I have looked for other MMO’s for my wife and I to play, but sadly after giving ESO and FF a try neither one of them worked out. Eso faired better, my wife did enjoy that over FF.
You and me both. That PvP…that was fun.
Yeah but players tastes are changing as well… People want the quick in, little expense of time, immediate fun that games like Fortnite offer. There is way more to this than just the current state of the game.
Mmorpg market existed before wow, but it was a few niche games.
Investors saw wows success and thought if their game could get half the subs…well it was an investor frenzy. They all failed.
The las generation of mmorpgs survived due to lack of other new mmorpgs…and they were big name game ip like FF amd Elder Scrolls.
Market today, a few niche mmorpgs, just like before the mmorpg investor gold rush.
Wow carried investment dreams 2005 to 2010. After that its gonna be just like bwfore wow existed. Wow is an anomoly, it got it right at the right time by,the right devs,and found the right audience.
This is why blizzard better have a next gen overhaul of the engine going in the background and needs to stop messing up expansions. There will be no wow replacement if it dies.
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Another old mmorpg was by Sierra Online. It was actually my very first mmorpg. Called the Realm Online.
So yeah, the mmorpg genre has been around a LONG LONG time.
WoW didn’t create the genre, they just found ways early on to make it visibly popular.
Awww I miss that game 
I’d argue that Everquest did the foundation work for the MMO gametype, WoW just made the genre more popular.
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Dark age of camelot built the genre…
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And that probably would have been a good thing, in retrospect. DAoC, AC, EQ, etc were all in their own ways pretty fantastic games.
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Then people should pursue exactly that sort of game, rather than insisting that an MMO cater to what it doesn’t excel at. It’s like me asking why tennis players aren’t tackling each other.
WoW trying to be a jack of all trades in terms of player appeal is part of its underlying problems, and this has been the case for quite a few expansions.
So blame wow for making an awesome game or blame the players who dont know to move on from wow?
Not really. FFXIV is healthy, but it took like 4 years for them to go from “2 of our old games + FFXIV combined hit 1 million subs!” to “FFXIV just hit 1 million subs!”
It’s not exactly exploding with growth like some people like to make it sound.
That aside, yeah, WoW carried the MMO market for a long time. It carved out that market. But I honestly think it was more of an anomaly than a trailblazer. It’s not surprising to me that it lost that extra bonus audience over time. It never really did anything to earn it in the first place, it was just a more casual option than Everquest.
It also broke it by trying to change what an MMORPG is by catering to all types of players and regurgitating the same crap for 10+ years instead of being genre defining.
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There was an interesting article about WoW. According to business analysts, WoW should not have succeeded. It should have flopped. But they somehow captured the lightning in a bottle.
It came along at exactly the right time, when I was really bored to tears in Everquest. Then I was in the City of Heroes beta, then City of Heroes release. Then I got into the Wow beta; I never logged into that other stuff again.
Wow had a promise of grand adventure, along with some pre-release lies. One of them was that Wow would have housing and guild housing, but not until after it released. One of my original reasons for buying Wow was because that was said.
posted 2004-07-15
Katricia: "Guild Halls will most likely not be implemented before World of Warcraft is released. They are very similar to Player Housing (which also will not make the release).
Both Player Housing and Guild Halls will be implemented as soon as possible after release.
I have no information available regarding the functions of either Guild Halls or Player Housing . ~Kat"
I actually remember the original forum post on that, how excited I was. After all, why would anyone say something was going to be in the game when it was NOT? The funny thing was, we never got an apology for that, or even an explanation as to WHY that person ever came on the forums and said that.
But there was a lot of stuff like that, player said or otherwise, that made us think there was more to the game then there was. Then we got to 60, seeing that there was only raiding. By then, you were REALLY “reeled in” though. You went ahead and stuck it out because you thought that it must get better somehow. It really didn’t improve for me until the Burning Crusade expansion.
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I don’t blame WoW or Blizz for making a good game, obviously good on them.
I’m just pointing out it sucks that because of wow’s crazy success, for over a decade everyone just went “If we can’t match WoW’s numbers our game is a failure” and they devolve to money grabs. The few games that decided they didn’t want to do that seem to be chugging along just fine, but everyone else straddles the line between P2W nightmare or Unsupported Desolate Hellscape.
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Swtor still makes me sad that they refused to take absolutely any sandbox elements from SWG. It hurts my soul. It deserves to be refined in a modern game.
What an absolute loss. For me, I stopped being interested completely when they teased space combat to be on rails. That actually hurt. Physically. Completely made me disassociated from Bioware for the rest of my days.
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This has arguably been a long term negative. Instead of making that next excellent niche MMO, investors wanted the “next WoW” and they made terrible design decisions hoping to attract the lowest common denominator.
Wildstar was tragic. It was tooted as taking players back to TBC in WoW, which was great for building hype, but it also set the bar unbelievably high. Needless to say, it didn’t live up to expectations, and so it went f2p and eventually shut down. It had its own independent problems, yes, but expectations were high enough that nobody was going to temporarily overlook them while they got their stuff together.
I would submit that WoW was initially successful because it rode on the heels of three incredibly successful RTS games in the same universe, one of which debuted an expansion just a year before (WC3: TFT in 2003).
Not to take any grandeur away from Classic as a game itself, of course.