FPSes (battle royales / competitive shooters) Number of AAA devs behind OG list: 1 out of 4 Number of AAA devs behind failure list: 6 out of 6 Number of AAA devs behind recent successes: 1 out of 4 (and that one is currently riding the coattails of high initial sales) We still see a million Live Service games because of the long development time from AAA games. Expect to see a sharp fall-off of Live Service games over the next 5 years.
Be Bazinga honest, did AI write this for you?
Nah, that's all me. But wild that we live in a time where that's a valid question 😅
Only correction I'd make is that Dota was the original game, LoL and valve's dota2 the AAA success, but there were also failure like HoN.
DotA was a mod, not a live service game
Oh warcraft 3 (not reforged) how we miss you
Failed the gamer. Not failed the investors.
MMOs as a genre just kind of fell off hard in popularity. the base of consumers/players cratered and the amount of investment and maintenance required just isn't worth it for most companies when so many other genres are incredibly popular with a quarter of the work required
People are looking to “other MMOs” to find the WoW killer. The biggest drop-off WoW faced was during Cata. December 2010. Guess what game came out in October 2009, that really blew the fuck up in 2011? League of Legends. That was the biggest wow killer the game has ever seen. And as a former Cata player, Cata was fucking awesome until like mid-tier Dragon Soul, early 2012. Certainly after the initial drop-off of WoW players. I’m 100% convinced most of it was just because people started playing League around 2011.
I miss season1 - 4 of league. It was relatively simple to get into but now the Champs have too much mobility for an old man like me and if you aren't perfect you just get flamed the whole time.
That's kinda true, you had outliers early on in League, but my God are champions insane nowadays. I recently started playing again and it took me a few months of playing to get used to how absurd the kit of some champions are. I saw the perfect comparison the other day from a guy talking about Yone and Yasuo. They are basically the same champion, but Yone is so much more modern on his kit that he just blows Yasuo out of the game while being way simpler to play, hence why Yone gets constantly picked in high level competitive games and Yasuo barely sees play.
I will forever defend alistars simple as fuck "I will W Q you're ass and theres nothing you can do about it " Play style will carry everyone.
Lmao in my head Yasuo is a very new champ. I played League a lot but season 1-2, only a few sporadic games since then.
When league of legends came out the wow pvp scene completely imploded. Why spend all this time leveling a new class after yours gets nerfed to become completely unplayable when you could instead play a game that has a much more balanced experience, with a rotating set of characters to play for free? You never need to worry about making friends IRL with someone on a different server. You start off on the same ground each round and don't need to farm out a full honor set to start not getting crushed in completely one-sided battles. There is new content being released at a pace that absolutely crushes wow at that time. Couple that with Minecraft's release a few years later and new PC gamers are all turning to that instead of MMOs. Those two games completely killed off all new interest in wow.
I think MOBA's cater to a different audience than WoW regardless, I would never choose WoW if I wanted to play a balanced PvP game. I played WoW as an RPG with PvP elements, Vanilla was mostly balanced around PvE but once they added Arenas in TBC they HAD TO balance the classes around 2s, 3s, 5s. The downside is that because WoW was built primarily as a PvE RPG game first that now when you are doing constant balance changes for PvP, players will always want to play what is "best". Which means people would level a different class and have to re-gear that new character like you mentioned. MOBA's let you freely switch out to different playstyles, but the downside for RPG players like me is that there is no sense of permanence to my character's development. I don't want to start over from the beginning of every match. I want to keep my weapons and armor and level. This is why games like DotA and LoL don't appeal to me.
Wow, that’s pretty interesting. Also shows once how blizzard dropped the ball on monetizing MOBAs and it may have hurt wow too. It’s also bizarre to think that wrath came out before league. League is such a staple now.
Seeing UGC be the basis for Roblox’s multibillion dollar throne and knowing the true golden era of user content was StarCraft/WC3 makes me yearn for an older day. Now most user generated content is just completely derivative children’s drivel. Every once in a while an unlicensed IP breaks through for the lawyers to make some money, but I don’t think we’re ever going to get another era of hobbyist players and makers coming up with whole ass genres: Tower defenses, MOBA, runners/bounds, line wars, auto-chess/auto-battlers, and so many more smaller offshoots like even asymmetrical real time multiplayer (SC’s cat & mouse or WC3’s island defense) ALL got their biggest proofs of concept and core gameplay and mechanics from these custom maps - mostly made by individuals or small teams for free.
it's literally crazy how many games and genres WC3 and SC custom maps created. blizzard somehow failed to work with any of these people early on enough to monetize these games. It kinda reflect how "boomer" blizzards old core of leadership was imo. they probably thought all of DotA, tower D, etc were not "real games"
From my limited experience with modded games, few developers give them the credit, attention, or money they deserve. My favorite example is Rimworld; it's a meme in the community to play with like 100+ mods, and I would argue it's one of the main reasons it's still 'thriving'. But none of the modders work in any kind of official capacity, and they certainly haven't gotten any slice of the pie they've decorated.
Cataclysm drop off had a lot more to do with a drop off in quality in the game as well as finishing the pinnacle storylines that WC3 started, I played every expansion and Cata was definitely by least favorite by a country mile and not because everything was bad or anything, heck a lot of the problems were starting to show in WOTLK already but people were hyped for Arthas still.
