I believe once classics out and people starts digging into it they’re gonna see just how beautiful the game can really be compared to live current wow and pretty much any other game that tried to replicate wow. I understand its terrible at first because of the annoying grind to 60, and then grinding mobs for months, possibly years just to farm gold/mats to get their decided mount and gear. Now that’s when the game finally becomes the greatest game of them all. Its like trying to climb an ancient egyptian pyramid, so tall and steep, worthless rocks in the way which is painful, until you finally reach the golden tip of the top.
But the problem that I see is that I think like, all game companies only makes casual games now and most gamers just aren’t able to put in the time needed to progress in the game or any other game related to vanilla wow. Quite a sticky situation.
I can see one day the devs may consider conjuring a game that may mix between modern games, and some form of the same philosophy that is already in vanilla wow.
If it was my choice I’d say make just another modern mmo but having to grind mobs for mats to go into the next portal into a different instance, and gear up from performing rituals at a raid that’s full of monsters that requires a tremendous amount of absorbant shields from their quest givers so they can survive, but for a heavy price, and getting in game currency from either finding chests or randomly dropping from killing players. I can come up with some pretty wild ideas (some of which may actually be a good idea to the devs)
The point being is that I hope within the highest of my wow toons that at the very least classic can inspire other devs to make games very similar to vanilla. A perfect opportunity. But do I think classic wow will save wow? No it won’t. In fact I’m expecting the servers to be 90-95% dead by the time AQ comes out. And i know what AQ can do to people lol. Only the most hardcore raiders/pvpers will remain by then, bet on it.
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if classic doesn’t, well we got pantheon and saga of lucimia both trying.
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i doubt it. classic wont fail or anything, but its not going to greatly shift the market.
game developers realized their target demographic is into other games now, and they are easier to make too. look at the hype apex legends is getting, classic wow is hardly being mentioned by comparison
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It depends on if developers pay attention or not. I think they are going to be surprised when classic turns out to be as good as it was.
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That’s a pretty heavy burden to put on a re-release of original content. Gut instinct says any impact it has on the genre will be anecdotal and quite by accident. Classic is being released as entertainment (for those who like that style) and curiosity (for those who never had the opportunity to experience the original WoW).
Successful? Yes.
Savior of the MMO genre? Not likely.
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why not both. I feel/hope it’s going to be wildly successful. Of course the companies don’t expect that it will be. I expect them to be surprised come BlizzCon 2019.
No I don’t think the slow pseudo turn based style of RPG necessitated by technology 25 years ago is ever going to be popular with new gamers in the future. The MMO genre isn’t dead but the current game design for it simply hasn’t aged well.
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There is a market for games that are similar to what pre-expansion (and TBC) had to offer. The only problem is that it’s challenging to monetize that game sufficiently to not only pay the bills, but to make that investment worthwhile enough vs other investment opportunities.
In addition for games to be fun for us to play, they also have to make money for the people that put the work into creating and supporting them.
In my opinion, the gamer demographic for a game like classic WOW is much smaller than it was originally, which deters investment.
Because the cost to stand back-up something like pre-expansion WOW is so low, I think Classic is the best candidate (right now) to serve that community of gamers.
No. Because the market has changed too much. The era of having these long, grindy games with slow progression and such is over for the most part.
The original Vanilla players for the most part are living completely different lives now than they were Pre-BC. Assuming the average player was 18 at the time, they’ve graduated college, potentially completed grad school, started careers, gotten married, started families, etc. So it will become a question of if they feel paying for the game again is worth it given the time constraints upon them.
I think Classic will have enough people to justify its continuation, especially once it’s done and all the bugs are ironed out with the old code interacting with the new backend systems it goes into maintenance mode since there will be no more patches to it. All the costs for it are up-front for Blizzard and then turn into a slight increase of costs they’re already paying in terms of server overhead. Couple that with the fact that players will be paying $14.99/mo to access it. Only things they will add to it are backend changes that Retail will get that make sense such as the new Auction House system that’s coming in 9.0 probably.
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It’d likely be the only way SWG II would ever be a thing.
I don’t see it rebirthing the genre since it is almost 15 years old at this point. I’m sure there will be several studios that attempt to recapture the “classic” audience not understanding that Classic will be enough, most of us who played back then are now in our mid-lives and don’t have time for multiple MMOs.
Some quibbles.
Yes tech back then made slower action easier, but ofc not mandatory; see that one mmo where it was fps gameplay with lots of spell shooting.
So while Blizzard was forced to sate the rpg crowd it isnt like they were going against their norm; theyd served niches in the past with Lost Vikings etc.
Secondly claiming “old” design hasnt aged well is confusing your subjective preference with objectively good design. Your statement is identical to claiming that turn based rpgs are objectively worse than live action ones.
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No.
Classic will be a success within it’s niche, as the old-style MMO is a niche product now. It was a flash-in-the-pan case of right place, right game, right time for the original WoW.
The way the gaming market has shifted, no MMORPG is going to have near the success that WoW did when it launched.
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Nah, the MMORPG ship sailed years ago.
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Long grindy games were around before either of us were born and will be long after we are dead. The preference for high investment high immersion tactical strategic etc is not a fad, it’s simply one side of human interests, just like twitch and skill.
Occasionally circumstances will cause one or the other preference to be easier served, puzzles in the very early days due to speed and memory constraints, rpgs in the early networking days due to latency and bandwidth constraints, etc.
But circumstances could change again.
And the marketplace is littered with the corpses of many grindy games too. They’re being replaced by games that one can pick up easy, invest time in chunk by chunk, and still progress.
I think Classic is going to spark the interest of certain gamers. I am not one of them, even though when it was new, I was there playing and I loved it. I think the majority of current WoW players are going to hate Classic. With the grind and the time it took to do anything in Vanilla, the current instant reward mentality won’t like it at all. Just travel times in game will infuriate those that are accustomed to the 7000 flight paths we have now. I remember well the 45 minutes it took to fly from Darn to Silithus if your toon was stuck there with no mage friends to get you to a closer place. Taking boats was no faster because it took almost 20 minutes or more waiting on the next boat to arrive. I think there are a few things players might like to see brought back to the current WoW, one being the greater choice in talents and gear that is feasible to be worn. That you didn’t necessarily have to be decked out in the top end gear to do well in dungeons and raids, and that even the top end gear might not be the best to wear. Sometimes greens and blues were better.
As a whole, I see a lot of people flocking to Classic, initially, and it dying down to a select few within 2-3 months after launch. I give it a year tops before there are but a handful of people playing.
Yea and those should be fairly minor costs, again covered by already sunk devs that are working on the ‘main’ game backend that is shared with classic.
I do wonder about changes that might impact the ‘authenticity’ of classic that are made on the backend, like a change to the lua API and if those will slip through unintentionally or not, but I guess we’ll just have to see what happens.
To the OP though… no it won’t. There is definitely a niche out there, but I don’t think it’s more than a few hundred k subs, best case, in the long term. I don’t think I’m too out of ‘normal’ for an ex-WoW addict whose life circumstance has changed greatly in the past 14 years and I just don’t have the time anymore for the even more grindy version of WoW that was Vanilla end-game (because that’s the trajectory to where we all end up if this is to be a museum piece).
I might be interested in a Destiny-esque mostly single player ‘MMO’ RPG though, like Skyrim mixed with Fallout76 that didn’t suck. But that’s some other game with god-knows-what other problems and gameplay issues.
I doubt it, but if it is successful I can see other MMOs or even Blizzard itself taking note and reevaluating the current model.