If only this were true. How great would it be if there were actually multiple MMOs with noticeably superior gameplay? I would say WoW’s longevity is 35% nostalgia and 65% the poor quality of it’s competition.
The part about story is spot on though. I die a little inside every time the story forces me save Thrall again.
You aren’t totally wrong, honestly.
Part of the reason I keep occasionally tossing $15 to Blizzard to revisit for a week then get bored is because I’m established. I’ve had 16 years of playing off and on to get me to the point in the game where I’m comfortable. I’m an altoholic, but also not a dedicated one - as I only have one Alliance and one Horde at “max” (for me, since I haven’t purchased Shadowlands) level. Incidentally they’re both Hunters.
Eh, I’d say WoW’s longevity is 35% nostalgia, 25% perceived poor quality of competition, and 40% Average Age of Gamers going Up. Put simply, none of us are getting any younger and MMOs, especially grind-y MMOs, are the stuff for younglings. We just don’t have the time to dedicate to an MMO like we used to and WoW, for all its warts, continues to have a pretty good “ease of access” compared to other MMOs.
The only people I know who are excited about grind in their MMO are aging vets dying to relive their glory days in EQ or Vanilla WoW.
Well, them and Koreans… at least I think Koreans enjoy grinding because the games they release are full of it.
I mean, I get excited by grinding but…not the MMO kind.
<_<
Well played.
“You think you do, but you don’t” has taken on a whole new meaning with the TBC stuff.
He was right.
Honestly, the one thing I miss most about TBC was questing in Hellfire and suddenly hearing that god awful ROAR behind you as the screen started to shake.
By expansion’s end the Fel Reaver might have just been a griefing tool (I myself may have led it on a merry chase up to the Horde base a time or two), but it really was iconic. Especially culminating in having to get a party together to bring it down for a Heroic Key.
I didn’t say MMOs, sadly. I said games. I have friends bouncing around a lot of games that have something better - at least one of the features I mentioned and usually more. Whether it’s Hades, Last of Us, RDR, Animal Crossing, Ghosts of Tsushima, The Witcher, Jedi Fallen Order, Among Us, or Outer Worlds - or replaying Skyrim, Fallout or some other old favorites, there are other games out there with better storylines, better representation, better graphics, better replayability, better modding, etc.
And that’s where a lot of us are going. We log into WoW for the expac, then do like the raiders and stop spending $14/month because there are other games we enjoy now. A lot. We can stay in touch with friends on Discord and move together from game to game if we want, or just hang out in voice and do our individual things.
While I don’t feel MMOs are obsolete, I feel that WoW is very behind the times and the gameplay, storytelling and graphics have been on life support since WoD. They almost fixed themselves in Legion, but they they forgot they still needed to be better for the last 2 expacs and are back to their life support era efforts. We’re running out of patience and there’s only so much pacification that nostalgia can buy before we decide to go find RP somewhere else. Discord, forums, other games…
Also from a story standpoint, this would help.
Imagine if instead of becoming rabid jingoists in BFA, the champions continued to work with their class order halls to deescalate the war in their own ways; paladins through heroics and stirring speeches, rogues through sabotage and skullduggery, etc. New class campaigns for everyone, and not having to make characters like Rexxar and Voss into these uber-patriot Ultimate Avengers Captain Americas just so they can fit in the story.
The idea that there is even a discussion to be had about comparing an MMO that is old enough to go to college to a new single player game says a lot for the MMO.
Except for the story part, they have no one to blame but themselves for that.
WoW should be behind the times, it’s ancient. It’s a weird accident of history that it’s still going as strong as it is.
WoW is like an old, fat, diseased gazelle on the African savanna that can barely walk and is begging for the sweet release of death but all the predators have disappeared so it just carries on.
This.
Listen, WoW is 17 years old. It’s engine has leftover code from Warcraft 3 in 2001, making that code twenty years old. For comparison, that is the same year Windows XP released, so parts of the current engine were developed in pre-XP environments.
It’s just to show how completely ancient this game is. There’s so much spaghetti code, old code, redacted stuff and the entire thing is probably more reminiscent of a duct tape monstrosity than streamlined code. They’re probably taking shots in the office and pray to RNGesus before every patch deployment.