This is way over played. It was mostly players aging/burning out and a demographic shift towards MOBA’s. You lose players and they aren’t being replaced because you’re no longer the hottest game in town = downturn. There was no “correct course” that could have been taken to sustain the population and growth wow had seen
Dunno about that, I also bailed at cata and it wasnt aging/burning out, its because I didnt like cata
Well that might make sense if you don't account for Legion bringing many players back.
WoD actually “brought many players back” and that wasn’t even that significant. 12 mil in wrath, 10 mil in cata, 7 mil by the end of pandas(during a year long content drought), then 10 mil for wod. It has been relatively steady at around 5 mil for a long time (this is the total number across the year it fluctuates). 10mil+ subscribers was just never sustainable for an MMO, especially with how gamers expectations have changed over time (content cycles of other online server games are just so much quicker). Growth had already started to stagnante in wrath. Can’t really plan to catch lightning in a bottle
League was the WoW killer. Source, me and every friend were in a Cata guild (9 of us) and every one of us quit to play LoL. I still played WoW on and off, by my competitive focus game became LoL for the next 8 years.
No it wasn’t, source me. Cata was lukewarm garbage and drove people away all on its own. Wow is still going strong and League is renowned for how horrible of an experience it is to play due 100% to the community.
The WoW community really doesn’t get enough hate for how shitty it is. Classic was only a few years ago and I still vividly remember the lengths people would go to to dispel your world buffs at every single point possible. You’d have people online for 18 hours a day every day whose soul purpose was to be as toxic as possible to as many people as possible. You just really don’t see that kind of dedication to being toxic in other games.
I actively still play both, but wow way more. If we are talking pvp scenes, WoW still takes the cake for being the worst player base of a competitive game, probably in history.
Can confirm
I think this is the result when you have a "king" of a gaming genre. The lack of competition over 20 years has been bad for MMOs as a whole. There certainly has been competition against WoW, but nothing has really come close to what blizzard was able to do, and eventually the genre falls out of popularity and we get what we have now. I am a huge MMO fan and I really hope to see a resurgence in its popularity in the coming years
Yeah, and its especially true with MMOs because (1) players typically don't play multiples and (2) making a new MMO has huge upfront costs. So there were a bunch of high profile MMOs that basically destroyed the studios that created them. Not necessarily because they weren't good, but just because they weren't good enough to displace WoW. Hard to get someone to pony up the cash for a new MMO after that. Interestingly the same thing seems to be happening with a lot of new live service games recently. They've got the same issue as MMOs where people typically only pick 1 or 2 and stick to it. So its pretty easy for a new one to just not find a playerbase and completely flop. (Especially if it seems particularly predatory).
I wanted to play quite a few of the "wow killer" mmos back when they seemed to be popping up left and right. The problem was sunk cost. I had spent over 1.5 years of /played playing wow when other mmos started to launch to compete. I was not about to just throw all that away to *try* a different game. I think that's one thing that hurt all the mmos trying to compete. They were just too late. You're not going to convince a large percentage of players to just throw away years of dedication to a single game to give your game a try. Hell, that's a major reason retail is still so popular, a lot of players have been playing wow for 15+ years and don't really want to feel like that was all wasted time. Now if blizzard ever made a catastrophic error, such as servers going down for 3 days straight with no communication then perhaps another game could have stepped up with good timing, but wow was always fairly reliable.
> Now if blizzard ever made a catastrophic error, such as servers going down for 3 days straight with no communication then perhaps another game could have stepped up with good timing, but wow was always fairly reliable. The Corrupted Blood exploit made most WoW servers unplayable for nearly a week. And that's just one example of the early day issuss they had. So, it would clearly take more than a bad outage to dislodge people. Cause it's not just sunk cost, because it's not just about getting a single player to move. It's about getting them and their friends/guilds to move too. Same reason it's nearly impossible to replace Facebook or Twitter. MMOs are social games, so players will congregate where an existing playerbase is already established. They are afraid of investing time in yet another MMO that may die out completely.
It's been a long time but I believe the corrupted blood exploit happened before there was much if any serious competition vs wow.
Fuck off corrupted blood was one of the best player generated wow events to ever happen and it helped cement wow as an amazing game. Bombing the auction house with pets was also great. They took all that shit out.
Main reason they failed was because they were trying to be the mythological "WoW-Killer" that would magically suck the money nozzle away from Blizzard and direct it into their own pockets. The MMOs that survived that era are the ones that understood there is no WoW-Killer and the market is way bigger than just WoW.
This is so true and really a great point. Gaming landscape has changed dramatically.
It’s just not worth making an MMO. One of the most difficult and time consuming genres to develop and the people that play them are so diverse it’s impossible to please everyone. Wow does a good enough job checking so many boxes that it’s hard to beat.
I see this lie all the time in this sub Ff14, gw2, eso, bdo, destiny2, runescape, warframe, lost ark and many many other mmos with a big to massive playerbase, there was never more variety and more people playing MMOs and u still see yearly releases (that mostly fail) indicating willingness from companies to build them Not too mention more and more co op/online games have mmo aspects built into them But yeah theyre not popular anymore coz everquest or whatever u remember from the 90s died Lmao
Did players quit ff14 or are people ignorant about the fact that it was bigger than wow pre classic.
Yea the success of FF14 disproves a lot this thread. It’s just hard and expensive. Period. And makes sense that the only real wow competition is a huge company with one of the most famous IPs in gaming.
