Difference is that those other games are rightly identified as trash.
i think some are still holding their ground. But generally people play wow because it’s the less terrible mmo there is
The thing is: it’s an 18 year old game with an established playerbase that likes the way the game is, more or less – that is, they like the basic formula of brief leveling, followed by raid/M+/PvP, coupled with open world content for more casual players or for content variety. It’s the same basic chassis, because that is what the playerbase expects and likes, and in an 18-year old game that’s not a small thing.
In an 18-year old game, you’re not going to see massive innovation. Innovation for Blizzard was what we saw in the Legion → Shadowlands period, where the endgame was different from what it had been previously, due to the addition of borrowed power elements which were specific to the expansion in question. That was new, and it was extremely divisive in the playerbase because of that. Blizzard tried to iterate the basic innovation again in BfA and SL before they abandoned it, here, because each time the playerbase threw up on it, and begged Blizzard to “go back to basics, I don’t want World of Systemscraft”. So they went back to basics. And now they have some players saying it isn’t innovative, LMAO. You can’t please everyone with a playerbase of this size, in any case, but in an 18-year old game it’s best not to innovate the heck out of it – you want to keep your core players, not alienate them.
Sure, they could take the risk of totally redoing the game and trying to get new players, old players be damned. Like some people want. But that’s expensive and uncertain, and Blizzard almost certainly won’t do it, when they can simply iterate on the existing basic formula that its core playerbase likes.
Is the game in decline? Sure. It’s an 18-year old game. It’s going to be in decline. It’s amazing that it still has the large playerbase that it does, which is mostly due to its absolute leadership in instanced group content design, and its snappy combat system. But if you’re expecting massive innovation from an 18-year old game, and one in which the last major attempt at system-level innovation (the borrowed power systems of the last three expansions) were extremely divisive, at best, and disastrous for retaining players (in SL), I don’t know what to tell you. It isn’t going to happen.
What we’re going to get are more iterations of the same basic formula that appeals to the core playerbase, and, yes, it will get smaller over time because the game is old after all. Blizzard is aware of that, and this is what they expect from WoW at this point, Perhaps they make another MMO at some stage, but I wouldn’t hold my breath, given the massive cost involved, and the problems with the MMO market and genre as a whole (the entire genre suffers from similar problems, because it’s now played out as a genre, pending new technology that allows a new play experience to emerge).
2 Likes
I mean we did get a form of flying and the people who wanted it dead love it. So technically I was right all along and they were wrong, I can do a better job designing the game lol
1 Like
Yea Arena was a mistake in so far as ranked pvp content is the meta, thus making 3v3 and 2v2 the most accessible ranked pvp content. Which really limited class design space. A lot more weird abilities can be useful in a 10v10 battleground, especially one that’s dynamic.
Part of the problem is Blizzard has tried and failed to make an evergreen dynamic battleground. Alteric Valley and Ashran are both examples, but they really just had flawed conceptions. Like a noob is never going to gravitate towards killing mobs for neutral objectives. Noobs gravitates towards the team so they can be carried. Even if you suck if you land a stun you can be useful.
But if they just like took Arathi Basin and added some MOBA elements it should be able to carry at least an expansion. I think PVP was an important aspect of WoW popularity, including low level battlegrounds like level 19 and 29 which served as simpler introductions into pvp, and also allowed you to experiment with more characters sort of like a MOBA does.
1 Like
Yup the addition that trained us that all group content needs to be rushed through to beat a timer. Great addition.
Everyone is blaming the tanks for speed running, when the game has taught us that’s the way they want us to play.
Among other things I dislike about it.
1 Like
I mean I wanted them to rework flying and they reworked flying (with fewer breath attacks than I envisioned but whatever). So I kinda feel like my wish came more true here.
The problem is that in the last 2 decades the intrinsic meaning of what an MMO is has changed.
2 decades ago, MMO meant large online world with socialization on a scale that doesn’t exist anywhere else, used to overcome obstacles and story on a scale unprecedented.
Nowadays, MMO means shallow gameplay and shallow repetitive gameplay loops that have less dynamic gameplay than even cell phone games. People play MMOs to play alone intentionally, which also goes against the entire concept. As it stands, most other games on the market with online functionality do the multiplayer aspect of gaming better. Fortnite for example is an incredible example of how seamless it can be to play with hundreds of other people. World events, music concerts, custom game modes, you name it. Never any lag either. A few months ago I loaded into lobbies of players and we’d sit there and watch FULL LENGTH dragon ball z episodes on a virtual screen in a theater setting. It was badass.
WoW as a single player game is 0/10 compared to whats available. But I have a sneaking suspicion that Blizz keeps WoW super simple to play for the older folk who can’t learn new tricks so to speak, and have to be drip fed modern game mechanics every 2 years so as to not shock the system.
And I mean no offense to the older players. Yall are lovely and always have been important to the WoW community as a whole.
1 Like
The borrowed power thing wasn’t innovation. It’s just slapping a talent tree into your weapon slot. Truly a terrible idea.
And it was brought into existence really by the WoW token forcing alternative currencies to become necessary for power progression.
This encapsulates the problem, I think.
