We know many have tried and all have failed but what franchise do you wish actually made a game good enough to take on WoW? There’s 3 obvious ones for me:
D&D - I’m not a huge D&D nerd but I loved Baldur’s Gate. Maybe D&DO is what D&D players envisioned with the play style, rule set, etc. but it always confounded me why they didn’t make it in the Forgotten Realms and instead chose Eberron. Elminster and Drizzt are their two most well known characters and being able to walk the streets of Baldur’s Gate would’ve been amazing… but again, I’m not a huge D&D guy so maybe someone that is could tell us the edition they chose means more to D&D players than Forgotten Realms.
Warhammer - Obviously. What a disaster… you people that complain about WoW’s bugs and playability have nooooo idea what unplayeable means. This game was a mess but even if it wasn’t, the inclusion of instanced PvP to match WoW’s Battlegrounds was a mistake. World PvP should’ve been WHO’s calling card but they took that away by making instanced PvP more lucrative so everyone played games of Capture the Hill rather than actually fight in massive battles.
Star Wars - If only SWG was polished to match WoW. TOR was a mistake, SWG was the better game and the better world.
TOR as a property was excellent because it was impossible for the game to step on the toes of the movies. It fell down on endgame content at release and hemorrhaged players ever since. The light/dark choice system was great.
A fallout MMO would be nice, but Bethesda is incapable.
Warhammer fantasy with the tone of vermintide? I’d even kickstart that. Saltzpyre for lyfe.
NCSoft. If they’d just become solidly dual platform, they’d be a serious challenger. Lineage siege was way better than any PVP Warcraft has, because the result actually mattered.
Xcom based MMO. Real world based locations. Humans vs Advent. Guilds build their own bases. Shootouts. Mind control Shenanigans. Rookies missing 85% hit rate shots.
Disgaea based MMO. Make the korean mmo devs weep with jealousy over the pure grindiness. Grind your warrior to level 9999 and then reincarnate so you can do it again and again.
Three Kingdoms, or any MMO where you could hypothetically have moving borders and where faction warfare is… warfare.
ESO disappointed me pretty badly. If they’d kept the style and formula they had in Oblivion and Skyrim, it’d have been amazing.
Instead its just a bad MMO with a TES skin, filled with blatant cash grabs. Lore distortions more abysmal than WoW’s. I actually shudder to see how it’ll effect the next TES game.
No one because I love WoW and don’t want to see it go. But If I had to pick I would pick the Zelda series to build a MMO off of. I think their dungeons would be alot of fun and just the world the built for the last one was awesome.
Star Wars has the most expanded story for a fictional universe and has unlimited potential. If they could make an mmo that excels at more than just the story telling I would probably quit wow for good.
Fallout mmorpg just developed by obsidian entertainment.
I don’t think a WoW killer could ever even exist - the only way for it to happen would be for a well-respected developer to release an MMO in a major franchise before Blizzard did with WoW. Trying to kill it after the fact is just asinine.
But metaphorically speaking? If Freelancer had a couple more years in the oven, and had come out as an MMO, I may not have ever tried WoW until much later. And I say that having grown up with WarCraft as a whole.
Why would I wish for something to ‘kill’ a game I enjoy playing?
They tried, that’s why they released the new experience. SWG wasn’t as great as people remember it being. It had some good point sure but most of it was garbage.
I also wish there was a successful D&D MMO, but I can’t see anything “killing” WoW and no other game company is really ever going to try again, it’s just not as profitable a business model anymore.
Classic WoW kind of had that DnD feel where classes felt unique and you actually had some niche spells and abilities that may only fit certain scenarios. I feel a successful DnD game would be able to incorporate this into some storytelling with meaningful (at least in feeling) player decisions.
Problem with this is that inevitably one faction will control the server. They would have to have regular/weekly resets which will eventually get boring. There was a game a long time ago that tried this model, can’t recall off the top of my head.