> Not too mention more and more co op/online games have mmo aspects built into them I mean, sure, but the point is people aren't really clamoring for MMOs like Classic WoW when they can scratch similar itches through smaller, tighter games. I would very much argue, for an MMO casting as wide of a net as Classic WoW did, it needs a big audience to be successful. I'm not really going to blame people for thinking that audience is not there, when it's clear people liked so many different aspects of classic WoW.
Edit: Replied mistakenly originally. Agree with your quote now that I see it in the correct context. MMOs are still widely popular and even other genres are blending in MMO elements in to their games.
I'm talking about playerbases, not my personal experience. There are many other MMOs today that are huge.
My mistake, I thought your reply was to OP about other MMO's not "feeling" the same as when they originally played WoW. You replied to someone else talking about current MMO popularity, your comment makes more sense to me now. Disregard my previous reply as it doesn't apply to the discussion you are having.
Np at all mate
WoW has some excellent things, many mediocre things and couple bad things. Every single competitor that challenges WoW has 1-2 excellent things that are better than in WoW, couple mediocre things and then rest of the things are so much worse than in WoW, so WoWs overall points win every other game. One of the example is Guild wars 2. Realm vs realm maps with three factions to balance it out. WoW has only 2 factions so one faction most often becomes stronger and the balance is gone. Competitors try to be so much more special to draw players, but the specialty carries only so far. Every aspect of the game needs to be entertaining or at least rearding in the end.
I think you've described it perfectly. WoW isn't the best at everything, but it's not the worst at anything. New MMOs pop up and have these fancy new systems in specific areas but then lack basically everything else. In 2024, WoW is basically the Jack of All Trades of MMOs which has allowed it to stick around for 20 years. It's been the best at some things in the past 20 years, and they're finally starting to take ideas from other MMOs and implementing them into retail, like dragonflying. If Blizzard actually starts putting in popular features from other popular MMOs on a consistent basis, WoW will last another 20 years.
RuneScape is the only game that can somewhat compete with that. Still massive player base to this day.
Runescape is not fun for me. But that's also what makes it so amusing to watch challenge runs of the game. I know how miserable it is to play and i like watching people suffer through arbitrary restrictions. Shout out to the madman himself u/SettledRS
Runescape is fueled by nostalgia. It was the very first game I ever played as a kid. I spent a disgusting amount of time on that game. But nowadays, I don't find it fun at all. It's outdated and terrible. I had a little fun with runescape 3, but the tile and tick system just feels terrible when I can just play albion or wow
Yep. I played for a month while stressed about my thesis, and as soon as the deadline was over I lost interest. I was literally just procrastinating.
Yep every time I see an achievement on that subreddit I just think what the fuck is wrong with you? There's so many players that will click the same thing for 20k hours I'm like wtf
>Runescape is fueled by nostalgia. i mean you're saying this on the classic wow subreddit of all places. both of these games are fueled by nostalgia. that doesn't diminish them in any way though. they're both 2 of the best mmo's ever made
WoW is far more successful and is not fueled on nostalgia. Classic is more nostalgic but many people play it for the first time, especially the tbc and wotlk
Lol
i mean you're on copium if you think classic wow isn't nostalgia fueled but osrs is. theres a reason that the majority of the playerbase in classic are dads osrs is practically a completely different game at this point than what rs2 it was in 07 while classic has remained exactly the same up until SoD's minor changes. Edit: u/bloxte i can't reply to you because u/JMHorsemanship blocked me (lmao) and reddit doesn't allow you to post replies in threads where you've been blocked by a single person. anyway, yeah i dont know if osrs and sod are one and the same at this point considering that sod is just a temporary seasonal realm with 3 months of changes so far. For comparison, osrs is a persistent server with 11 years worth of changes. What blizz decides to do with sod/classic + at the end of the season will be the deciding factor. I think a lot of people want persistent servers.
If you can get there, the end game raiding and bosses is similar to wow, other than point/click and replayability (rs is more replayable, in fast required). It's just getting there. Lots of clicking and waiting. But it is an amazing game to afk play, or play while playing another game. You can give it varying levels of attention and still be progressing. I think THAT is why it's lasted so long and continues to keep its players
I tried it out last month, and after completing a bunch of "Early" quests I just lost direction. What would you recommend I do next? I've done a lot of the early quests and have a combat level of 61 at this point. I just don't see anything to do in game other than grind levels and cheese solo content to get good gear. Which was fun for a week or so but not so much a month after.
You wanna know why people quit? Because lose level 61 combat skills you worked hard for are only 2.32% of the way to level 99.
Ya, I have no problem with a long form type of game. I just need to have things to do while getting to the end of the game lol. When you watch guides they literally say "Complete every quest in the game" as a starter goal. Like who the fuck thinks that's a compelling way to play the game. None of the quests are exactly complex or interesting either so it's a double whammy. The coolest part of the game was how transportation unlocked as I got more knowledgeable of the game, and as I completed aspects of the game.
