A Gentleman’s Duel, WoW Tourists, and The Pixar Factor
So the gentleman's duel between two of my favorite bloggers continues today so I what better time to give my happy medium opinion.
On one side, Syncaine blames the rise and fall of WAR numbers on WoW tourists who constantly say that they are looking for something that is now WoW, go after every new shiny, and then leave because it is not WoW. He also argues that when we think back to WoW's launch, we see it with rose colored classes and it had a terrible launch in its own right. Moreover, he believes the main reason WoW is so successful today is because of the perfect storm of game launches and mishaps that made it possible for Blizzard to sweep up everyone on the market
Wilhelm argues that maybe the rise and fall of WAR numbers is because the game is bad or not fun or people just did not get what they wanted out of it.
So why was WoW a huge booming success from day one and why did WAR see the loss of so many in the first three months?
I think it is a mixture of both Syncaine's and Wilhelm's with a dash of some things alluded to in the blog comments on one of Syncaine's posts.
First, I believe WAR was released too early. I do not think they should have launched until all the classes were implemented into the game. The four cities that were removed do not bother me. The removal of the classes (even though they are getting patched back in) does. This could be one of three reasons in my mind. Either someone at Mythic realized they were running out of money and felt they needed to push it out the door, someone at EA wanted their fiscal report to look better so forced Mythic to push it out the door, or because they were worried if WotLK launched before them, they would lose out on those players for too long and have a weaker launch. Whatever the reason, the game was released when it was and I think that was a mistake.
Second is something that a comment by Nat outlines well:
WOW (Blizzard as a whole actually) has a special something that most games don't. It's the same thing the separates Pixar from other studios that make animated movies. It's the same something special Disney had 50 years ago.
In a way, I could imagine WoW as Pixar and WAR as Dreamworks. The top Pixar films include Wall-E, The Incredibles, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, Toy Story, A Bug's Life and more. The top Dreamworks films include Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda, Over The Hedge, Bee Movie, Shark Tale. While Dreamworks may have some hits with Shrek and others, the Pixar films are seen as much more memorable and have more of a consistent quality to them.
In that way, I believe Blizzard has a bit more "street cred" to them for years before WoW they had three strong IPs going. Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo battlechests still sell ridiculous amounts of game boxes to this day. Mythic's only major accomplishment was Dark Age of Camelot.
Third, WAR sort of looks like... well not very good for 2008/2009. I am able to play both WoW and WAR at max settings and side by side I believe that the graphics of WoW at maxxed are superior to WAR at maxxed settings. Rynala came into the office while I was playing the other day and remarked on how it surprised her that such a new game looked worse than one four years old. Lord of the Rings Online came out in April 2007 and the world in that game looks tremendously better than WoW. I do not see why WAR took a step back on graphics instead of a step forward.
Fourth, focus. I think that the focus of WAR changed a bit multiple times in development leading to this lack of focus seen early game. WoW came out as a jack of all trades, doing everything okay, nothing spectacular (except questing for the most part), so that it could appeal to anyone. Compare the grind and penalties in WoW to those in Everquest and Ultima Online. Blizzard looked at WoW as a hobby game instead of a niche game. I remember watching the beta videos Paul Barnett and Jeff Hickman put out about how to play the game and the tiers. They talked about how you could just open world PvP if you wanted, do scenarios if you wanted or do the PvE with the awesome revolutionary public quests. Well the questing (not counting public quests) in WAR is boring. And since it is human nature to take the path of least resistance, we are left with everyone running scenarios and few people in ORvR and even less doing questing and public quests. WAR needs to decide what it wants to be and focus everything into that. Want open world RvR to be more popular? Make the experience and renown gains three to five as much as you'd gain from scenarios. I guarantee you would see more people in the world fighting.
Fifth, I believe some of blame does land on Blizzard and World of Warcraft. They took a genre that is about niche gaming and opened up to the masses. I am betting that Syncaine sees this as a bad thing. I, however, do not. Compare MMORPGs to other genres. Call of Duty 4 sold seven million copies. Seven. Million. Copies. Madden 2009 has already sold over 2.5 million copies. These other genres have millions upon million of people playing. Call of Duty 4 sold more copies than Blizzard has of WoW in the US. I believe in a way, MMOs are still a niche genre, but nowhere to the scale that they were 5+ years ago.
So wow, this post became about three times longer than I wanted it to be. Forgive my rambling and stream of thought typing.
In the end, I believe WAR can and will succeed. It just needs to find its focus and be what it was meant to be.
Week of WAR – Day 3
Of all weeks to have to work extra hours, the had to be the week. I got home late last night so I did not get to play as much Warhammer as I would have liked. The good news is that I'm out of Tier 1 now. Maybe I can take part in a keep siege tonight.
Tier 1 just needs to be removed. Simply that. It lacks purpose and focus. The other thing that would help is if they had a low level keep and improved influence gains. When I spend a total of three hours in the RvR lake and am only half way to the first influence reward, things are too slow.
I have come to hate the Vegas roll system. Coming in first place for contributions but not getting anything for your efforts is terrible design. We were doing the chapter 4 public quest in Chaos lands where you burn wagons, fight soldiers and then a Knight of the Burning Sun. I came in first in contributions twice. The first time I rolled and 88 and even with the +500 was bottom of the loot charts and the second time I rolled about a 220 and only got one of the bad loot bags that does not have anything good in it.
The other solution for the Vegas loot system is change the way points work. Right now, first place contribution gets +500, then +450 then +400 and so on from there. Instead, set a pool of like 2500 "contribution points." Have the amount you get be in direct relation to the percentage of contribution they have you marked at. If you're at 50%, you get +1250, If you only did 10% contribution, you only get +250. Then have the Vegas 1000 sided dice roll after that. I often feel like I'm contributing a lot more compared to the next person on the list yet we're still only 50 points apart in this system. I would like more transparency to see the actual contribution percentages.
I explored the rest of the tier 1 map that I could explore. I found a huge public quest to the far south of the Chaos/Empire tier 1 zones that was marked as "Hard" since it was basically a PQ in a huge town. Obviously no one was there so I will never get to experience that one.
The night ended with me hitting rank 11 and renown rank 9, moving on to tier 2 (which I think looks a lot better than tier 1) and abandoning all my old tier 1 quests.
What I wonder is how many quests are carbon copies of each other. Since Chaos and Order are mirrored, how much variety are there in the quests for each side or do all the tier 1 Chaos quests have an exact mirror Order quest with just the names changed?
Also, I hope you do not expect me to write about the new WoW patch 3.1 news. There are a million other blogs already talking about it and you do not need me to repeat it.