But this entire TBC thing brought up a horrifying realization in Discord earlier: I can’t for the life of me say whether EA or Blizzard is worse at this point. On one hand “pride and accomplishment” was always bantha-poojoo. However, we got some gems now - mandatory lootboxes are gone from SWTOR, Squadrons is a genuinely fun game in VR without power boxes, and Fallen Order was brilliant. So there’s improvement there since the backlash.
And here I am with Blizzard charging me $70 for a 15-year-old game and $35 per character just to keep playing a seventeen-year-old game at the same time. I love TBC. It’s when I started raiding seriously and doing arena. Hell, my gnome warlock is just waiting for it. But at this point I’m not even sure if I want to subscribe and support this in any way…
Personally, I don’t think there’s any legit excuse for it to be behind the times.
The engine: one of the things on the table for Cataclysm was an entirely new engine. They chose not to in order to keep the minimum requirements low.
Sure, implementing a new engine would be a lot of work but that’s what companies do when they want to maintain market leadership.
It’s their choice to not update it and before any says “you don’t know how much work that would be!”, I do. It would be a lot of work and they’ve clearly chosen the “house of cards” approach, which is Kotik’s MO.
It wouldn’t have been impossible for Blizzard to constantly innovate, but they didn’t.
I think an issue with MMOs in general is that innovation now comes with great risk, so you don’t see much variance in functionality or its use as a social platform (which definitely hasn’t evolved to suit contemporary needs).
Who will take that risk? Probably nobody. Budget for a competitive MMO is so high that we see a lot of what happens in Hollywood here — risk is avoided, framing via past success is embraced.
The issue is that this industry needs innovation way more to meet consumer needs/expectations.
Would agree but would also again point out that most of the problems are a direct result of the “we know what you want better than you do” mentality.
Every expac release is the same - people come back. They buy and show up in large numbers. The initial sales are usually off the charts. People want to be here. People want to play in Azeroth.
The numbers only really start cascading after the first 2-3 months once the shiny is worn down, because they see it’s the same BS again - Clunky systems no one asked for, a story that leaves people shaking their heads, time-gating for the sake of time-gating, etc etc etc.
I’m not sure where the disconnect is. I don’t work at Blizzard. I don’t pretend to know what they are doing. That said, there are ideas and tools they could implement to turn this ship around. Why they refuse to do so, is beyond me.
Blizzard refusing to update WoW’s engine is like Bethesda’s creepy adherence to the Creation/Gamebryo engine (Todd Howard’s already said Starfield and TES VI will run on this engine…whose bones are 24 years old at this point).
Gamebryo is middleware, not a true engine on its own. Bethesda have messed with the engine so much it doesn’t even resemble the original Gamebryo anyhow. Gamebryo is sort of like an older Unreal or Unity where you can pretty much do whatever you want with it, and two games using Gamebryo can exist side-by-side and be completely different in every perceivable way.
Bethesda’s source code is just poopy. Their animations are poopy.
Eh. I’ve dabbled in enough modding to know that Skyrim still is working via the moldy old bones of Morrowind. They’ve done a lot to it sure, but especially with Creation there’s a lot they HAVEN’T done (Fallout 4 having entire lines of code specific to Skyrim, for example).
If we want to talk about spaghetti code, that’s how you end up with it.
Those are Bethesda’s own changes and stuff though, which is my point. That’s not Gamebryo’s doing.
I get that people are tired of the wacky bugs in Elder Scrolls games because of the old engine but …they are still funny to me and I’m just not ready to let go yet.
I mean, ANY open world game you are going to deal with bugs and AI glitches and the like. People sing praises of Witcher 3 while crapping on Cyberpunk…seemingly forgetting Witcher 3 had TONS of bugs.
Open World games plus a dynamic/semi-dynamic AI is going to lead to madness.
I still love the fact Oblivion’s Radiant AI had to be shackled because they did too good a job programming it, causing the NPCs to go absolutely mental on each other (And thus resulting in most NPCs being set to essential because the mad bastards were shanking each other in the streets).
I really wish they hadn’t collared it and instead tried to refine it. Radiant AI was fun. Oblivion NPC behavior was more fun. Yes the conversations got stale and the Imperial City suffered from pop in where everyone spawned together, but in smaller towns like Chorrol it made the place feel ALIVE in a way Skyrim lacks.
My absolute personal favourite: All the bits are perfect. The guard telling you off, the murder for weapons, Brynjolf telling people that he can grow back missing limbs in the background… it’s amazing.