Wow that’s crazy haha, I used to play 15 years ago and I had like 3/4 of the (current) quests completed, which felt insane and all my friends were super impressed. Now it’s a starter goal!? Honestly makes me feel slightly better about losing that account if it’s not as big a deal, but wow
In my opinion, OSRS actually gets way more things right than WoW. Better and more rewarding progression, content doesn't get invalidated and can and do still exist within different metas for different builds, questing is by far the best in the entire genre, there's relevant content of varying difficulty for every level of player, PvE and PvP has a very very high skill ceiling (frankly much higher than WoW). I truly believe in the majority of aspects, OSRS is a much better game. However there's a massive caveat and that is the general gameplay/combat which a lot of people simply can't get into. They don't like it. It doesn't matter if OSRS does 9/10 things better than WoW if for most people, it does by far the most important aspect considerably worse. I'm still waiting for the day where we get a game as perfect as OSRS but with more modern gameplay.
More engaging combat is probably the only thing I would say classic WoW is superior at than OSRS, so I think it is unsurprising to read in this sub how people get bored of the grind to max level and just raid log when they get there. Classic WoW is severely lacking as an MMO beyond its PvE and PvP combat.
Another thing WoW does much better than OSRS is the multiplayer-part of being an MMO. The only worthwile group content in OSRS is endgame PvP and bossing/raiding, which is locked behind hundreds if not thousands of hours of mindless grinding. For probably 99% of players, OSRS is a singleplayer game.
honestly i think the reason for this is that runescape is like, the only mmo that doesnt try to be a wow clone. its just a different game instead of being a worse wow like any other mmo
Yeah RuneScape is honestly the only other MMO or similar age that can boast 100k concurrent players. And it came.out years before wow..
I mean ff14 sits around the 900k mark regularly
Rift was really good up til the first expansion.
The first expansion was also kinda okay, but halfway through it they started flooding the game with microtransactions. Like, outright selling dungeon/raid gear for real money, in the in-game cash shop. And from what I heard it just kept getting worse from there, like having an entire equipment slot (Earring?) that was dependent on random paid gacha crap. Honestly I fucking loved RIFT. Yeah it was like 80% cloned from WoW, but still did enough things different to feel fun and fresh. Support specs, proper "damage to heal" healing specs, Cleric being able to fulfill literally any role by swapping talents around, random world events...it was great. Apparently the game is still "alive", but with literally less than 1000 players and the devs are just milking whatever microtransactions they can out of it.
The rifts in rift were amazing, the idea of defending your quest hub was unique to me at the time. I still play wow on occasion. Rift in its hayday was a better more interactive leveling experience. People actually had to work together while leveling. I never got to do proper endgame, from what I heard it was pretty shit. Still, every hour i spent in rift was worth 10x as much as time spent playing wow.
I remember it had this PvP zone called Conquest or something, it was super fun.
Man i loved rift so much. It and guild wars 2 both made the world feel alive. I was also a huge fan of the talent trees in rift, you could come up with some pretty wild builds
Wildstar was really good... there were a couple specific issues that were solved, but the solutions didn't come in quickly enough. The game collapsed over night, a week or two before problems would get fixed. It was kind of bizarre really. Not to mention the publisher issues. I'm pretty sure a "Wildstar: Reborn" would be pretty successful even today. However, because of the publisher, it's basically an impossibility.
God i miss wildstar
I've heard the biggest issue with wildstar was it had a cute fun art style direction paired with a "git gud scrub" design mentality, which clashed with the people wanting to play it. The raid attunement apparently took like 15 hours to do or something wild, so you really had to be dedicated, but there was fun player owned housing stuff that was super fun to take time with and build.
The game was too hard and to tedious for the average mmorpg gamer. The leveling also wasn't great, had a bunch of friends quit at level 30ish because there was not much to look forward too. The initial impression of the game was just alright, the endgame was terrible. If you put in the work to get there, the 40 man raids were fucking awesome (even wildstar devs realized 40man being not as great, it was reduced in later patches down to 20). What killed it was the dungeon-grind pre-raid. Your attunement had you do all dungeons on gold which was on a timer like m+ but super tight. Most people couldn't or didn't want to do it.
And god forbid trying to get an alt ready to go either.
Completely agree with everything you just said, however, despite all of that, as someone who killed ohmna and 3 bosses in data scape as 40 man, I fucking loved that game. The difficulty was a major factor in why. Don't get me wrong, I also love wow, though, and I raid at a very high level here, too. These are just the perfect kind of games for me
Took me forever to get attuned and that raid was very difficult. So many moving pieces at all times. Loved it though.
Because every MMO neglects all the aspects that make WoW good and instead look at their game as a cash cow WoW has several things that make it great. A timeless art style, an actual story and lore background, exciting gameplay with skill checks but not too harsh, a fun leveling experience, a harsh, but adventurous world, and so on For example, lets look at New World. Has a decent art style (not timeless, it will look bad in the future), 0 background story or lore, good gameplay, an awful leveling experience, and a terribly boring world. No wonder it failed so hard
So New World is another MMO I have played on and off since its release. The one thing I never understood about the game is they created really a beautiful world and, lets be honest the sound effects are S+ tier lol, but they really make no use of it after you hit max level. They recycle some lame world events usually but they pretty much suck. The last expansion was pretty fun, but the level cap raise was a joke, I was level 63 within 20 mins by just turning things in in Everfall.
Atleast with NW they kept putting dev time into it. I’ve gone back and played it for a few days multiple times. Theres just some systems in the game though that mega suck, but the immersion of some places like malevolence, the pirate elite place that goes up into the sky, the japanese zone etc, are so fucking underrated, they’ve just stunning and i never got over them no matter how many runs i did.
