Quote:
Originally Posted by choklo
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I never played WoW, but I can't deny it's success. Many of my former EQ friends left for WoW, but the real problem was that they never came back. How did WoW maintain it's dominance all these years, while so many other games faded away? What have we learned about MMO's in the process? What type of game could replace WoW?
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My opinion is that it was the best game available at the perfect time.
I played the WoW beta in 2004. Everquest released Omens of War in September 2004. Then WoW released in November 2004. I was a hardcore EQ player until that time. At first, I kept logging into EQ, but my desire steadily faded away due to raid sizes and the saturation of design. I play games other than mmorpgs; notably fps and rts. Doom3 and CS:Source released in 2004... woohoo. There were no other games in the mmorpg genre that could come close to competing with WoW.
Why it maintained its dominance is a good question. I have no idea. After completing the worthwhile parts of Burning Legion, I felt there was nothing to do. I lead a pvp guild on Burning Legion and I really enjoyed world pvp and original battleground*/s*. Zone line queue for AV then compete in the Southshore vs Tarren Mill battles. Then there was introduction of resource and ctf pvp maps, :T. I quit for a while. Shortly after, I rejoined due to my girlfriend playing and stayed throughout Burning Crusade. Thennn, I started Vanguard in like 2007.
WoW was easy to begin with. Then is was made more comfortable. Then it was made way too easy. When mentioned in sitcom dialogue, it was trendy. My only guess as to why so many people
still play is that it was/is the flagship of friendly mmorpgs. If I had to guess, the
majority of wow players don't leave for other games; they take a hiatus from mmorpgs. Unless trying games of the EQ era, I'm not sure what all these people are doing because there's certainly nothing on the horizon (that I'm aware of).
As far as what have we learned about mmorpgs since WoW.. the answer is subjective to the person. I learned that I don't want everything handed to me on a silver platter. I do want a lot of other people to play with. I do want more player to player interaction and less automation. I do want pvp, optional or not. I don't like instances in any fashion I've seen implemented that weren't created due to population vs. design caps. WoW created a distinct terminology in mmorpgs up to the point where something can be considered "wow-like".
What type of game could replace WoW? A different game of the same type, but likely a game of the same type that was as different as vanilla WoW was to post-PoP EQ. And make sure it has a lot of content.
I played Vanguard until I missed classic EQ. I could go on for paragraphs about why Vanguard wasn't sustainable, but I digress. A few google searches later, I was playing some of the servers in the eqemulator community. Since that time, there hasn't been a new mmorpg worth playing for longer than a month, imo.