No, we won’t get that “OMG this is so cool!!!” factor again. Because it isn’t new as a genre now. And the technology isn’t developing in the way that it was when WoW was being created, and broadband was coming out and things were really changing. Things aren’t changing like that now, the improvements are iterative and incremental technologically, so the games are not as “different” as they were when tech was really changing quickly.
This is why we are kind of stuck in a stagnant state in the MMO genre as a whole. The basic idea has been done to death, and the technology doesn’t really permit a new emergent player experience that makes people feel enchanted with something truly new. And as you say, this isn’t just WoW, it’s a lot of games – we aren’t seeing a lot of innovation because the tech is only improving incrementally, not fundamentally, so there isn’t something entirely new that is emerging.
In short, we won’t get that “new car smell” phase back again until technology has another big leap, which makes an entirely different experience possible for the player.
Then go do mmo stuff, you are no mythic raider and no gladiator.
That’s the end game of wow, this whole “it’s the same” means nothing when you don’t even know what you actually want.
You just burnout and that’s fine but nothing what you said is new.
Well see, you were also right and they were wrong, You too should have a job with me. We can tackle the next big Wow issue lol
1 Like
Idk maybe it’s because I’m sort of a creative guy, maybe it’s because I play DnD, but I don’t think this is true. I can spend all night coming up with exciting features with a WoW factor.
Take Sea of Thieves sailing, add it to WoW, add breath attacks to dragon riding. Let our dragons burn the ships. Let the ships hunt for whales for crazy loot. And just let the players have fun with these toys.
The problem is they gave us toys we can’t hit each other with.
Dont blame technology for WoW being stale.
I play Fortnite (inb4 the fork knife jokes), and it is a true feat of what can be done in an online ecosystem. Constant open world events, weekly massive updates, custom games, hundreds of players playing simultaneously with no lag, tournaments that are accessible to everyone, MUSIC CONCERTS, theater rooms where movies like Inception can be watched start to finish. I watched episodes of Dragon Ball Z with others in one of these theaters. It’s a liviing breathing game, they NEVER would dare to make players wait 9 months for content updates.
Then look at WoW, a game that defines itself by the scale of its online ecosystem via the MMO moniker, and any amount of world pvp makes the game lag out and take a dump.
No one talks or interacts in the game. It’s antisocial and the gameplay is dated.
Technology isn’t the problem.
1 Like
Funny thing is that they could kill two birds with one stone. Bad class/gear design is causing the lag.
Nowadays every ability has a proc that interacts with some other ability making for some complex adhd catering rotation. Which causes every landed attack to have like 30 modifiers being rolled.
1 Like
Yeah well that ship sailed when they wasted the talent tree opportunity and instead turned the talent tree into a reskin of what we already had. Because lazy and uninspired seem to be core tenets in the studio.
Yea because if you remove anything ever then forum babies will cry about. Game need pruning tho.
I didn’t play in MoP. I actually sort of liked class design in WoD, it was approachable.
To be fair, I think MoP and WoD were exciting times. Atleast until content droughts became the reality.
But now expansions are really just reskins of Legion’s game design. Blizzard have streamlined the process of making WoW expansions, and it is super obvious to anyone who pays attention.
Sure, but Fortnite is an example of the problem.
WoW is an 18-year old game with an 18-year old code. It can’t be Fortnite without being entirely rewritten from the ground up, and they won’t do that due to the cost. So that isn’t going to happen. The context in which something like that would be possible would be a new game, like WoW 2 – a new MMO of some kind – but I don’t think that’s likely either, because the genre of the MMO is stale compared to other genres of online games, like Fortnite, that people find more interesting today.
Fortnite, however, will face the same problem WoW does now in 12-15 years. That is, it will then be old hat, with an established formula, which an existing playerbase loves, and others find alienating because it’s stale. It will have an old codebase that is hard to change and compete with new games that are entirely new code. And, for all of those reasons, its ability to compete in the online gaming space with new kinds of online games – with the “new shiny” of online gaming – will be limited. Just like WoW has today.
WoW was once the “new shiny”. Then MOBAs were, for a while. Then battle arenas, for a while. And so on. Battle arenas are the newest ones. How innovative are the MOBAs? Not much. It’s tweaks to an established formula, for the same basic reason that the formula is what keeps its players interested. At the same time that makes them relatively “stagnant” – you either like that formula or you don’t. Fortnite will be in the same boat in 10 years, likely, and certainly in 15 years, unless they redo the entire thing from the ground up every 10-15 years.
You stated the problem. Old Blizzard had the stones to make cool games that players would want to play.
WoW 2 would sell itself without any marketing. No one with a computer wouldn’t buy WoW 2. Instead were going to get 5 more expansions that beat this dead horse into the ground over and over and over again.
Its shameful, because Blizzard wouldn’t LOSE money making a new game. But reskinning WoW every 2 years and feeding the addicts is less risky.
Also, Fortnite isn’t a new game anymore either. It is 6 years old and was in alpha back in 2014. They constantly update its engine and modernize that game. Constantly.
Blizzard doesn’t want to make new games. Thats why they took Overwatch 1, overhauled the in-game store, and rereleased it as Overwatch 2.
1 Like