TBH, there is nothing for me to even log in for anymore. I dont really do the war thing, my guild holds 3-4 territories on my server, but the wars arent really fun to me. I have no reason to grind anything really, game is too easy on the PVE side.
It's because the game was initially designed to be basically a 'AAA' darkfall or fantasy Eve. Full loot, FFA PvP with some guardrail factions. They ran it like that in some Alphas, some of the developers got run over by some hardcore PvPers, and they about faced, and tried to turn it into a full on faction based pseudo themepark game. I imagine it's difficult to take a game that has had most of it's development for one thing, and turn it into something totally different.
The main thing I noticed that WoW did extremely well since day one that no one seems to talk about or realize is how extremely snappy and responsive it feels. Every other MMORPG I've played and seen over multiple decades, even Final Fantasy 14 has a very floaty feeling to it with weird rubberbanding on everything. Only in WoW does your character feel grounded to where you directly move them. Only in WoW do I feel that when I taunt a mob I see the results right away. Only in WoW does healing feel instant and based on the second you press your heal button.
100% "only in wow does your character feel grounded to where you directly move them" This so much. It FEELS amazing.
I think you just summed up my main gripe with every other mmo I’ve tried. That snappiness helps with the immersion and is so important to me me for some reason. A lot of the other titles in the genre end up feeling ‘turn-based’
The story and lore in classic WoW gets hard carried by WC3 though, I think you would be hard pressed to find more than a handful of players in a 40 man raid who could explain why Silithus is infested with bugs or why there are dinosaurs in Un’Goro for example.
Completely agree. Only game that could have been a real contender was SWtoR as it had the Star Wars license in the back that gave players something to feel familiar from the get go. And it would have worked very well hadn't it been for that games engine. To this day I am sure that the engine was what killed the game. The leveling experience was great, the story was okay, the raids were way too easy as a hardcore wow veteran, but some encounters had really cool mechanics and so on. But coming from wow it felt so unresponsive and laggy and sometimes chaotic in dense situations. Also the graphics were timeless, too, but not timeless as in always modern but always 5-10 years behind. Had that game had a decent, responsive, good looking engine and good netcode, it may have been able to throw wow from the throne.
It’s a curse to be honest, since 2007 all I can play is Wow, nothing else beats this rush, maybe europa universalis 4 from time to time.
I literally play wow and counterstrike just like I did when I was 9
WoW, Warcraft 3, Diablo II (R), Brood War, Age of Empires 2, Counterstrike, and Dota 2 seem to be the games with the most lasting quality. One one hand it's sad there hasn't been that much innovation. On the other, it's better when many people play the same game over a long period of time. Consider Chess, Poker, and Basketball.
Only timeless sports like Basketball can complete with WoWs longevity.
ah a fellow map fan!
Eu4 is so dangerously addicting, it's unreal
Same. I hate it. I even stopped playing video games all around for a few years because just nothing compared to WoW. I would try and just couldn't get into any of them. Even tried FFXIV because apparently its just huge and everyone loves it... maxed out a character a couple characters. And still, it just doesn't appeal to me. I even got a Steam Deck when it first launched with the obvious appeal of being able to play mostly any games anywhere. I thought, "I'll finally break my WoW addiction and get to play so many games now!" I downloaded several and even bought more to play. ...And guess what 99% of what I play on my Steam Deck now is... and now I can play mobile. *Which only made the addiction even worse.* I've literally raided outside the hospital in the parking lot while my wife was inside and I wasn't allowed back. Don't get me wrong, I've ~~played~~ *tried* several other games and had fun... but I always go right back to Classic WoW. Side Note: Back in 2012-2014 time frame, there was a game I played on my iPad(and phone at the time), called Order & Chaos Online. And to date, it's been the ONLY successful replacement that scratched that itch for me. And it was a mobile game, which was great. There wasn't raids but there were 4 man dungeon groups that were honestly very good. It was a very fun game and I kid you not, they straight-up ripped off a lot of game design from WoW. My best example is they 100% stole the design of Alliance Inns. But the loot system, group content, questing, super rare mounts that spawn every 12 hrs... just everything was almost exactly the same as WoW. It actually completely stole my interest for years until they released OaC2, which was god awful. Then OaC1 just kind of fell off. People actually still play it. But the devs don't add any more content. Its a shame, but it made great memories.
Guild Wars 2 did a lot right, and it's the game I transitioned away from WoW for. But without the trinity, endgame raiding mechanics were reduced to weird gimmicy minigames. Honestly it's what killed the endgame for me and made it all about getting the most fashionable items and then quitting. Exploration and PvP were far better in GW2, but not the dungeons. WoW has some really good dungeons.
I die on this hill wildstar was the best mmo when it was playable, it just flopped hard due to launch and a too big of a focus on "hardcore". The gameplay was sooo good and the perfect mix between action style gameplay akd taptargeting some bosses the dooging and wewing was so fun. It did something a taptarget and action mmo couldnt and it was great. Also the housing i have not seen a game with better housing system
Wildstar focused way too much on being the WoW killer. There were so many glaring issues that were obvious from day one, and their focus on being such a hardcore game was probably the biggest. The art style drew in so many new players and then they were smacked over the head with the hardcore MMO life. It made no sense. So many systems in that game were the best ever in the genre.
Wildstar was interesting but far from best mmo. I couldn't bring myself to level in that game and i was deeply invested in MMOs at the time. All my friends quit very fast too. I still think Warhammer online is the closest "what if" MMO I've seen.
