Would it be better for MMOs if WoW ended? If Blizzard could free itself from the restrictions of WoW, they could design a game they genuinely like instead of constantly trying to guess what the players of this old game would like.
They could design a new game with interesting feature and we might get to see the best of Blizzard once again.
It’s the Dev team we have, that’s pumping out garbage. Not Blizzard itself.
You want to see the best of Blizzard? You better get rid of this Dev team… And Activision.
No.
Mostly because I don’t believe in the idea that Blizzard is somehow restricting themselves trying to cater to their long-time audience. Almost everything they do pisses off that exact audience, but they do it anyway.
For MMOs in general, from any company?
Also no.
If something had launched and overtaken WoW back near its peak, say, 2010-2014ish at the latest, it would have been huge news and would likely mean we have a groundbreaking new game to play.
But WoW ending won’t arbitrarily leave room for MMOs to innovate. That’s ALREADY what they need to do if they want to stand out from WoW and the couple other popular western MMOs. But they won’t, because that’s a risk, and MMOs are already a big cost and risk. Has nothing to do with WoW.
The old Blizzard’s dev that made all the good game already left, barring maybe Kaplan.
I feel like it would be the same game, but with action combat and better graphics. They tried to re-invent the genre with Titan and we all know what happened there.
I think the mmo gaming genre is pretty much dead. Look at the major selling games, they are FPS games, single player games, not mmos. WoW does well because it’s a firmly established game. It has over a decade of content that any new mmo couldn’t even come close to touching. If it ends, that would be the end of a gaming genre really.
Not gonna lie, I want this so badly for this franchise.
Tera had a lot of stuff wrong with it, but its combat was fantastic. Blade and Soul too.
They are not even guessing… They know what the players would love to see/have they just don’t give a …
The genre will live on thru the Eastern market. Lots of heavily P2W MMOs over there and I don’t see that stopping.
But it’s definitely going to become a niche thing, especially in the West. Hell, ALREADY we haven’t seen a proper AAA MMORPG in ~6 years in the west. Realistically it’s always been a niche thing. WoW is/was an anomaly, and that anomaly caused other devs to think the MMORPG market was bigger than it actually was. Once they realized they weren’t going to see the numbers WoW saw, they stopped trying.
They are developing a game they like. You not liking it, doesn’t mean what you think it does.