I remember when there was an update for Asheron’s Call and I was still on dial-up:
- Start download in the morning.
- Go to work.
- Hope the download was done when I got home.
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Most MMOs out there today would love to have WoW’s declining subscription numbers. Yeah, it has fallen off over the years but it is still doing better than most of it’s competition and most games never survive 15+ years.
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I would say there were a lot of things outside of gaming that contributed to WoW’s success.
- Lord of the RIngs popularity
- Everquest
- Rise of high speed internet
I say this because I remember when EQ was going to be considered a success if it had subs in the 10s of thousands. when it broke 100k it was crazy. I saw a LOT of people who would just log in, sit in a city and talk. Like a chat room. There were a lot of “players” who really didn’t play the game, they logged in mainly for the social aspect.
I played both WC1 & 2 but it absolutely amazed me that Blizzard was making their MMORPG on Warcraft instead of Diablo. I just didn’t see the attraction to the Warcraft universe from WC 1 & 2. WC 3 was completely different though.
Not to take anything away from WoW. It took the best parts of EQ, the factions and PvP of DAoC / SWG and made everything easier.
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I’m not gonna necessarily disagree. However, I feel the blame too often falls on WoW (not saying you’re blaming WoW, just that I’ve seen many people blame WoW for the downfall of MMOs). I can’t blame WoW for being successful, I can blame other developers for being lazy and just trying to copy WoW.
Man I loved DAoC! I use to play EQ and for your truly old school players, anyone remember Neverwinter Nights on AoL? It was an online D&D game back in the 90’s. Pretty sure it was among the first, if not the first online MMO.
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OMG I also thought Diablo made more sense as an MMO than WoW. After D2 the world was more or less post-apocalypse and that was the perfect starting point! We already had classes as well… it seemed obvious.
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I don’t blame WoW at all. WoW is a masterpiece. I blame the industry from moving from studios who make passion projects and get to make a living doing so to a place where institutional investors expect studios to give them market rate returns or better on investment. Once investors realized that the gaming industry could be more profitable than Hollywood, then it was really all over. WoW simply showed them how successful the MMO genre could be. It wasn’t just other MMOs as WoW itself has suffered from this exact problem from investors in Activision Blizzard. It’s no longer about making games and then being fortunate to be successful and making money on top of the satisfaction of making great games. Now, the games are a shell, a husk. They are widgets. The point is to make the maximum return on investment, period. The games are just a means to an end. They are no longer the purpose. If investors thought that making WoW into the worst game ever made would net them the most money, they’d do it. Blizzard of old wouldn’t. There’s been a serious culture shift in the industry and it’s been terrible unless your only goal is to make money. Then you’re doing great because people are getting bilked out of record amounts of money on inferior games.
and some seem to forget that the original Neverwinter Online was a thing on AoL.
The OP was the single most blatant attempt at rewriting history I have seen in a while.
While WoW was a decent, not great but enjoyable, MMORPG at release, it was definitely not the game play that propelled it to such high subscription numbers. The only thing WoW did that I would label as new is create an MMORPG from the leading RTS IP, Warcraft, and made it something that 10’s of millions of existing fans just had to play.
This was an amazing accomplishment, and as it often said the art team totally carried the game developers in bringing the Warcraft universe to life in WoW, which accomplished the important second step of keeping new players in the game.
But that is where the MMORPG story of WoW ended. There is almost nothing of an MMORPG left about WoW since the development teams recognized the fanbase they had captured was not what they originally aimed for and so changed direction to make WoW into the World of Diablo, with a Warcraft skin, MMO it is today.
It will, and should, still go down as one of the most popular MMO’s ever created. But not only did WoW not build/carry the MMORPG market, it did incredible damage to it and may have destroyed it completely if something does not happen in the next few years.
Blizzard was obviously better handling business than most of the indie devs making most of the quality MMORPG’s during WoW’s comeup. There’s a reason the only lasting competition were backed by larger franchises like Final Fantasy and Star Wars.
But I refuse to believe that the MMORPG market being so top heavy is a good thing. There have been a lot of great games that just couldn’t sustain themselves because of the control these businesses have on the market. It’s never just been about the quality of the game.
I hear this a lot, but mostly from WC3 fans. I will still stand by this statement. WoW took other MMORPGs (Mainly EQ though) polished it and made it tremendously easier so anyone could sit down and start playing.
If WoW were not as easy as it had been, the millions of players that joined that never played WC 1, 2 or 3 would not have stayed. I have know entire guilds of players that never touched the original Warcraft games. Honestly, I found it harder to find those who did play them than those who didn’t. Warcraft 1 & 2 only had sales in the 2-3 million range each…
https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Best_selling_Blizzard_games
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I would say wow stands on the shoulders of Ultima Online.
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No argument from me about any of the above. But the fans I spoke of were blizzard fans, not just Warcraft fans, plus fans of the numerous RTS knockoffs, FPS, ARPG and other miscellaneous genre’s out there that all recognized Blizzard as one of the top PC game developers. Plus, speaking as a former lan party junkie, you cannot correlate game sales to players as there was not much copy protection on the games back then.
As I said before, Blizzard deserves credit for what it accomplished as well as blame for the damage it did to the MMORPG development/market.
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“WoW built and carried the MMO market on its shoulders”. And now it’s being left in the dust by other MMOs. WoW tried to rest on its laurels and that was a massive mistake.
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Not me, I played it from start until they closed it down. I remember it boomed when AoL went to a monthly rate the game exploded and you could find youself in a queue for a while. Back then the game only supported like 300 active players and there was only one server.
How far online MMOs have come these days.
seeing what happened to WoW it reminds me of the first Jurassic park movie
Ian Malcolm: I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here: it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you’re selling it, you want to sell it.
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Certainly you can attribute the initial hype to its IP, but initial hype dies down. It was by the game’s own merits that it climbed and climbed, over time, up to its 12 million peak. It wasn’t that the game released, millions of Warcraft fans flooded in, and it died down. It had a very reliable very sustainable model that allowed it to keep earning more new players for years constantly reaching new peaks up to Wrath.
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Ah yes, I try to forget those days as I would receive $700 bills for my usage fees.
In the end I had to sign on to volunteer as ‘NW Lanser’ just to get free access to the game. I was so into it that when AoL released the Windows application, and many of the DOS games had connection issues when called from it, I spent $300 of my own money to buy the Windows Device Developer Kit and created the NWComm drivers that fixed a loop bug in the default drivers.
I still sometimes have nightmares about modem initialization strings.
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Yes, but Wrath was only the second expansion so I am not quite as impressed with it’s sustainability as you are.
first time i loaded it up and had to get it up to date, took me 2 nights on 56k… the first night i think i sat watching tv for 3-4 hours waiting till i went to bed, woke up it was still downloading, but i had to kill it. next night i started it before bed and it was done when i got up in the morning…
i still hold out hope that a Diablo MMO might be made…
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