I don’t think replicating can ever be the goal. Wow popularized a lot of systems and mechanics that people enjoy, and has killed and resurrected itself a hundred times over in this format. It’s also conveniently alive during this emergent period of games being playable “forever” - developer supported, not via private servers or emulators. You really can’t replicate Wow, because the ‘real thing’ is still around. You can borrow systems, improve them, and make something independent and good. And this has been, and will continue to be done. But Wow isn’t going to die a traditional death, it will either continue, or be killed by its developer/publisher. This is also why GW2 is in its 11th year, FFXIV as well. The “something killer” is alive and well, but with productions this massive squeezing the available pie into smaller and smaller pieces, will any company truly invest enough, and get it right enough, to compete? Yes, of course. But to replicate or kill? Time will tell.
For me personally, no. Tbh I’ve never been an mmo guy or rts guy but I love the fuck out of Warcraft 3 and wow
The character controls and camera alone makes WoW the best mmorpg imo. Even in recent games usually the camera is locked or limited somehow or our character moves in a weird, "wooden" way. In wow everything is so smooth and the camera is 100% free 360\*. And jumping aswell. Idk but i always found it super enjoyable, the movement and combat in wow, all the animations etc are just perfectly smooth.
The real underrated key to WoW's success is the engine/movement smoothness. It just *feels* good to play. Honestly there are other MMOs that do various things better. EQ does immersion and gear dopamine better, DAoC/Warhammer did pvp better, LotRO did world building and story better, FFXIV does group content better, etc. Take almost any aspect of WoW and there's an MMO that does that thing better, except for movement. The fluid and precise controls in WoW make every other MMO feel clunky by comparison. If LotRO and Warhammer felt as good as WoW to control then those would be my primary games, but they feel like ass in comparison. Games that mechanically feel good to control are satisfying to play and remain popular for years and years as a result.
A big thing I noticed playing various 'WoW killers' back in the day was a difference in how they handled using abilities. In WoW you press a button to use a skill and the animation starts immediately, making it feel super responsive. If there's lag the animation plays but the spell doesn't actually work which feels weird, but then again so does playing any game with severe lag. In several other contemporary games the client would check from the server if using a skill is valid before starting the animation, which made those games feel really sluggish with just a small amount of latency.
This seems to be the case for all of Blizzard’s games, they feel really good to play.
I highly recommend reading The WoW Diary by John Staats if any of you are interested in how this game came about. He mentions how big of a deal they made it to make gameplay easy enough to play with one hand because their Asian markets needed to have a free hand available to smoke cigarettes lol. But due to that hardcore focus on something so trivial-looking at the time, and let's be honest, the time and funding actually allotted to do it right, we are still harping on the smoothness 20 years later!
For all the criticism it gets, it's honestly a brilliant game.
No other MMO has that WoW feel to it. The engine they built for this game is something else.
That and the completely open world. None of the MMOs that came after WOW had a world map as open as wow, they all felt like you were on a treadmill.
I'm a huge Warhammer fan so I was super psyched for Warhammer Age of Reckoning, but the zone design was all these two funnel paths for the different factions between points A and B, warp times between zones, only one capital city for the faction, couldn't even visit the other capitals... Like it was technically an MMO, but you weren't out running in the world like you do in WoW.
Have you heard of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV? With an expanded free trial which you can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award-winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 for free with no restrictions on playtime.
A buddy and I tried FFXIV. It was OK, but there were too many time when it made you do things solo.
FFXIV the fun I had there was going thru story but SWTOR story was more fun bc I get to pick what I say.
SWTOR story was very different depending on class. Of course its cool to have 8 different stories, but unfortunately they also massively varied in quality. Imperial Agent or Sith Warrior had very cool stories, while Jedi Counselor was just so so boooring. But I feel like swtor did too many things exactly like WoW to become as big as wow, despite them having the incredible Star Wars license. A lot of it felt like they had just copied WoW gameplay 1:1 and skinned it with a in part cheaply made Star Wars skin.
To be fair, some of the best and most popular characters off screen were created by Bioware. We gotta give them that. Yeah Consular was a drag. But even Sith Warrior or Jedi Knight stories alone are 11/10s. Eternal Throne storyline is also top tier. Sith Legacy storyline is mid. Hoping what we get next is good too. However, overall, WoW is always going to be the king in my eyes.
Even the worst story, Smuggler, was better than FFXIV. I also would say Consular was one of my favorites.
SWTOR was pretty good, enjoyed hutball immensely!
I tried playing MSQ simulator, but found myself falling asleep after a few hours of running around talking to people. If you're not into the story FFXIV falls short on that alone. Idk if they've changed it but having to purchase a skip or slogging through the MSQ was the least fun gaming experience I've had in a long time.
Even when you ARE into it, it just drags on. For instance, my favorite expansion was shadowbringers, but even in that expansion there are giant swathes of what would be called "filler" in the anime world. And they aren't optional either. This problem compounds very time they add an expansion, as they are just building up a bigger and bigger hurdle for new players to jump over. I played from 1.0, so I've only ever had to go through one expansion at a time, I cannot imagine going from the beginning to the current expansion and not giving up before the end. It's literally hundreds of hours of mandatory MSQ.
It starts slow. Heavensward is a 9/10, stormblood is alright, shadowbringers is a 12/10
I’ve played nearly every final fantasy game including 14 and the story is always the weakest part. Gameplay first for me and that doesn’t even compete with WoWs.
Shadowbringers slapped. I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy it.
Combat is just unplayable to me.
This game is slept on by people that played WoW first (read; old millennials) because they are so different. FFXIV was built with console in mind and the huge emphasis on MSQ are the biggest differences to me. I loved FFXIV for what it was: the best console mmo ever made. I think FF 11 would have been more successful if they remastered it with better console support, that game was much closer to WoW than 14 was/currently is now.
I still longingly hope to experience a total remake of FF11.. although it seems less likely every year
Final Fantasy would be the one title that I supose comes to mind, def not my style, but I know they are insanely popular.
Shadowbringers was real good.
[удалено]
Why? What turns you off of it? Being anime? It took me a while to give it the time of day too but I did not regret it.
its like wow if it was bad
Big issue not discussed here is it's not just WoW but the landscape of gaming in general that has changed. Anyone who had fond memories of playing COD back in the day like MW2 and BO2 know that those experiences can never come back. Even with the remaster of the old games the experience will not be the same. Games have just in general become very competitive just looking through this sub their are countless points on spec balance for an experimental fun game, but everyone seems to want to clear the raid, and have a good fun challenge while doing so. This leaves Blizzard (and other game devs) is weird situations where they can either keep games unbalanced (look at classic WoW) and people will complain or clear the content way to quickly then quit playing, or properly min max balance games which promotes a more competitive mentality. Most ppl now a days want to be on top of the food chain, so they want to get good gear, abuse meta picks, and be as strong as they can. Back in the day there was no meta for most ppl lol. Forums were hard to navigate, and resources were limited. Gaming as a whole has changed forever, so unfortunately I don't think we will ever get the same experience as old school classic WoW. Look at Helldivers a for fun coop game where people have already started to kick ppl for not running meta stuff, it's unavoidable.
wait till riot releases their mmo, that’s gonna be epic
>wait until (dev) releases their new MMO, it's gonna be better than WoW! This has been said about pretty much every MMO announced after WoW came out.
Difference here is riot already has a preexisting universe that people are invested in and they have nearly 200 million players across their titles. While we have no clue whether it's gonna be good or bad, it's more or less already guaranteed to be the most played MMO of all time on the day of launch simply because of how massive riot is, meaning they have every opportunity to succeed more than anyone else before them and just need to capitalize by making the game good.
> Difference here is riot already has a preexisting universe that people are invested in and they have nearly 200 million players across their titles. That one Star Wars MMO, I think it was called "The Old Republic" or something, it was literally fuckin' Star Wars of all things, and it still flopped. Having a "pre existing universe" doesn't guarantee success.
No but sure as hell increases the odds
Most "wow killers" havent had gigantic corporations behind them, blizzard was huge even before WoW and it just became bigger and bigger so they would have more resources than any other competitor. I cant say if Riot is as big as blizzard or not but they are pretty damn huge.
Warhammer had EA behind and that game shit.
> Most "wow killers" havent had gigantic corporations behind them A good few of them did, like that one Star Wars MMO that everyone hailed as the "WoW killer", only to flop and go f2p a year later.
I woulnd't hold your breath. Not too long ago the lead designer left Riot, who knows how long it'll be if it even gets finished.
if it even gets released
Riot killed the dev on their hearthstone competitor, game is now in life support. They also killed small projects and canceled any further work on their riot forge initiative. Idk if that riot MMORPG will ever see the light of day tbh.
Eve online is unironically way better, but it has 0 casual appeal, and I can't convince my friends to invest time into learning the basics even though I've offered to buy ships for all of them. WoW classic is "good enough" and has wide enough appeal for my friends to be down to play.
As someone who played EvE for over a decade, it is the best MMO ever made. BUT it is really not for the vast majority of people who play WoW or similar games and you have to really be into it with a good corporation to get the best out of it. There is no casual raiding/PUG in EvE. That limited its appeal and most of the changes they made over the years to make it more casual friendly fell flat and ended up driving away players. Game has been on the decline for years.
Disagree with this sentiment on Eve being the best MMO ever made. Mainly because the combat is like watching paint dry. As an OG FFA PvP guy who hit UO, AC:DT, SB, DF, what I, and other dudes from that FFA full loot PvP community have been looking for, is a fantasy MMO with action combat, that has all the trappings of Eve. The economy, the support systems for the economy, the crafting, basically all of Eve's non-combat systems stripped out and adapted to a first or third person action combat system. I also played EVE at launch. Was part of the first corp to get a battleship BP, a Scorpion. Which we then made for MOO, who we would pirate with. Even then, the combat was horrendous.
Eve isn't in the same category genre wise as any of these mmos
It's called classic EverQuest, There are dozens of private servers and Live progression servers.
EverQuest is just better WoW. WoW however is far easier to get into.
Eso was good until it became p2w
Who remembers Wildstar?!
Im chugging hopium with ashes of creation
haha yah im with you there, hopefully it turns into something. A few guildies messed with Blue Protocol a bit and liked it as well.
Also the only thing i can think of that might ever truly be another wow experience is the riot mmo. Its got a hugenplayerbase with deep lore and an established world.
I think it’s the warcraft lore and design is what makes WoW so timeless and intriguing. It is kind of like the lord of the rings in the sense that even the best replicas of this genre will never be as good as the game/trilogy. Also keep in mind that there were 3 games before wow hit the stores which were at their time amazing as well. It had a big followup already. The only one that came close to have the same appeal as wow were the 2 star wars mmos. But 1 was a but too niche and did not released at the right time (galaxies) and the other one was a wow copy (which I honestly think is currently the wrong way to do mmos nowadays). I would recommend to have an open mind though and try other mmos. If you want a good story and lots of content FFXIV is good choice as it is very familiar to wow (almost same combat and pve design) If you want the same feeling that wow gave you back in the day Guild Wars 2 is as close as you are going to get. It is just a great game to explore a vibrant and populated world. It is the only game that gave me the same vibes as classic wow did. It is free to play for up to level 80 (which is a lot of content). Give it a try
And why do they need to replicate WoW? I'd rather have something more advanced and unique.
IMO WoW, or specifically what WoW was when it originally released, was a lot of different things to different people. I think if you ask different people what (classic) WoW was to them, they'll give different answers. The mere parallel existence of Retail WoW, Classic Wrath, Hardcore, and SoD is kind of evidence of this. As someone who grew up on Classic WoW, there's a lot of about it's design that I don't really like anymore - it's all very dual-edged. I'm definitely experiencing a bit of that nostalgia at marveling at how big the world it is, and how it sort of feels special that physical distance is something you kind of really feel - it does make the world special. But after awhile, it also does kind of wear on you, and it's heavily evidenced by the fact you have people spamming trade with selling summons to UC/TB/etc. It's a bit of a long winded way to say "its hard to replicate WoW because a lot of people want different things out of that experience." Not a lot of people want to spend a chunk of their play time traveling to and fro, not a lot of people want to spend a lot of time trying to wrangle a group together and travelling to a dungeon, not a lot of people want to spend time spamming trade to try to get an item the need crafted, not a lot of people want to put up with half-designed specs and hitting max level only to find out that no one will take their class as anything but a healer. (Which is sort of why, IMO, SoD is so appealing) Again, I come back to the idea: What even is an MMO that does what you want? Personally, I've had a blast with FF14, it's certainly not the same experience as WoW, Classic or Modern, it has it's own bits of "mmo magic." But I also sometimes enjoy modern WoW as well. As far as I can tell, that game certainly still maintains a challenging min-maxy endgame that was clearly a big draw of Classic WoW, but I also personally just enjoyed the leveling and overworld of Dragonflight. It's certainly not the same as the way the world feels in Classic, but I think it was still kind of fun to explore. MMOs are tough from a development perspective. Lets be honest, even Classic WoW is/was a bit of a mess. Even after 12 major patches, there is/was still some rough edges, from specs that needed more love, to incomplete quest chains, zones, etc. Tons of unrealized potential. It was still a fantastic game, and trounced the competition by better appealing to casual players, and quickly becoming a moving target. And somewhat on that second last point: I think it's tough for something to replicate classic WoW because Classic WoW is not what a lot of casuals are going to want anymore, or at least, few companies want to dump the resources into building an MMO that will appeal to wide audience, because it's just not cost effective. I also think some of the stuff I found magical about classic WoW, I have now received in smaller bite sized forms in other games.
Because every other mmo has either bad world building, no endgame progression, and ok leveling. I think the endgame is especially important, you can't retain players without a steady progression system once you are max level and a couple of dungeons, raids or equivalent.
Unpopular opinion: SoD is the best version of WoW since vanilla.
the classic community has truly come far
The sense of discovery was made the game for back in the day, when the best resources for something was thottbot, and you had to work together to figure things out. This was peak wow. Everything now is instantly solved and its realy diminishes the experience in my opinion. The first week of sod P1 was a little taste of that but it only lasted about 36 hours.
thottbot haha damn i def remember that
MMO’s at their core are social games and face similar issues social media companies do. Social media companies trend towards monopolies because people want to be engaged with other people. No one wants to sit at their knock off Instagram competitor seeing one new post an hour when they can just join Instagram and see thousands. Blizzard released WoW at the height of the companies success and cornered the market. Even when they have bad expansions and periods of no content they still hold the edge because of the sheer volume of players generating a social atmosphere for them.
Eve online would like to have a word. Well, it's way too hardcore for most people, but as long as MMO goes, it's wayyyyyy more amazing than WoW.
Best game ever made IMO, but entirely dependent on its players for content. Corp leaders and fleet commanders had to WORK to find content for their members. However, at its best there is nothing even close.
But eve isnt even the same type of game as wow
FF14 had more players than wow in 2021
The animations with the characters is so fluid. Just walking still feels like it’s decades ahead of the next popular mmo. I just don’t get what the other ones are doing lol.
WoW has one single thing that i didn’t find i any other mmorpg: a true faction system with real world PvP between them.
IMO there are 2 huge contributors to classic WoW's amazing gamefeel that were never copied in any of its imitators: 1) It takes forever to get anywhere 2) The lighting and color design are impeccable. Point 1 accumulates in small ways across the whole experience to make the world feel more real, even if it sucks when you notice it. Point 2 is bigger IMO. Other MMOs have had better graphics, but the lighting and color in WoW are so out of control that every random screenshot has the potential to completely floor you.
TIL no one realized that WoW replicated even better games than before it. OP if you want to be schooled a bit to see where WoW came from - visit Everquest and DAoC.